bhaiyya

I ask this watchman at our office to swipe his card to let me in (did not get my ID card) " Bhaiyya, zara gate khol do na"
"Kholta hun saab, par main Bhaiyaa nahin hun, main Maharastrian hun", was his queer reply.
I was taken aback, could not understand what he just told me. Did he get offended? Why? I called him as Bhaiyaa, what else could I call him?
"Ah, arre haan bahut lafda chal raha hai aaaj kal" was all I could say while passing by the door and finally gettting the full meaning of his words.

'Bhaiyya' or 'Bhaiyyaji' is a term people generally use to refer to people from UP and Bihar and that guy did not want any misconception. Why?
If you have followed newspapers for some time now, the biggest news coming from Mumbai have been related to BSE Sensex and this isssue of Non-Maharastrian working class in Mumbai.
I am sure you would have read enough on this issue, and have your own opinion and your own numbers to back it up, I am not going to add to the same debate.

I would like to look at the core of this and any other lines of separation or division that men love to draw and plunge into the 'us' and 'them' cowardice.

Is this a new phenomena? By no means. Divisiveness is as old as man himself. Reasons change, evolve, return and multiply and the people at the other side too change accordingly as not many (actually other than yourself) one can fit all the bills.
Forget all, lats take your parents - one of them cannot be of your own sex and by this reason alone both of them be on one side.

I am sure you dont want me to start counting the reasons now - some have nothing to do with man such as sex, colour of skin, country you are born in and others man created himself just to divide himself such as religion, creed, education, caste (may be read as profession one chooses for himslef or is born into), social class, economic class and i have studied about some socio-economic class too, region and many more.

Why does man do this thing then?
The reasons may be many, but the most prominent ones would be fear and ambition (wait are they not similar, an ambitious man is also a very afraid man, who is not happy with or is afraid of the way the things are at the present and would do anything to change it).
Anyway, man is afraid of himself and more so in solitude, thus he wants assurance that there are more people like him and he wants to add on numbers on his side and feel better (read less afraid) and thats where ambition comes into picture. The people who are very ambitious, use its cousin fear very well to play the game of division.
Man has an incessant need of staying close to himself and in the lack avenues to do so (what else would you call the hours people spend on work, travel, food, routine etc.) he chooses to get himself closer to other people whom he calls 'us' and to squeeze the radius of the people in the 'us' circle he brings them closer and thus starts to find differences in many of them and unable to bring them asny closer he distances them are 'them'. Rest is there for us to witness.

Is there any solution?
I don't know. Even if the catastrophe called 'fear' is removed from people's minds I am not sure, whether there won't be grades of 'unafraid level 1, unafraid level 2 or unafraid recently, unafraid classic' and so on. As long as there is reltivity and things can't be absolute (man not even the ground I stand on is absolute, not the time, not anything I have ever come across) there would be this divisions. "Divide and Rule " eh?