Random rumination on hate

Ladka Punjabi hai Par hai kaafi padhalikha The boy is Punjabi But hes rather wellread said the Philadephiabased psychoanalyst Salman Akhtar of a conversation he was having with his aunt about a boy who was getting married into their family Salman for those who might not know is writer Javed Akhtars IndianAmerican brotherAt a talk I attended of his many years ago he was explaining the difference between bias and prejudice Punjabi par padhalikha is a bias Which he said is an inevitable human trait You cant escape it That the bias had no bearing on the aunt accepting the boy into the family showed lack of prejudiceWhats the distance between bias and prejudice exactly Presuming its hard to measure That were naturally inclined towards relishingbelieving the worst about people is something you can gauge from an endless human delightappetite for gossip mdash mostly about folk we hardly knowWhats the more public modern equivalent of a gossipmonger The socialmedia troll Have you actually met your personal troll I have once at a party where I casually went up to say hi to this fellow mdash giving him no inkling of how hed been bothering the hell out of me making up crap for the sake of cracking jokesinnuendos at my expense onlineWhat did that socialmedia handle do standing opposite a real person hed been maligning for pleasure Behave like the best friend at that party mdash engaging in conversations deeply interested in points of view overcompensating for past indiscretions pretty much fetching my drinks all night Social plus physical distance explains the personal troll Bridge that even for a second I suspect the cowardice disappearsCommon word for troll is hater Conventional wisdom all of which I acquire from the Twitter handle fact suggests a person generally hates you for three reasons A They want to be you B They hate themselves C They see you as a threat The other popular gyaan is that the opposite of hate isnt love Its indifferenceWhat these criteria dont recognise enough though is the seductive power of hate itself mdash to amalgamateunite Where did I first learn this At an advertising agency Lowe Lintas headed by filmmaker R Balki about a decade ago while we were trying to put together an innocuous citywide day designed around multiple outdoor events for readers of a newspaper I worked forThe agency suggested we call the event No TV Day Why Because a negative slogan would galvanise people more positively towards doing something together The advertising thought worked The caption had a recall The event was a success alright Glad the villain was TV The only fallout was no TV station advertised for itWould the same marketingadvertising principle apply if the imagined other were groups of people running into millionsbillions You see this happening with race caste religion all the time This wholesale hate is what Salmans brother Javed terms fascismHow does this occur Guess from lack of personal exposure first mdash when individuals create perceptions en masse about other individuals they have not personally metseenexperienced They let these perceptions pass through their small minds into big mouths to perpetuate some sort of myths to justify their prejudice mdash tending towards extreme hateArts responded to this phenomenon widely This is how the little boy Jojo Rabbit in the recent Nazi comedy comes up with inane theories about wild creatures called the Jews Likewise Kashmir kids in Vidhu Vinod Chopras Shikara are dumbstruck staring at a Kashmiri Pandit whos returned from exile in 2018 These children have never seen a Kashmiri Pandit Theyre probably surprised he looksbehaves no differentlyTheres also the pain of shared history mdash or racial memory as Karl Gustav Jung calls it Actor Naseeruddin Shah 69 who never thought of himself as a Muslim growing up in India says in an interview to The Wire Collective hate directed on the basis of religion has a lot to do with people of my generation or decade or two younger mdash affected by memetics of what they heard as childrenThis clouded us for a little while In school we did toss around insults and epithets at each other But this was never followed up with anything by way of action Partition wounds inflicted on the parents generation affected our psyches somewhere Luckily the generation that is not scarred by such memetics is the one coming upWhy am I bringing up this popular weapon of mass distraction Because it gets brought up 24x7 in public discourse chiefly by the generation Naseer speaks of Note that I am not referring to politicspoliticians here For the Roman philosopher Seneca who died in frickin 65 AD has already said all there is to on that subject Religionis regarded by the common people as true By the wise as false And by the rulers asuseful What else to say Beware I guess NoMayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture He tweets mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individuals and 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