Wannabe Liberal
The other day I was having the usual lunch at the dodge Chinese joint with a friend. The place belongs more in Beijing than in Central London with duck and chicken carcasses hanging on display, whetting the appetite and screaming bird flu. It’s well located (just near the museums and the South Ken tube station), cheap, tasty, seedy and always full despite the fact that the staff only bother to serve you in between shouting battles amongst themselves. So whilst happily tucking into some roast duck with egg fried rice, a couple of builder guys came and sat at our table, as sharing tables is the norm in chinese places here. It was all good until one of them tells the waitress “No cock for me today please.” I was shocked, but the girl didn’t seem too perturbed, but I don’t think she understood it bc most of them don’t speak much English. This continued for several minutes including some comments rather less subtle than the pun on coke. As they left, one of them told the waitress that she better be ready at 8 O clock that he’s coming to pick her up.
I was thinking to myself later on that this sort of behaviour is the norm amongst ppl of such a social category. You often get builders, road workers etc. harrassing ppl on the streets and I guess one comes to accept it. This does sound terribly classist, but it is the reality, though a generalisation. Recognizing differences in social class is I think engraved in human nature. Though I and a lot of ppl in my generation tend to consider the caste system to be primitive and massively discriminatory, we exercise the very same discriminations in our mind every single day. The only difference being the caste system uses the professions of one’s ancestors whilst we use the professions of today. For instance, if someone told me I could get married to a girl working in a garment factory, chances are i’d refuse. The role of caste in marriage is the same, the majority of weddings in our grandparents’ (and sometimes parents’) generation were determined by social caste. Today we look down upon the latter but secretly acknowledge the former. I think that I maintain a basic degree of liberalism by rejecting the caste system, unfortunately this makes me a hypocrite. This is not a defence of the caste system bc that system crosses the line by passing judgement on individuals based on what their great great grand parents did with themselves. It is however normal to pass judgement on ppl based on what they do with themselves in their own life. Acknowledging differences in social class is completely normal, and to be blind to it is probably impossible at this stage of human history.
The same applies to things like race, skin colour etc. we are born with a Masters Degree in prejudice. (If you doubt this conduct the following thought experiment, you have a line up of 4 possible suspects of a terrorist bombing, one a short Chinese chap, two a middle aged white guy, three a tall black man, four a bearded Middle Eastern guy dressed in traditional Muslim clothing, what would your most instinctive thought be? Similarly if you were told to name which of the four are likely to have been involved in a television robbery, and which of the four is a millionaire and which of the four is a computer engineer, most of us would have fairly similar initial instincts). I guess the best we can do is to accept that one will be judgemental about one’s differences but to try one’s best to not let that judgement affect one’s decisions and actions.
A totally unrelated but mildly amusing thing that I found out today is the name of those long chairs that you find in walauvvas, the ones characterized by polished wood and a meshwork of cane with extended arms to raise your legs onto with the intention of having an afternoon siesta. They are deliciously named Bombay Fornicators.
