Ladies and gentlemen (as a young girl I always used to spoof this as general-men but that's a digression that warrants a stand-alone entry!:D), this is the story of a boy and a girl - actually some 2 boys and 3 girls and a typically academic discussion. For most occasions, the group under consideration loves food - eating, talking, cooking, talking, debating, talking, sharing, talking (u get the general drift) FOOD. Infact, food is such a universal conversation-"starter" that it is the only true competitor to the weather and bollywood(? !! ahem!). No wonder some of the best chef designed experiments are called "starters" - probably they are referring to loud/subtle but in any case vocal verdicts/debates/discusssions. However, unfortunately this entry is not about food (sigh, i do have a lot of catch-up-on-my-writing to do but promise loads on food later:D). This one is about stereotypes!!
What is a stereotype? Walter Lippmann answered this question metaphorically by calling a stereotype a "picture in our heads" typically about people based on certain common characteristics....(italics mine) To extend the definition further, one could theretically have stereotypes about places, cultures, books, etc coz its just another form of categorization - though I could not find any evidence of this in literature, however, it sounds possible logically - "a typical pagan culture", "a typical quaint-little irish town" and so on. Please note that I am no expert on the topic and speak only from my limited knowledge and reading. However, in the big-picture context, sterotyping is an extremely simplistic way of profiling people across disciplines - beyond the obvious examples, econometrics uses demographic profiling to generate results based on representative sample-sets, advertisments are simplistic expansion-oriented tools based on demand projections again from target audience sets..Nice, vairy vairy nice. Also extremely convenient to bucket people and use the "common" charateristics for "uncommon" good;-)
Unfortunately, does that not make all of us conformists? I mean, by moving from individuals to sterotypes to groups, as rational thinking beings, do we necessarily want to conform? all of us? as someone else chooses to define us? Think about it, its a bit scary. But more importantly it proves a bigger point - man is a social animal. We all like to belong - even though we may be the "typical rebels"!!:D:D
Therefore, I may scream from my roof-top about my lack of deep deep love for non-veg, when it comes to eating I choose to conform to a stereotype - that of a non-vegetarian who can happily cross over to the other side yet is reluctant to do so...
still confused,
the reluctant you-know-what by now!
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