‘Kupa manduka’-the Sanskrit phrase defines a small-minded person who foolishly imagines the limits of his knowledge to form the limit of all human knowledge. This is much like the frog confined to a well and ignorant of the vastness of the ocean believing that the well is the largest water body ever. The frog looking up at the sky from the well also imagines the tiny disc it perceives above the well to be the entire sky. Many intellectuals have rightly interpreted the ‘frog-in-the well attitude’ as one that propagates insularity and denotes a propensity to bigotry and intolerance. Instances of this abound in everyday life and are becoming so pervasive that it set me thinking about the way society has been continuously dividing itself based on differences. I was aghast when I saw a post in a school Whatsapp group to which I was added recently. It was a large group interacting online after someone had painstakingly traced people from different parts of the world during the pandemic. I suddenly spotted a comment where one of the members whom I do not know put up the following comment “Excuse me but I am racist. I hope there are no people from the State syllabus group here which I cannot tolerate”. For the first time in my life, I felt the anger and hurt of people branded inferior be it on the basis of caste, class religion or nation. I couldn’t believe that someone was using the dreadful word ‘racist’ so gleefully and cruelly against schoolmates, decades after leaving school on the presumption that superiority accrued because of the syllabus followed. Worse, no one said a word, condemning such a distasteful remark. Never the type to get into wordy duels I quietly exited the group feeling relieved that I had in some way shown my protest. I don’t know what snippets of knowledge the group is exchanging but I see this remark as an indicator of a larger malaise that grips our society. We have over the years trivialized similarities and magnified differences. Our differences when not respected lead to one-upmanship and notions of superiority based on height, weight, the colour of our skin, the strength of our intellect, caste, class, nationality and background with the list being endless. Unless we learn to sink our differences and respect the physical and intellectual diversity of humans, we are no better than warring tribes. Let us cease being ‘frogs in the well’ and instead focus our energy on the immensity of the endless ocean.
ARUNA RAVIKUMAR
