Growing up in a country as culturally vibrant as India, one truly believes “variety is the spice of life.”
To the rest of the world, we all fall under the common category of being ‘Indian’ but the definition of what it means to be Indian varies from coast to coast, and state to state. In a country like India where people hail from across the 28 states and 8 union territories, with over 19,500 spoken languages of which are 22 scheduled languages and the rest, not even identifiable – coming with their own set of customs, traditions, and history; even the way we say common everyday phrases like “please and thank you” changes. I was born into a South Indian, Malayalee (Malayalees are people who hail from the South Indian State of Kerala) family who brought me up in Mumbai Maharashtra. My first memory of any kind of an on-screen representation was only around the 8th grade.
For my north Indian friends, I was too mallu (an abbreviation of Malayalees’) but for my mallu friends and relatives, I was far too north Indian. And while I turned out lucky that this was the only kind of discrimination I experienced, one that I can laugh about in retrospect, not everyone with a similar story has such a happy ending.
And even today, most North Indians are oblivious to the fact that not all South Indians speak the same language or there being a significant difference in our beliefs and rituals.
The need for accurate onscreen representation is the need of the hour, not just in India but the world over.
Why the emphasis on on-screen representation you ask? Because everyone deserves to be in the ‘lead’ and not just assigned to as a stereotypical sidekick that people assume less of. Everyone, especially kids, deserve to grow up knowing they can be the heroes of their own story.
Accurate on-screen representation has more benefits than we credit it to be. It helps with self-esteem, external validation, and provides the necessary tools for acknowledging that equal opportunities prevail and how we can promote our many differences to our advantage.
[15/02/2021, for Debut Magazine.
Read the original article here.]
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