Stereotype Me

Judge me, put me in a specific category, impress your pre-conceived notions about me on me. You cannot take the way I look as a guarantee of what I should do.

Lets face it, we judge people, whatever we might be, however nice we are, judgmental we are many-a-time. Its not a bad thing, but what happens is that we like to put people in their own place. Segregate them, isolate them if you like from the mass body of people we presume to know. We all know different groups of people and we place them in our own categories created in our mind.

I know them all, the jocks, the nerds, the teacher’s pets, the one’s who always sit at the back bench, the front-benchers, the insatiable certificate collectors, the different ones etc, you name it I know them. I stereotype people, like it or not, I do it all the time. Make them a part of a group of people who have nothing in common with them except their liking for a cartain thing. It seems right to place them in that profile, doesn’t it. It gives a sense of security.

We don’t like not being able to figure out people, if we cannot place them in a certain group, cannot define them with the group of people they hang out with. It makes us feel scared, intrigues us to the point of wanting to know them even better. Its different things which make us want to know certain people. It might be that intelligent discourse on television, the uncertainty they show on being faced with unknown people. But whatever it is, there is always that thought lurking in your mind, that he belongs to a certain group.How can somebody not belong to a group, even if they are different, there is the ‘different’ genre for those people.

To sum it up, I don’t like stereotyping people, it limits your mindset when you think of them, branding people as someone they always won’t be, thoughts change, perceptions change, stereotypes might change too, but stereotypes they will be again; But again I stereotype people. It is hypocrisy of the highest order, but I do what I do because I must. Judge me if you want, it is your birthright, however skewed or accurate your judgement will be, is irrelevant now and always. Leaving people outside tags makes it wrong, to have a perfect world is to keep everybody in groups. So, live and let live, rather, be judged and judge away, that continues to affirm my faith in the beauty of human behavior.