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One of my friends, a blond blue-eyed Harvard graduate, rented a room for a year, somewhere between Colaba and Churchgate. She paid Rs. 300 for an Alfonso mango, waited hours every week for her Bisleri delivery man, and got chased down the street by leering teenagers who shouted: “Sex? Oral sex?”

I’d hear her stories and shake my head and say, “Poor thing.  To be a white woman in Bombay...”  Another friend of mine, a Thane native, shook his head and pointed a finger at me.  “But you’re an American.  Aren’t you all like that?”

Everyone’s the same
Aren’t you all like that?  It’s been a year and this question still hangs over my head like a dinosaur bone, old, heavy and what I imagine to be a part of a much bigger puzzle.  My friend explained himself bashfully: “Americans are all…open.”  He sounded like he had a gigantic ball of cotton in his mouth.

All open, huh?
I’m still trying this generalisation on for size, to see if it suits me.  We are all certainly open-minded, I tell myself.  We are all certainly open to new, unexpected adventures, I reason with myself.  I go round and round, talking myself into seizures, and eventually come to this, the bottom line: We are all certainly…not of one substance at all, actually.

It vexes me daily, this Indian impulse towards over-generalisation.  I cringe when I hear about how all the Gujjus are cheapskates, or the Mallus all peace-loving communists; the Punjabis all seething in anger, quietly wielding their knives at the nightclubs in Delhi. And let’s not forget the “all-open Americans” (all open, at all times, for all sorts of misadventures, day and night!).

When I try to understand why this ease with using labels bothers me so much, I envision myself back in the US, hearing someone utter the words: “All blacks are lazy,” or “All Jews are money-grubbing” or “Never do business with an Arab.” 

Surprising trend
And my insides are rattled. People get stoned for making comments like this back home—and if not stoned, then blackballed from social circles and blacklisted in academic communities. (A Washington D.C. politician lost his job in 1999 for using the word “niggardly” in one of his speeches.)

I suppose in the US we like to imagine ourselves as a nation of misfits, people who live on the margins of identity politics, and who aim to confound expectations of our race, gender, and family backgrounds.  We are the nation that has invented and popularised the notion of counter-culture.  And having done so, we—the youth, in particular—resist almost every attempt to be put into a box.

As I write this, I realise something: I have just crafted an over-generalisation.  Oops. It’s inevitable, I guess, the human impulse to move towards generalisation, for without it, we are fools who resist knowledge and roam around making the same mistakes over and over again. So the moral of this story is still elusive; at the very least the story begs the question: what is the difference between a useful generalisation and an over-generalisation?  What is the difference between generalisation and racism?

Fear factor
In my view, moving towards a useful generalisation requires evidence —not that which is garnered through hearsay and prejudice. I think over-generalisation is primarily about fear.  Fear of the unknown.  But isn’t traversing fear the most exciting adventure of all?
That white woman you see buying mangoes in Colaba is, in fact, an emblem of the unknown. And whether you choose to find out about her world, or to typecast her and put her in a box is entirely up to you.