Too Quick to Label, Wastelands
Labelling Others - with Nightcafe AI
On the train this morning, I had promised to use the time to write this piece. Instead, I found many valid excuses to read a mystery novel instead - the train is rattling too much, the guy in the next row has gone to sleep with a loud reel on loop, I’ve been up since four and don’t feel rested enough to write.
Called A Fatal Distraction, it was a pretty fun novel, but it was not distraction enough. Even though the stock markets were not open, and my work e-mails were silent early on a Sunday morning, I felt compelled to check my phone every hour or so. Three friends had run the Delhi half-marathon, and I had to check in on them; as on the latest silly puns being perpetrated on my school Whatsapp group, on the latest barrage of Israeli atrocities in Gaza…many excuses to indulge my ADHD.
Through my life I dipped into ADHD when I had work to do. Not if I had the trees or mountains to gaze at - my mother said she used to leave me in a bassinet in the garden and I would gurgle to myself for hours. But, homework had to be interspersed with visits to the fridge, or later, with a few tracks of my favourite rock. My grades, thankfully, were always decent, so the worst label my teachers ever tagged me with was - he’s a bit of a dreamer.
I have a bit of ADHD, and when I have to file my taxes, I’m both autistic and depressive. And, even though I’m one of the more optimistic people I know, I sometimes indulge myself in imagining the worst outcomes, especially when forced to deal with the outreaching tentacles of our bureaucracy. More recently, I’ve had fleeting brushes with memory loss. All this is just grace, that the intimations of my psychological waywardness are not yet dysfunctional.
Others are not so lucky. And then, we are - I am - so quick to stick labels on them.
There’s no point trying to convince her - she’s so paranoid about everything
No way I’ll get through that explanation with him - he has a bad case of ADHD.
These labels become a way to stick a person in a box, and shut the lid on it. They become our excuse, to not try and understand the behaviour of others, and to justify our own. A convenience for our own laziness in engaging with people whose behaviour falls outside the narrow bounds of what we choose to call normalcy.
Of course we each have limitations in engaging with others. It takes a high level of training to deal with the severely maladjusted. And short of a hypodermic full of powerful sedatives, even a highly skilled psychiatrist would not try to reason with a schizophrenic in the midst of a full-blown psychotic attack.
But these are boundary conditions. For the most part, the only training we need to engage more deeply with others is the stretching of our empathy muscles, reminding ourselves that we too have a touch of paranoia, a smidgen of negativity, lapses into grouchiness, recurring spells of inattention. Labels have their value, but that value should be measured by the consideration we give those flagged with them, not by the on-off switch of rejection.
There, but for fortune, go you or I.
The Wastelands of Indian Youth
Our train finally dragged itself into Kathgodam station this morning, the dry river bed of the Gaula to our right, an unending shanty town to our left. Adolescent lads passed the day in desultory clusters on a large patch of wasteland that was more landfill than soil of any description, bright bits of plastic and faded rags of fabric poking through damp grey ground.
“What do you think these boys will be doing twenty years from now?” I asked my wife.
“Gig-work for Zomato and Zepto.”
“Mmm, maybe not. There will be a hundred million men aged between 25 and 40 by then. It will require many hundred million consumers to keep them employed, and I don’t see that happening so soon.”
“Producing four babies each…?”
I don’t think so. In the villages I know, young women are refusing to get married to men without jobs. Marriages are getting delayed to thirty and beyond, and when they do take place, couples are having many fewer children than their parents. I don’t know when we will have our next census, but I suspect it will point to a sharp drop in population growth rates. And that’s probably the only good news about the future of youth unemployment in India - that their numbers will peak, soon-ish.