How do you feel to be Minority?

Couple of weeks back I was attending a global meet for my unit, and as the name suggests there were people from all over the world. To set the context of this piece let me share a few demographics of this meet. Location was Hyderabad and people from multiple countries had flown in for this 3 day exercise. Most of these people were Indians, at least by origin, though their official nationalities may have been different, there were very few non-Indians. Again in the same ration was the male female divide. This is also a group of people who drive a particular business unit in a large organization, hence most of them knew each other. Lot of them met each other for the first time, but nevertheless they had either exchanged e-mails or attended voice conferences together. Hence this is a group, where everyone knew almost everyone else, had a fair idea of what each of them do or not do for that matter, where do they belong in the big picture and what are their alignments.

Like most global meets, this one also had a packed agenda with all three meals thrown in for people to network, to sort out issues that may otherwise be lying somewhere in your mailboxes and for people to connect, discover or re-discover. During one of the lunches, I was sharing the table with a non-Indian colleague of mine and he popped up a question ‘ How do you feel to be a part of the minority?’ It took me half a minute to realize what he was referring to and another half a minute to realize why he asked that question. After this one minute, I was trying to think of an answer, but finally had to admit that this question did not strike me till the time it was asked, and I am sure I did not feel minority if I did not realize it in the first place. The answer puzzled my colleague even more, who was probably expecting some clichéd answer or perhaps was wanting to share his feelings of being a minority. I tried to reason out by saying that I probably do not feel minority as I know everyone in that group, have worked with most of them and interact with them on a day to day basis, but the answer did not seem to go well with my colleague. I finally ended up asking him the same question as I thought he was expecting that but I was wrong, as he said he had been with this group for more than six years now and felt as comfortable or uncomfortable as everyone else. So where did that question come from I was wondering. He went on to explain that since he saw so few women, he wanted to know if they felt any different and how did they feel they were being treated. We laughed off and moved on to the next discussion.

After the event as I was reflecting I realized that half the differences and discriminations occur in our minds than in actual world. Going back to what I said in an earlier blog Men, Women…Debate’. men feel as uncomfortable in the presence of women as women do when they find themselves in minority. What we women need to realize it is when we enter what had been till now a Man’s World, not only it is a challenge for us, but it is as much a challenge for men as well. They find it difficult to carry on with their usual behavior and are not sure about their expected behavior. If both try and understand what the other one is going through, we probably would have one less issue to debate about and that is so called ‘Feminism’.