Every time Thomas Friedman uses the words “flat” and “world” in the same sentence, I feel like hauling his eminent personage to the distinctly unflat environs of Besant Nagar and explaining to him the finer points of how rental agreements work in this part of the world.
A colleague of mine recently moved from Bangalore to Chennai, and having received rave reviews about Besant Nagar’s idyllic and picturesque surroundings, especially its proximity to the Bay of Bengal, he was sold and went about looking for an apartment to rent for his family of three. He found one that he liked and paid a rather hefty advance to the owner and was all set to move in. That was when he got a phone call from the owner who sheepishly informed him that the other tenants in the apartment had expressed some “concerns” about his moving in. My colleague was perplexed — he had a clean police record, a flawless credit report and even liked Carnatic music, so what was the problem, he wondered.
It turned out to be his preference for consuming food that was made up of cells that, once in a while, did not possess a cell wall. For the Biology-challenged, let me simplify and say that he was non-vegetarian. Apparently, the fact that he was from Kerala, a place known for having quite the most multicuisine-tolerant people in all of India, had escaped the attention of the tenants, who were themselves, rather hypocritically, violating Vedic scripture by not slaughtering bulls for Indra and Agni every other day.
To be fair, they did return his advance with no further hassle, but I can’t help wondering how we can still tolerate this sort of bigotry in 2011. Apparently, the Ganga only washes away sins, not retarded intolerance. Of course, people have the right to be bigoted, and live in ghettoes, and it’s not just Tambrahms who do this sort of thing. Jains, Muslims and Christians all live in similar ghettoes in Mumbai, and it’s not uncommon for flat societies to have entry criteria. For instance, my brother had trouble finding an apartment as a graduate student in Pune because apartment associations had strict “No Bachelors” rules for rental contracts.
So while they have the right to deny someone who eats a different kind of food a rental agreement, I will simply point out the inherent hypocrisy. Their children, all NRIs in the US, live in apartment complexes where neighbors regularly grill large parts of cows on barbecue grills. When they go and visit them to babysit their kids, do they ask the neighbours to grill carrots and cabbages? So why the double-standard?
Having grown up in a strictly vegetarian household myself, I do understand that it’s not easy, but seriously, it’s almost as if we are unwilling to exercise our ability to tolerate rather selectively. Lastly, if one wants to be bigoted, it’s better to wear on it the sleeve, and put the “Brahmins only. Rest please excuse” wordings clearly in classified ads. Why tempt people with feigned tolerance?