I grew up on a farm.  We had no electricity and very little money to be able to buy a fridge so we could not keep vegetables in the house overnight.  We used to harvest fresh beans and herbs.  Pumpkin was the only vegetable that we could keep for days on end.  We had animals.  Cows giving us fresh milk and dogs and cats to play with and love.  Living with them was part of farm life.

All that changed when we moved to a flat in a tall building.  No pets, no freshly harvested vegetables but electricity water and all the other services.  Nostalgia continues to haunt us.

Relocation is change adapting to new ways.  Recently I read painful stories of people who were forcibly separated.  Here is one,

“I had heard many things about India since childhood. I learnt about my cousins who lived there, their culture, language and stories of the partition narrated by my grandparents to my mother. My mother recalled her visits to India many a times. Even today, she has hope of finding her lost cousins in the land her parents migrated from. She dreams of meeting them someday and silently loves them without their knowledge of it.

Around these emotional stories, I spent much of my childhood watching Indian dramas and movies. The first time I learnt about rivalry between two countries was from these very dramas and movies. I was surprised because my mother had never thought about this enmity and hostility. She loved and still loves India. The empty roads during Pakistan-India cricket matches, social media debates that spewed hatred and electronic media’s exaggeration of events between the two countries made me curious to undertake a visit across the border.”

These stories are instilled with deep emotions and prejudices which embed themselves over generations.  So what we see in South Africa and call it racism is in fact prejudice which emanates from unpleasant experiences which are then generalised and regarded as typical characteristics of a particular group or race or religion.

Like in so many examples all over the world, anti Semitic feelings, anti Muslim, anti Hindu anti Indian and the list goes on.  Clearly these are misguided feelings because at the end we are all one and all humanity is interlinked and interdependent.