Whoever You Are

Title: Whoever You Are
Author: Mem Fox
Illustrator: Leslie Staub
Publisher, Year: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1997

Initially people lived in their own little villages. They married within their groups and had children, who also married within the same group. When you identified yourself as a member of a certain group, it is a given that you do a set of things just like the other members of the group.

Slowly, people started travelling out of their groups for various reasons like education, job, adventure, love, wealth, good fortune etc and found themselves amongst new culture, new traditions and people with completely different values. A plant or an animal would have perished, but man is known for his resilience. He managed to survive. But what were the adjustments he had to make in order to survive? Did he keep his home culture intact? Did he surrender completely to the host culture? Did he end up forming his own third culture, which was neither the home culture nor the host culture?

As an immigrant who is bringing up my children in USA, these questions are important to me. Do I embrace the ‘American culture’? If so, considering that America is a land of immigrants, what exactly is American culture? If I wanted to contribute to the host culture without completely being assimilated am I asking for too much?

Imagining that I am carrot, do I want to be cut in to pieces, sautéed along with a host of other vegetables and spices, blended, passed through a fine sieve and become homogenous soup, in the process of loosing my identity? Or do I want to be diced and be a part of a delicious salad? After much thinking I have decided I like my salad better than soup :)

Because when you keep preaching equality, it gets confusing. People are not made from the same dough using the same cookie cutter. However effectivley one blends in, there are differences and one just cannot turn a blind eye to those differences. Its like saying, if we take away 1 from 3, then it will be the same as 2. Now 3 and 2 are equal.

The best way to make people feel validated is by telling that we are all different in different ways. We eat different food. We wear different clothes. We celebrate different things. We celebrate in diferent ways. We have different beliefs. But underneath all those differences the one single common bond that unites us is our humanity. If you can extend a loving hand, share a hug, feel another person’s pain, fully aware of the mutual differences, then true tolerance is achieved.

This is the message of the book Whoever You Are. Mem Fox takes children on a magic ride through out the world pointing that no two skin colos are the same, no two landscapes are the same, no two lifestyles are the same, but past all these differences, if you look deep inside, we all have a heart, we all laugh and we all are capable of hurting and healing.

You know what I kept thinking of? My second standard lessons that talked about ‘unity in diversity’!