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Bangalore-based Rashmi Vasudeva's journalism has appeared in many Indian and international publications over the past decade. A features writer with over nine years of experience heading a health and fitness supplement in a mainstream Indian newspaper, her niche areas include health, wellness, fitness, food, nutrition and Indian classical Arts.
Her articles have appeared in various publications including Mint-Wall Street Journal, The Hindu, Deccan Herald (mainstream South Indian newspaper), Smart Life (Health magazine from the Malayala Manorama Group of publications), YourStory (India's media technology platform for entrepreneurs), Avantika (a noir arts and theatre magazine), ZDF (a German public broadcasting company) and others.
In 2006, she was awarded the British Print-Chevening scholarship to pursue a short-term course in new-age journalism at the University of Westminster, U.K. With a double Masters in Globalisation and Media Studies from Aarhus Universitet (Denmark), University of Amsterdam and Swansea University in Wales, U.K., she has also dabbled in academics, travel writing and socio-cultural studies. Mother to a frisky toddler, she hums 'wheels on the bus' while working and keeps a beady eye on the aforementioned toddler's antics.
Seeing The 'Others' As Less Than Human: Are We All Bigots Within?
On my Facebook news feed this story popped up right after the now-viral photo of the young Syrian father clutching two bundles -- his gassed and very dead twins. A macabre sort of serendipity if you please.
Yugoslavian performance artist Marina Abramovic stood still for six hours in the middle of a room and told people around that they could do whatever they wanted to her. There were 72 objects kept on a table nearby, some harmless (like a feather) and some potentially harmful (like a razor).
It is frightening how soon the dehumanization began. By the fourth hour, people were cutting off her clothes. It soon turned darker -- some grazed her neck with the razor, other pierced thorns in her stomach, blades were used to explore her body parts and minor sexual assaults were carried out. The artiste describes her horrifying experience in an unmissable video embedded in the article.
This is just a small experiment that reveals how quickly and depressingly humanity can descend to hell when given blanket authority and a pliant target. An explainer article in Vox (which ought to be read along with this experiment), terms dehumanization a 'mental loophole' and describes how psychologists are trying to understand this dark and disturbing 'mental program'. Some believe it is evolutionary while others argue it is part of our innate capacity for 'othering'.
Studies are being conducted on how minimal exposure combined with language and images that strip people of basic human traits (Jews as rats, Syrian refugees as a bowl of skittles, comparing Muslims to dogs) strengthen our ability to view those different from us as less than human.
After the experiment, when Marina walked through the very same people who had assaulted her, they had nothing to say and nowhere to look. This confirms what sociologists have always believed -- the only way to combat dehumanization is the hard way: more interactions with people who are different from us.
As idealistic as it sounds in today's world.
