Like any feeling that is nurtured for too long, antipathy can assume an involuntary behaviour pattern.
Among Homo sapiens, who now number 5.7 billion, about one-fifth are South Asians. They share many characteristics with other Homo sapiens elsewhere. But, unlike other humans, South Asians have no special liking for their own variety. In fact they strongly disapprove of them. To this extent, they are an unusual breed, and of much interest to the scientific community.
Antipathy, even as a temporary aberration, tends to enhance the incipient human aggressiveness and erode objectivity. For South Asians, the feeling of antipathy for other South Asians is not even an aberration. They have lived with it for centuries. It has been bequeathed from one generation to the next as if it were part of folklore. But antipathy, or any feeling nurtured for so long, can assume an involuntary behaviour pattern. It would, then, cross the frontiers of conscious and rational control. This seems to have happened in South Asia, divided as it is by language, religion, caste and culture. South Asians have degenerated into jaded and polarised peoples forever immersed in innumerable old and new conflicts that keep them busy on the streets or at the frontiers.
How and why South Asians were led into this theatre of the absurd is a long and complex chronicle. It would take us far into the past where we are more likely to get lost than redeemed. Also, the purpose here and now is not to discover the causes so much as to recognise and accept the antipathetic and subjective mind-set of the South Asian, as reflected in actual events. Let us, therefore, look at the recent past and the contemporary scene.