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Trivial incident which triggered a change in my perspective

I was sitting in a cafe, eating a mango slice. Trying to consume as much mango, as fast as possible because.. mango. Then in my quest to consume, I suddenly ate some of the peel and my face turned started gaining similarities to the nun from Conjuring 2. Post which I made a comment on these lines, "Shit, ate the damn peel." my friend replied "Its okay, people eat mango peel" and to that I wildly protested, saying "Only poor people have it because they don't have anything to eat" that's when he dragged me to the other end of the cafeteria and showed me multiple people who were eating mango with the peel.

I was shocked to my wits and went back the memory lane to understand how I came up with this idea and the reason which I traced this to was me seeing a kid near a trash can eating mango peels, to that kid I offered a few bananas that I was carrying. I am not saying the kid was eating it for taste but that association led me to believe that probably only poor people eat mango peel.

This was such a deep realisation for me that I went back and read a lot about what is the general basis of views shared by any person who is being racist or is blaming muslims for terrorism. It is knowledge be association. That was the day I realised that all of us live with a few biases and investigating, rather than generalization is the right way to go about forming perceptions. We need to follow strict guidelines on data and how to use it in order to prove or disprove our perceptions.


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