Today I would want to share a lesson we learned the long hard way at GGIS.
You see GGIS is in Ahmedabad, Gujarat which is a predominantly vegetarian state. Non-vegetarian food, while widely available, is not socially acceptable and that is very often visible in the lunch boxes that our children carry.
Keeping this in mind last year we as a school decided to keep veg-food only as a rule for our school lunches which is generally the case in most schools here. We made this decision to respect the local food culture and save the non-veg eaters from being singled out, or so we believed.
But then we have children from almost a dozen nationalities including French, American, Indonesian, etc a dozen other Indian states where the food is predominantly non-vegetarian.
Not only was our decision overlooking their choices as pointed out well-wishing parents, but it was also creating a greater bias in the minds of all other students as we would be reinforcing their belief that non-veg eaters are lesser humans.
Thank the lord we realized our mistake and promptly changed our policy. I am sure this will make our students far better at handling diversity as they grow up and interact with a multitude of people all with different beliefs.
Do share your views and let’s take this conversation further.
3
July
