She was on a flight from Dubai to Mumbai and had a headache. She needed a glass of water and requested the steward to bring her one. He ignored her. A short while later, she requested him to bring her some water again. He ignored her... again. Undeterred she once again called the steward, a white man, and requested that she be given some water. He ignored her once again. A short while later, a woman seated next to her requested a blanket. He brought it to her in the blink of an eye and a wide smile. The other woman was white.
Does the incident spark a sense of outrage? It did in Anuranjita Kumar, who was at the receiving end of this incident. The senior HR professional had been travelling for work. Not one to take it lying down, she escalated the matter and took it up with the cabin manager. “I was on a full fare ticket; a glass of water is not too much to ask. We’ve all faced biases of some sort... at the workplace, while travelling overseas, while shopping. What would worry me was why we didn’t do anything about it. We tend to let things slide to avoid confrontation,” she says during an interview while she was in the city to launch her book. “By escalating the issue, I made sure the steward wouldn’t do it again.”
Her book Colour Matters?: The Truth That No One Wants to See which released less than a month ago deals with the various biases people face on an everyday basis. The book explores cross cultural dynamics, highlights the difficulties of being a minority in different geographies and offers perspectives of different ethnicities.
Inspired by the world
Filled with stories from around the globe, spanning ethnicities and professional backgrounds, the book offers personal encounters. “It deals with stories that I came across during my research for the book — white and black dilemma, brown and black, brown and white, Chinese, Japanese and all kinds of biases people face across the world by virtue of being a minority,” says the author, who is also the MD and head, HR at Royal Bank of Scotland.
“The stories essentially point toward the fact that people who have a privilege don’t see that privilege... The book touches upon all kinds of codes: how black parents who tried to adopt a white child were treated; a white person’s experience in India; an Indian’s experience in China and so much more,” she says. Colour Matters? , she says, is an attempt to bring these issues to the fore and talk about it constructively.
“It is basically a minority’s perspective on colour and ethnicity whilst they’re dealing with a situation where the majority may be brown, white or black,” says Anuranjita, adding that there was quite a bit of push back when she first wanted to write this book.
“I had friends advising me against it. Some of the leading publishers in the country asked me if bias on the basis of colour was actually an issue in today’s time. Luckily, my organisation was supportive and asked me to go ahead with the book.” While the topic had been on Anuranjita’s mind for a while, she says she started working on it last September. She undertook public research and had several people writing in to her with their experiences. “It was then about filtering the repetitive stories and clustering them. I used the word Colour as an acronym (C= connect, O= openness, L= love, O= objectivity, U= unbiasedness, R= resilience) and bunched up stories under these themes so there were takeaways for the readers.”
Anuranjita’s books are an offshoot of her personal experiences. “My first book Can I Have It All? is about being a mother and the choices a woman faces. Writing for me is about leaving a legacy for my children... about leaving the world better than the one we inherited,” she says.
