Who am I? Who is she? Who is one?... Stop... This is causing a loss of self-esteem and leading to isolation. We need to come as one and stop discriminating. Treat everyone as one. We all need to be as one rather than cruel racists. Prevent protests…. Promote unitedness.

Every time I go to India, I get lovely warm welcomes and greetings from my kins. “Welcome... Foreign daughter, foreign sister, foreign aunt”... and whatnot. Visiting my cousin, she gets all excited and introduces me to the whole community. The words constantly echo in my mind. “Hello! Look! My foreign sister is here. She is from Singapore.” Then comes the blast of questions… “Is it pretty? How is life there?” Furthermore, one question that I hate answering… “Which is better? Singapore… or… India?”... Ok no offence, but I love my family and cousins and everyone in the family… But….“Why?” is what I want to ask. Just because I live in Singapore, am I supposed to be raced with a different ethnicity now? Am I not Indian anymore? It is definitely not that I have changed race from Indian to… what they call … FOREIGNER.

Why is it so hard to treat everyone as one? Not put labels on anyone? Why is it always blacks, whites, brown, this, that, you, me, he, she?... Why not us?

Did you even know, in the US, 1 in 3 black men have a likelihood of imprisonment whereas being a white man, the chances are 1 in 17. Similarly, 1 in 18 black women are likely to suffer imprisonment and being a white woman, 1 in 111 women would have a chance of being imprisoned.

Let’s also imagine another situation. What if someone needs blood from the blood bank? Would you run looking around for the race and ethnicity of the blood? Or would you find the blood bag with a specific blood group that is needed which is A, B or AB? We never look for the race on the blood bag. Just remember, if it is none of the blood groups available, you will look for blood group O which is compatible for all blood groups. Blood group O can give blood to all A, B and AB. Look at the irony though. Blood group O can donate blood to one with a blood group of A, B or AB. However, it is not possible the other way round. Blood group O can only receive from its own blood type. Not any other.

A real fact is that we are all As and Bs. We all have something in our mind for people with a different race or different cultures that we are not used to seeing. Let’s take my family for an example. We are vegetarians. Therefore, seeing animals being slaughtered for food is against our culture and we believe it as a shame that people do this. However, the ones who are non-vegetarians, they would never feel the same way because they're used to it and they are providing food to themselves and their family. They wouldn’t find anything wrong in that. This is where I was talking about the As and Bs.

What we need to do is come as one whole and be the O blood group. If we become the Os, imagine how happy and peaceful the world would be. There won’t be any discrimination. It will all be a happy world. If we take the ironic situation mentioned above, in terms of real-life situations, I can simply conclude that Os do not stand discrimination.

Let’s all come together, accepting everyone, changing from… A and B to O. and He, she, you, me to us.