Shon Mehta

As a child, when people declared pride in their gender, ethnicity, or country, you felt confused. You never understood the pride of being born into something. What have you done to deserve your gender? Your ethnicity? Your country? You did not make them. They arrived before you did, as naturally as the weather. To be proud of them would be like being proud that it rained. Pride, if it must exist, belongs elsewhere. Pride belongs to the carpenter who shapes a table from stubborn timber, to the farmer or gardener who grows flowers from dry earth, or to those who create something with their own hands against the indifference of time. Yet you find yourself defending what you never claimed to have achieved. This is the strange part. You do not defend these things because they make you feel greater than others. You defend them because they are part of what makes you who you are. They are not medals pinned to your chest; they are circumstances from which your life was made: your ethnicity, yo...