Systematic dehumanisation
With a new courage , I asked my dad.
"Was there a colony in our native village ?"
He replied , " Yes. There was and there is ".
The conversation couldn't continue. I collected that courage for a long time to ask my dad. Not because my dad is a patriarch, but because I didn't want the answer to be heard. Though I knew it's gonna be yes, I stopped myself from asking. I convinced myself, maybe if I don't ask, it doesn't exist.
Foolishness. What else can be used to describe the thought of mine " it doesn't exist until someone tells me it exists " . But I continued to accept that deception . Not anymore. It is already pricking me.
I had the privilege to listen to P Sainath once . He told in his speech "We are living in a deception of normalcy. We assume that everything is normal . We assume everyone is happy. We tend to ignore the alarming rise of inequality in our country ". The whole speech was enlightening. I got the courage to ask my dad after his speech. His speech bridged the gap I had , what I had observed and what I tend to observe.
I realised my flaws in how I address this society. I realised how I show partiality in justifying or fighting against a problem. It's all about seeing and observing the world.
Inequality is so ingrained in everyday life that we got used to it and accepted it. It is not about numbers - the number of people below poverty line ,the number of tribals fighting for their land ,the number of dalits fighting for dignity ,the number of farmer suicides and other magical numbers of sympathy. Once we start addressing a problem by numbers and percentage ,we tend to find solutions intellectually .And the product of this ill concieved knowledge of numbers gives us the belief that the answer lies with reservation .But inequality and reservation are not the same .As privileged elite of this society ,we are more worried about who grabs our opportunity .The way we narrow down the humanitarian issue to reservation explains our ignorance of the problem of ground reality .
On a daily basis , reservation is the least important entity they are worried about .We have comfortably accepted the hierarchy in daily life .We refuse to see their struggle for their survival and blame the institutional hypocrisy on the marginalised themselves . As a society we have made the majority incompetent and question their competency through illogical term called 'standards'. The question should be who marginalised them and why they are marginalised ?
The more we observe ,the more we can notice how biased we are towards them .When was the last time we asked the name of cleaner of our street? Have we asked our septic tank cleaners why they chose that job when we are doctors and software engineers? Why do we accept that we deserve to live better and they deserve to live a hard , disheartening life?
I don't have answers for inequality. I don't know what can be done to change the society. But I want to know more . About the people in my daily life who goes unnoticed .
Noticing the unnoticed has opened new doors of reality ,which are cruel and systematically accepted.
"Does castesim exist even now?"- I asked my brother when I was in 11th standard. He told " Go and count the number of iyengar bakeries in our town" . I took my bike ,went around the town and counted 6 of them .After I returned with the answer ,he asked me ,"Now count the number of paraiyar bakeries". I m yet to find one .
We just refuse to see the systematic dehumanisation.
Discrimination is there, was there and will be there. It may be based on religion, caste, statehood, language, nationality or even gender. The point is how do we tackle it. We have a president who is a dalit and as you said, so many other people who are dalit. As I come from a community, whose women were not even allowed to cover their breasts before higher castes just a 100 years ago, the solution were a few things. Conversion to another religion, education, business and education of a girl child. Today, the community has grown from nothing to one of the most influential in every field especially education and business. The one strength of any community is to help each other, provide job to one person from another family, take care of the education of one person from another family. We may say, we should not see caste, but, just because we have come up in our lives so much, we cannot take for granted the community's struggle to achieve each milestone from a woman wearing a dress to cover get Bosto, to men wearing a shirt, slipper, sitting on a stool in the school, to drink water from a common well, and the right to live in a dignified manner. This community has grown so much that it gave back the reservation based on religion it got some years back, because practically, their representation in education and jobs were way higher than their representation based on population. Just because we have all settled down somewhat in life, I cannot stand here and tell there is no caste and treat the people from one's own community as aliens. In summary, the solution is education, jobs, and most importantly when someone is going up in life, giving a helping hand to every other family in need as far as possible. There may not be discrimination but being indifferent to a community's struggle is as equal a sin.
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