India Shining , India Poised ??

While there's celebration (some well-deserved) over India one the move, you come across a shocking incident of a teacher spraying goumutra on Dalit students to purify them (and also of the effects of an earlier Dalit headmistress) ! You don't have to go into the interiors of one of the Bimaru states (as most of us would assume), it happened just under 100 kms away from one of the biggest city in Central India, a city with an International Airport, the orange city Nagpur !

Some might dismiss it as a one-off incident in Maharashtra - one of the progressive states, but it's an indication of how deeply rooted the misconceptions still are.

While most of us have been lucky to have parents who taught us to treat everyone with respect and dignity, there are still a lot of young minds where the seeds of the prejudice are being sown by the society around them.

And as we cry out against the discriminatory remarks on an international celeb show,perhaps a time for some collective introspection at how we deal with the grim realities in our own backyard ! At least, lets not deny that these issues still exist.

Will we continue to cruise along the path of economic progress, but as a lot of social scientists say, a huge disparity between the haves and have-nots is not a healthy sign for any nation in the long run !