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 !
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5 comments:
we have so many fallacies like such ...which ppl around us sometimes literate also...following dem with eyes wide shut.
By all odds - an eye-opener!
Good to see some compelling thoughts in writing which otherwise would have gone by after a brief stopover in the subconscious. Frankly speakin, after a point, one stops noticing the wrongs happening all around...Khairlanji was a similar episode but who really cares after some initial shor sharaba..
@crapgreek - Exactly ! Infact there's a saying in Marathi which translates to "The well-educated need not be necessarily be well-cultured"
@Deven - With all of us busy with the daily grind, these become "things which happen to others". It hit me a lot coz just a few days back I had a discussion with someone who said caste discrimination happens in the hinterlands, and this occured on Bhandara, so near to our native Nagpur.
i never believed in the india shining gimick....keep writing.
Removing misconceptions is really time consuming task. Only education over the years with strong demonstration of open thoughts can bring some parity in so many different sections of society. Painful incident for sensitive minds.
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