>Arun, I didn't get the point, or points, of your comments. Were you defending the Dalit deal or just saying it's not especially bad compared with other places?>
Points
1. You are talking about a billion+ people slowly moving into modernity with limited resources. There is bound to be friction. Caste conflict may be a symptom. Less than a billion people in Europe and they have been in conflicts around the world in the last 100 years with war, genocide, torture, fascism, totalitarianism. The Western society has a way of rationalizing it. The good becomes the accepted norm, the way West likes to look at itself. The rest becomes externalized. Hitler and Germany under him - once a millennium aberration. Stalin and ussr under him- they were communists. They are not us. But when it comes to India, 1 billion people are colored with the same brush.
2. Impatience with pace of modernity when it comes to other nations. What if the richest nation partly recovers from its racial issues officially only in the 1960s, and practically still recovering from it? But once we are a few decades ahead, beat down on everybody else as if a couple of decades is anything big in the history of mankind.
3. I am looking for a fresh perspective on caste and don't find any in the articles. All we see are these simplistic stories about caste.
I have lived only in cities in India, so definitely I can't claim to know how it works. But caste in India is not simple. It is important to the identity of most indians , but not necessarily in conflict. Will have to explore further myself...
I don't know how the caste system works in India, but it seems like the usual situation elsewhere, at least in the past.>
-Arun |
