Pseudo Diversity

“That’s it ?”asked my new colleague

I replied “Yeah”

“Just Karthic and nothing else?”

“What do you expect?”

                                                          

“Don’t you have any surnames?”

“No.We don’t follow the surnames in our naming systems.What do surnames point 

to?”

“They are actually family names.followed in the family”

“I thought it is the caste name”

“It is not the direct caste name.But in many cases it indicates the caste to which one 

belongs.From the surnames one can determine the community one comes from”

“We too followed the same naming system until some years back one good politician named Periyar  got a ban on the system of branding ourselves with our caste names wherever we go. If two people meet for the first time unless and until both are believers in caste system either cannot know which caste they  belong to and treat them indifferently ”

“What is the problem in knowing the other’s caste?”

“It means you never faced the monster in the system and wont be facing in the future also.Good.Most people in our country are not as lucky as you.Leave it”.

 The introductory session with my North Indian colleague went like this. I ended up as the first person from Tamilnadu he was meeting and had to explain him and some other colleagues why things here are different when compared to their home town. One thing they had hard time accepting is our food habit is not as simple as theirs.Explaining to them the climatic and historic factors decide the food habits took me some time.Answering them for Why most people in Tamilnadu chose not to learn or speak Hindi took me a long time and lots of never ending arguements.They were not ready to accept the diversity due to regional and cultural factors and expected the whole world full of 'roti-sabjhi-dhal-hindi speaking' people.This points to specific people only and no one from my college who happily mingled with us,accepted the reality,ordered roti  in Dhaba outside the college but instead got Tamilnadu  ‘rotti’(parotta ) and enjoyed it as he didn’t have any other choice.

I am giving a second thought about using the ‘we’,as if we actually act as united mass. Even though whole of India is not ready to accept the diversity due to region,most people still accept the more baseless and the most cruel diversification and branding system-Caste. Just because one is born into a particular parent he becomes a member of a caste and couldn’t come out of it.The number of crimes in the name of caste is consistent. Communal clashes still happen in small level in some remote villages and cities.Sons and daughters who chose their better half are murdered by their parents for saving the non-existent prestige.Caste makes the people to form clusters and restricts contact or merging with the other ones and the contact itself cause serious damages sometimes.  

Even in towns and cities there is formation of groups for specific communities. Here people run chits that economically support members of the group.’That guy belongs to my community’ thinking gives them a confidence on each other over the other people in the same area. This acts as a preformed group and needs less efforts to unite the people for any cause. In some rare cases trusts run by these groups have schools that give education to students at an affordable price.

There is a wide spread thinking that education will bring an end to this. I met some people who are students from top institutions boasting about their caste and proudly brand themselves as belonging to such a community. Just education cannot change this. Realization is needed about this long followed pseudo pride.