We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality

Throughout my school days, I knew there were people who belonged to the "scheduled castes."  SC, as it was often shortened to.  As I got closer to completing high school and getting to college, I came to understand firsthand the affirmative action--reservations--for various groups, including for SC.

The extended family with whom I interacted a lot were all brahmins.  Brahmins friends with brahmins, and brahmins marrying brahmins.  When we visited grandmothers' villages, the streets were all brahmin households.

My first real awareness of the separate-and-unequal existence of peoples came when I went with my father and his uncle to visit with that uncle's friend.  I went along because that older man was also the grandfather of a classmate of mine.

I was perhaps in the beginning phase of my teenage years.  The questioning self was slowly being made.  All I sensed was that there was something seriously wrong with the world.

We crossed the main road.  And then went to another part of the village.  There were no brahmins here.  Muslims were in a different part.

Much later in life, without explicitly talking about racism, I asked my father whether he was ok with such geographic separation of religions and castes and subcastes.  His reply was a simple one: That's how things were.

The older I got, and especially after getting to America, the more I thought about all these.  In one of my early letters to my parents when I was in graduate school, I wrote about the luck of the draw.  I wrote to them that had I been born in a different house, I might have grown up a Muslim or an untouchable.  The randomness of these bothered me, and it pissed me off that the traditional explanations conveniently justified all these as divine!

A couple of years ago, when proudly posting my family's old photographs in Facebook, it occurred to me that only those of us who grew up in privileged backgrounds even had photos from the past.  The poorer people, and the lower castes, had barely anything and, therefore, there was no question of photos of their grandparents and greatgrandparents.  A privilege that I had taken for granted.

Last year, I went to a gathering of a few old school mates.  I felt uncomfortable that it was an all-brahmin crowd, with three exceptions.  I went to an 80th birthday celebration, and it was mostly an all-brahmin crowd there too.  The paths don't seem to cross much :(

MLK famously observed that the long arc of the moral universe bends towards justice.  Maybe.  Had the randomness in the cosmos made me a Dalit and not a brahmin by birth, I know for certain that I would have been an angry young man, an angry middle-aged man, and perhaps a bitter old man, unable to forget the atrocities that were committed against my people.  After all, even as one who was born a brahmin, who lives in the US, I am not convinced about any arc bending towards justice.

There's something seriously wrong with the world, and I can't do a damn thing about it!