It was a lazy Sunday night, and I was binge watching
randomly suggested videos in Facebook. There was one particular video clip of a
Tamil debate show. I am not sure of the subject of debate as I was watching
only a short promo . There was a bunch kids on one side in the age group of 10
to 15 and on the other side was parental group .
The anchor of the show said the kids to ask parents , meaning of commonly used words, but the
meaning of which is not understandable by them. The kids were asking a bunch of words like
culture, ego, which were interesting and funny, and the parents managed to explain
them after a bit of struggle.
Then came a question from an unsuspecting boy, that clean
bowled out all members of parental group and made them fumbling for answer. It's
not a tough word like mary poppin's "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious".
It's a most common word used by all of us and I am 100% sure that you too would
have used it, and that million dollar question is,
"What is caste?".
Before reading further, take a moment and try to answer the
question for yourself, from your knowledge. What will you answer if your kid or
some school kid asks the same question.
Coming back to the show, this question totally threw
everyone off-guard. It was pathetic to see the parents fumbling with words to
give a diplomatic answer, and few others quite plainly gave out foolishly
divisive and ignorant answers, and not one person in the show was able to
answer the question.
It is terrifying to imagine how these so called educated lot
is going to groom the future adults and leaders of the country and the world.
Honestly it evoked a fear in me, and eventually lot of questions followed. Who
is to blame? Who is responsible? How to stop this ignorance from spreading
further? What is Caste? What is religion?
I asked the question myself again. What is religion? What is
caste? Where it started? How was it started? How it spread? How and why it grew
to be what it is today?
Some of the simple questions are the most difficult one to
answer. Answer to these questions cannot be given in few lines or a article or
even in volumes of books. Infact there is no right answer. Yet I will try to
share my understandings and answer the above questions, in the hope that, it
will serve a as ready reference when my kid asks me the same question someday.
Will follow up in the next article tracing the roots of religion
through thousands of years of history, war and bloodsheds.
