Reporting from Indian reality

Every morning. I now have the womderful opportunity to flick through yesterday's English newspaper, the Indian Times. Every morning, I learn something new and mind-boogling about Indian society.

Sometimes I learn some interesting facts aout the political system and how a repulic of this size actually functions bureaucratically (or how it fails).

One morning, I learned about Indian nationalism (not to be msitaken for the so-called Hindu nationalism), curiously in the sports pages. The story of a cricket match contained the story of an Asutralian player who had accused the public of shouting racial slurs and making monkey sounds at him during the game. The newspaper portrayed the player as being childish and unintelligent, and further mocked him for not playing well in the match. It had been proven that the public did in fact shout racial slurs and imitate monkey sounds (and one wonders who's looking the fool) after which the newspaper defended these practices as part of the game (!!). Many things in these reports fascinated me. For instance, how easily a claim of blatant racism towards a sportsman was ignored. It got me thinking about tolerance levels in a society with a clear and sharp social division based among other things on the colour of skin. Or how a supposedly respected newspaper engages in the same kind of childish arguing that fanclubs would about the team's performance. It got me thinking about how different it is to study such things in countries where institutional racism has been suppressed, or where there is at least a high elvel of awareness about such injustices - and then to live these differences every day of your life, having it ingrained in your social education and creation of your identity. Such differences. They make me feel humble.

Another morning, I learned about different categorisation mechanisms in institutional India. In the 1947 constitution, the founding fathers made an effort to protect and promote the rights of the 'untouchables', now the Dalits, a term that in my ears sound just as degrading. According to Wikipedia, it means "'held under check', 'suppressed', or 'crushed', or, in a looser sense, 'oppressed'". Great word. The constitution identifies and grants special status to groups of these and termed them as either Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes. As commendable as this move seems, it signifies the defeat of the nation. By granting a group special status, their special-ness is stressed and thus, this special-ness - rather than their equal-ness to other groups in society or society as a whole - is made the object of institutionalisation. It is cemented for decades to come and the institutional structures do nothing to deconstruct the devastation and debilitating social order. But granted, some groups in this society are so underprivileged that upwars social mobility is impossible without the help of institutional sturctures. In a society where some ethnic and cultural minorities are labelled OBCs, that is the Other Backward Classes, by the relevant authorities, there are buond to be a feeling of injustice running so deep that it seems to be the very spine of the nation. My obstinate self wants to ask who has the right to call other people backwards? Who if not those who have held the powerful poisitions for generations, and thus have no interest in sharing their privileges with others?

What I learn every single morning is that this is a society of violence in every thinkable and unthinkable shape and disguise. I am made painfully aware of physical violence in reports of police brutality (often leading to deaths) with no consequences whatsoever; in the accounts of political groups blasting bombs to make a point; in the stories of abducted, molested and mutilated children and women. I see the violence on the television where fathers and mothers slap and beat their adult children in frustration over failed marriages; I see how my Indian friends do not even frown, how they make fun of the infamous 'stick' of the Indian school system. I learn of young students tortured by their peers in hostels on university grounds, hung by their feet and made to drink kerosene, of how a day care worker made a 3-year-old drink urine. The child had wet herself during nap time. I guess I'm moer sensitive to these issues because I come from a society where violence is not accepted at any level, especially against children, the most vulnerable humans and the ones most in need of protection. It seems I should harden up and get used to reading these things. But I fear that my own sense of humanity - however over-sensitive it might be - will suffer from it.

So I choose to be apalled every morning. This morning I learned that Naxalites (violent Maoists) had blasted a bomb near a bus full of innocent humans. The report included the gory details of the bomber's fate: "his severed head was found some way off the road and the remains of his mangled body was stuck to the outside of the bus! (Indian Times, 01 November, 2007). How can I not be apalled, both when learning of this disgraceful attack on innocent people and when reading the less-than-human portrayal of the death of another human being? How can I not?