Chidrup Jhanjhari and I are friends. We drive to work together and although I’d planned to study Spanish during our two-hour daily commute, we often spend time talking. We both live in West Rogers Park, an inner city neighborhood on the north side of Chicago.
Our neighborhood collects people from all over the world, but like Chidrup, the majority of my neighbors are from India. He is in Chicago completing an internship as part of his graduate degree at the University of Illinois.
One day I jumped in the car. “Hey Chidrup,” I said, “I was on a website for programmers and I saw that someone wanted to create a website just like Bharatmatrimonial.com.” I knew it must be a popular site if someone wanted to imitate it.”
Chidrup knew Bharat Matrimonial, a place that offers match making to over 12 million Indians in 15 languages. “But what really surprised me,” I explained, “is that people were looking for mates based their caste.”
The caste system is an ancient cultural and religious system for defining people based on inherited social position. Which means, simply put, that the circumstances of your birth determine, define or limit the social and career opportunities you can aspire to or obtain in life. Whether or not caste means the same thing today it did in the past, there was no getting around it: caste was part of everyone’s profile on Bharat Matrimonial (along with a fill-in-the-blanks for “complexion,” too).
I was surprised because I had no idea how pervasive the caste system remains in India. Chidrup said that the grip of caste has loosened a bit, particularly for educated young adults, but not much and it is so seamlessly a part of the culture of India that I don’t even know if it is viewed as an “issue” at all today.
However, I knew that my personal hero, Mahatma Ghandi, the great moral leader of India’s overthrow of British rule, had worked to eliminate the unfairness of the caste system—particularly for those of the lowest castes. The democratic Constitution of India protects all of its citizens against discrimination on the basis of caste, color, creed, religion and gender. I’m embarrassed to admit that I thought the caste system was gone in India, a relic of the past. Was I ever mistaken.
But now I understood something about my own country I didn’t understand before. I know why so many white people here don’t realize how serious the problem of racism is in the USA. I finally get it.
The problems of racism are as remote to the majority of white Americans as the existence of the caste system in India was for me.
“Didn’t racism get handled when Martin Luther King led protests in the 1960s?” white Americans wonder. “Isn’t it illegal to discriminate now?”
I don’t care what caste my friend Chidrup is, nor that of his girlfriend, his friends, nor anyone else’s. I don’t care about the color of their “complexions.” But the fact that so many people do really opened my eyes.
Saturday, March 21st 2009 at 1:57 pm |
Well said Raymond! Humans are going to have to change and learn to respect each other despite our differences if we are going to survive on this planet aren’t we? Our differences aren’t worth dying for. We have a lot to learn but we can learn overnight if we decide to.
Thanks for reading this Ray. It’s really great sharing with you. Tell So and your other friends that they are welcome here. I hope that we can get some of the great translators at WordPress to be interested in translating our articles into other languages. Which languages do you think we should start with?
Friday, March 20th 2009 at 8:47 pm |
Well, I knew that there was caste in Indian History as well as in other country in Asia as different name , but I did not know that still such a caste has been being existing in India…. really it surprises me… when about people all over the world will enjoy the rainbow as favor from nature? Wide world, but still narrow human.