30-Jan-2012, 09:57 PM
Folks, what are your opinions about the perspective put forward in this article in 'The Daily' (News Corp's iPad-only magazine)?
http://www.thedaily.com/page/2012/01/19/...almia-1-3/
Context, Maya is a garbage collector/cleaner who's been going to the writer's house since 1977. She plans to quit doing her job, now that her son is reasonably well off as a government employee and network-marketer...
This is a line of argument that seems to be common to staunch casteists and this apparently progressive author: under the current socio-economic and political system, lower caste people are better off within their own castes. [/quote]
http://www.thedaily.com/page/2012/01/19/...almia-1-3/
Context, Maya is a garbage collector/cleaner who's been going to the writer's house since 1977. She plans to quit doing her job, now that her son is reasonably well off as a government employee and network-marketer...
Quote:But the choice (to retire) may not be hers much longer.
Upon retirement, she had planned to either pass her “business” to her children or sell it to another dalit for about $1,000. But about six months ago, municipal authorities started dispatching vans, Western-style, to collect trash from neighborhoods, the one service that protected Maya from obsolescence in an age of sophisticated home-cleaning gadgetry.
Maya and her fellow dalits held demonstrations outside the municipal commissioner’s office to stop the vans. They finally arrived at a compromise that lets Maya and her pals collect trash from individual homes and hand it to the vans for disposal. But Maya realizes that this arrangement won’t last. “I got branded as polluted and became unfit for other jobs, for what?” she wept. “To build a business that has now turned to dust?”
...
Her son, however, is pleased. He believes that this will finally force his siblings to develop skills for more respectable work instead of joining their mother. But Maya shakes her head.
And she might be right. Post-liberalization, the most dogged and determined dalits are able to escape their caste-assigned destiny and get rich. But for the vast majority, as Maya says, opportunities are better within the caste system than outside it.
This is a line of argument that seems to be common to staunch casteists and this apparently progressive author: under the current socio-economic and political system, lower caste people are better off within their own castes. [/quote]