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Exactly what killed the poor infant?

Every few days, one is bound to run across some piece in the media that speaks of caste and creed in such entrenched terms that it makes me wonder where it will all end. Usually, this is some story of outrageous assault on everything from human dignity to the Indian Penal Code. Some landed bigot raped a low-caste woman, and now claims it was both consensual and within his rights. Some C- student set fire to himself because he couldn't get into the one-room dung-heap that passes for a college in his town where the cutoffs are too high for his high-born strain-brain.

And so on and forth. All this is presented to us as if it makes perfect sense, too. With words like dalit, Chettiars, fair-skinned, Christian and Bengali, various people assault our eyes and ears with the din of this stuff. The real issues in these stories, meanwhile, usually get about three lines of space in a one-page article. A little bit in the vein of The Thakur's horse stumbled over a pothole in the road and stepped on the dalit woman's infant child right outside the splendid gates of the glittering mosque in Jehanabad, within sight of passing protesters clamoring for reservations in government jobs to be increased. Perspective, people! Please?

The only explanations I can think of are that whoever writes these things is convinced that they sell, or genuinely believes such writing represents the world in a real way. Rediff's piece in the Infotech section carries a story about computer code that unshackles users from the Brahmanism of formal coding. Twice-born bytes? Sure, why not? Pretty soon, the obsolete 3.5-inch drive can be referred to as the pariah of recording technologies, the forgotten standard-bearer of revolt against years of repression by its high-and-mighty colonial predecessor, the 5.25 inch drive.

The elections have been particularly gory with such details, with every constituency mostly viewed through the sieve of its various castes and creeds. Even the Lingayats will not vote for this man anymore, the Yadavs will certainly rally behind this woman, and the Muslims have all been told to vote tactically, whatever that means. I wonder why we even bother with elections, why not simply decide the dominant group by numbers in each constituency, and hand the seat to the biggest buffoon from that bunch? If things turn out very different, we can revisit the idea then, until which time we'll use the money saved to build a trust fund for yet-undiscovered groups hiding behind as-yet-not-defined crimes against being normal.

That's not to say that such things are entirely without basis or truth, only to point out that casting a jaundiced eye on every turn in life isn't particularly helpful. It doesn't even make good copy, after a while. I mean, how much respect can you have for writers and journalists who lead with the bigoted spin each time? Why not tell some real stories instead?

As I recall, there certainly were Brahminical plots in our neighbourhood. Three of them, in fact, on the same side of the street, where the most endowed families lived. Across the molten tar on the other side, there lived close to 300 people, in little homes that were dwarfed by the land that the elites owned. If you stopped to listen to the oldest truths circulating the doorsteps around there, you would sense it right away; the barriers to prosperity weren't those of caste, they were of class, plain and simple. For every Brahminical plot that would merit glaring headlines in the press, there were a 100 others, equally Brahmin, which were obscure and nondescript. But that wouldn't be news, right?

The next time you come across a Brahminical plot, can you please tell me? I mean, who is behind the devious design to impose computer codes SS-style on the rest of the uninitiated? I'd like to get in on this one. I'm twice born, maybe even thrice, and if there truly were a clannish scheme out there that restricted participation to the highborn lowlifes, I might sneak in. I'll compensate you for the inside information on my application. On the weekends, we'll meet up at some affordable sushi bar, and over seaweed and California rolls, we'll talk of money and women, caste and class, and every other plot that fills your imagination.

And we'll try to figure out how exactly the poor infant died at the horse's hoof.

Ashwin Mahesh