A Compelling Read

I should explain a thing or two about caste. Even Indians get confused about this word, especially educated Indians in the cities. They'll make a mess of explaining it to you. But it's simple, really.

Let's start with me.

See: Halwai, my name, means 'sweet-maker'.

That's my caste-my destiny. Everyone in the Darkness who hears that name knows all about me at once. That's why Kishan and I kept getting jobs at sweetshops whereever we went. The owner thought, Ah, they're Halwais, making sweets and tea is in their blood.

But if we were Halwais, then why was my father not making sweets but pulling a rickshaw? Why did I grow up breaking coals and wiping tables, instead of eating gulab jamuns and sweet pastries when and where I chose to? Why was I lean and dark and cunning, and not fat and creamy-skinned and smiling, like a boy raised on sweets would be?

See, this country, in its days of greatness, when it was the richest nation on earth, was like a zoo. A clean, well-kept, orderly zoo. Everyone in his place, everyone happy. Goldsmihs here. Cowherds there. Landlords there. The man called a Halwai made sweets. The man called a cowherd tended cows. The untouchables cleaned faeces. Landlords were kind to their serfs. Women covered their heads with a veil and turned their eyes to the ground when talking to strange men.

And thanks to all those politicians in Delhi, on the fifteenth of August, 1947 - the day the British left - cages had been let open; and the animals had attacked and ripped each other apart and jungle law replaced zoo law. Those that were the most ferocious, the hugriest, had eaten everyone else up, and grown big bellies. That was all that counted now, the size of your belly. It didn't matter whether you were a woman, or a Muslim, or an untouchable: anyone with a belly could rise up. My father's father must have been a real Halwai, a sweet-maker, but when he inherited the shop, a member of some other caste must have stolen it from him with the help of the police. My father had not had the belly to fight back. That's why he had fallen all the way to the mud, to the level of a rickshaw-puller. That's why I was cheated of my destiny to be fat, and creamy-skinned, and smiling.

To sum up - in the old days there were one thousand castes and destinies in India. These days, there are just two castes: Men with Big Bellies, and men with Small Bellies.

And only two destinies: eat - or get eaten up.



Just couldn't hold myself from quoting from 'The White Tiger'. Aravind Adiga almost makes you feel guilty about something!
(For the uninitiated, this book won the Man Booker prize, popularly known at the alternative Nobel Prize in the English speaking countries, this year.)