I Caste Thee Out ~ !

You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. Remember that all I am offering is the truth. Nothing more.
- Morpheus in "The Matrix"

Life is about choices. In this scene, Neo has the choice to take the blue pill and continue to ignore the truth. Or to swallow the bitter pill (pun intended) and find out what is really going on. For me, I've got options and I'm fortunate to have that. Sometimes we are fortunate to have a choice, sometimes our hand is forced. And I'm facing a huge crossroad at the moment. One of these minor crossroads is whether I continue on with my Masters of Law, start the Chartered Accountant program, Securities Institute course or simply do nothing.

I caught a train home with my brother and his friend today. His friend was telling me about his 3 month internship in India. I don't know a lot about India, but I know a lot for an non-Indian person. I asked him about various stuff like did he eat Butter Chicken, cows in the middle of the road, the various languages they had, Indian standard time (Indians are rarely punctual) and lastly about the Caste system. My brother didn't know what it was, so I gave him a breakdown.

I struggled to explain what it was, but I gave him an analogy which I had read in a World Religion textbook. Consider the Indian population as a person. The feet represent the beggars. The hands and arms represent the warriors. The body represent the merchants/workers. And the head reps the Rich and Royale. I think its changed a lot since then, but it still exists to a certain degree and that's why I asked this dude, who confirmed it did. See the thing is, if your born into a certain "class", that is the class that you will stay for the rest of your life. A person born into poverty will stay in poverty. A rich person will stay rich.


Here is an exerpt from California State Universtiy website:
"The Indian caste system has been in use for many years. Still today the values of the caste system are held strongly. It has kept a sense of order, and peace among the people. There are five different levels of the system: Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra, and Harijans. Within each of these categories are the actual "castes" or jatis within which people are born, marry, and die. They all have their own place among each other and accept that it is the way to keep society from disintegrating to chaos. This system has worked well for Indian people and still has a major role in modern India."

That's what it was like in England in the 18th Century. It's like that in a lot of other countries as well. Even in our modern Australian society we have classes: Upper, Middle, Lower. But the thing is we have the opportunity to move from the middle or lower class to the upper class. There is much more fluidity between the classes. Sure we have the poverty cycle, but there is the possibility of getting out of the poverty cycle through education, tax breaks for low marginal taxpayers, social & welfare policies, and creation of employment for the poor.
Class or caste?

I've cut and pasted snippets of text from the site adaniel, Wikipedia and somewhere else:

"Legally the government disallows the practice of caste system but has a policy of affirmative discrimination of the backward classes."

"But with all this positive discrimination policy, most of the communities who were low in the caste hierarchy remain low in the social order even today. And communities who were high in the social hierarchy remain even today high in the social hierarchy. Most of the degrading jobs are even today done by the Dalits, while the Brahmans remain at the top of the hierarchy by being the doctors, engineers and lawyers of India. "

From what i've read, it doens't exist so much in urban india, more so in rural India. But still I'm fortunate in a society like the one i'm living in that I have choices. I've got the means to move up the social order because I am highly skilled, my firm has invested in me to do further education, and I've got a decent job. Like a certain controversial political figure said, "By any means necessary" I'm going to move into the upper class. Because of the time and the opportunities I was given in life, I will never work in one of these "degrading jobs". I'm going to be a part of the elite in society. And I'm grateful for these choices that I have.

Peace Out,

DJ Ho.

p.s. is that tabloid material?