How much longer for change?

Balvinder 

AN otherwise gentle and kind woman, born to a family of devout Sikhs, my mother would always make me bathe and change my clothes whenever she found me, as a child, playing with Lachoo, a safai karamchari’s son and my lone friend in our locality. She would ask me to desist from playing with ‘untouchables’. My hard-core vegetarian mother had also kept separate utensils, never to be touched by her, for my father to cook meat.  

At that point, over 60 years ago, I could not decipher the reasons behind her behaviour. However, I could see that she was not a loner who nurtured such disdain. Most others acted the same way. 

Have things changed? Though the ugly scars of untouchability stand legally removed, they are yet to be erased from our antiquated psyche. Certain practices still prevail in many Indian homes even today, which promote ‘untouchability’. A majority of us still keep separate utensils for our maids and maalis. 

The other day while answering employment-related questions during a recent television channel interview, PM Modi asked: ‘If a man selling pakoras outside the channel’s office takes home Rs 200 at the end of the day, is it not employment?’

I am not a Modi fan, however, this time he was not wrong in his assertion. Still, he was trolled on social media for the pakora selling comment. As if the low-paying job of a pakora seller needs to be disgraced.

Perhaps it is so because our centuries-old social structure is based on a job-specific hierarchical caste system, as enumerated in Manusmriti. This long-forgotten ancient text was revived and followed by the British to formulate the Hindu law, and congealed our mindset. 

It is painful to see in the media well-dressed unemployed youngsters protesting against the scarce job opportunities by posing as shoe-shine boys. Why is the job of a shoe-shine boy not respected like any other job? 

Currently, every political party is shouting at its highest pitch that during the past three years of Modi’s ‘misrule’, the Indian job market has shrunk considerably. However, no one talks of removing job-related biases in our society which are responsible, to quite an extent, for joblessness. Most Indians, in other developed nations, do those very jobs rather successfully which they term as ‘menial’ here.

Eyebrows are raised whenever I tell someone that my London-based journalist daughter’s husband is a house-husband and takes care of the strenuous but ‘unpaid’ household job. She once told me that the husband of one of her friends, who is the CEO of a large company, was a butcher, and no one bothered there! 

I wish we could also end our biases of jobs that are menial, lowly or even plum, stuck to our psyche.