ECLIPSE

Today we saw a partial lunar eclipse and were again reminded about how small and fragile we are in this big vast universe. The beauty and the vastness of the universe amazes me.

The Eclipse brought back memory from my childhood, a memory that I did know I had. I was 9 or 10 years old when we in India experienced a full solar eclipse, the year must be 1994 and I was told not to go to school the next day and I was excited about it. The day began with me getting out of the bed, rolling my bed and rushing to the bathroom, but I was told not to touch anything.

All the furniture in our house was moved to a corner and we were asked to sit on a "chatai" and pray, my dad, mom, grandmom were all there, me and my sister joined the gang and we started reciting everything we were thought. 

We prayed and prayed, my grandmom was most worried and shocked, we joined the worried stage and started praying aloud so God can hear us. We forgot to ask what is that we are scared of, we were just so damn scared.

It all came to an end in few hours and we could hear commotion outside our house, I ran to the window to take a look (Now this is the memory I had today), there were beggars, around thousand beggars on the street asking for food, clothes, water. This was the first time in my life I had seen so helpless and timid people, they were simply not the regular beggars we used to encounter in India.

I saw people throwing clothes at them, from their window of-course, all my neighbors, every one started throwing clothes at them and they collected it all, but no one stepped out. something was out there which could have harmed but surprisingly did nothing to these beggars.

After some time people stepped out, it was a festive mode, people started offering food to these beggars, all the left over food, my mom started washing our house, literally washing, like with a hose-pipe. I could not understand what was happening but was busy celebrating our survival over something and I took all the credit for praying and saving us all from this unknown danger of the Eclipse.

I understood all these many years later when I was studying in junior college in Nashik. What we did back then, in our innocence and misguided fear was the worst form of caste based discrimination in Indian history. The beggars were "dalits" or the lowest in the caste system created by hindu religion, we being upper caste were not supposed to go out of the house as Eclipse (grihan in hindi) pollutes everything, and these "dalits" are supposed to roam, eat, wear clothes that are deemed polluted by the rest of the castes (rest of the country). Our celebration of giving clothes and food was our way of pushing them further down caste ladder, making them feel insignificant and worthless and their fault is they being born into it.

Today those memories came back gushing, I feel bad for the people born in that era, generations together of these "dalits" had to suffer a lot of said/unsaid humiliation by people who were unaware of what they were doing.

Today the caste system is not there, The stigma still prevails, I am happy that in my city nor the village I used to live in do this any more. These and many more such customs have deprived dalits in India of the basic human rights they should have been born with. 

Today we all speak about caste based reservations in government jobs, universities, schools for dalits,  many are also angry on why are these "dalits" getting preferential treatment, I would say its necessary, Its necessary for few decades to make up for mistakes done for centuries together.