Wit Wisdom and Whoop

I guess my parents brought me up wrong.  I can’t for the life of me recognise or differentiate between an Iyer or Iyengar, a SC or ST, a Dalit or whatever.  Life has indeed given me opportunity to learn and I have, but in a very limited way.  I can recognise a Sikh because of his turban or a Marwari after he has bested me in a business deal. Sometimes the Banerjee or Chaterjee tells me they are from Bengal. Give me a Rao and I am lost since I have no idea if he is from Karnataka or Andhra.  What the hell, till he filed his nomination at Varanasi and BJP went to town talking of how Modi is a OBC I never knew that. Always thought he was one of those rich Marwaris like Lalit Modi or Russi Modi till someone whacked me on the head and said that Russi Modi was a Parsi.   In that sense I am intellectually challenged or should I say religiously caste challenged.  A lifetime in sales has given me the opportunity to better deal and understand people dependin...

In the recent past there has been a huge uproar over the suicide of a young scholar Rohith  Vemula.  This is not about his suicide or the events that have followed. It is about my thoughts on the caste system we have. For centuries India has had a caste system. Religion has intermingled and made a concoction that is difficult to unravel.  For decades the British used the divide and rule strategy so effectively that we even had cricket matches “Hindus v/s Muslims” and none in the country felt like protesting. No, this was not in some past forgotten stone age, it was as recently as in  1946 meaning just 70 years ago when the heroes of our freedom movement Gandhiji, Nehru, Patel were all in their leadership positions.  It grew to encompass Christians, Buddhists etc as others.  For more on these cricket matches read here.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombay_Quadrangular These matches came to a halt in 1946 not because someone found it obnox...