Touch me not

?(Thoughts and opinions written below are purely my own individual ones and do not at all represent my employer’s)

?

When I was growing up in a small town named Titilagarh in Western Orissa ( Now named Odisha), India, in the 80s, there was a unique experience which has been deeply seared into my memory.

It was a rural area. My family has farming land in our village, in which we used to employ workers to help with ?farming. Sometimes some of the workers would come to our home, to visit my grandma, to either pay respect or to borrow money from her etc, as they considered her their saviors along with being employer as she would take care of them through their thick & thin. And from all the visiting workers, for only some workers, when they would visit, she would warn us to not go near them so that they or us don’t ?end up making any physical contact. She would insist we stay at least a meter away from them.

As a 5/6 year old child. I would be puzzled by that insistence.

Why should we not go near some human beings in the fear of accidentally touching them while we didn’t have to worry about that for anyoneelse !!

When I would broach this topic with her, she would just tell me that they are Kandh people ( One class of tribe of in Western Orissa) and you shouldn’t touch them. And when I would get more curious about this and ask her Why ?we shouldn’t touch them, she would just tell me they are Achhoots (untouchables) ), to which the brain of the 6 year old me would not know how to comprehend that concept at all.

Now, just to be fair to her, my grandmother wasn’t all evil. She adored me and I loved her. She used to tell me I was the best (which all grandmothers do to their grandchildren ??) and that used to give me inexplicable amount of confidence about who I was and what I could do in life. And that blind confidence stayed with me throughout my life.

But this world view, of looking at some people through the lens of whether they were worthy of being even accidentally touched or not, was beyond my?comprehension.

Meanwhile, I grew up, went about my elementary, high school, undergrad, post grad college and I never came face to face with this phenomenon ( while it very much existed around me as it does till date )

The closest I came to this topic, was with a tainted lens of ?negatively looking at what we knew as the ‘SC/ST’ community. In fact, if anything I, along with a lot of my contemporaries, were brought up with a healthy dose of disdain towards this community as they were supposedly taking away opportunities from us the rest of non ‘SC/ST’ people without merit.

The next time I confronted the issue of minorities was when I found myself on the other side of my previous life experience, when I moved to the US and started living in los Angeles, California.

In India, I was from the dominant– ‘Brahmin’ Caste. I worked my way through my whole education and employment not fully realizing the hidden benefits and the privileges of being born into an upper middle class Brahmin family – Being born to financial security, access to education, social equity, contacts/network across all sections of society, you name it.

As I moved to the US even with a high paying leadership role, working for an iconic employer like Disney, living in Los Angeles, one of the most diverse cities in the united states, I came face to face with the life of a minority. Suddenly I was the brown guy with a funny accent and a weird name who was starting their life in the US. I would get a curious look when folks asked me my name and I would respond – Subhasis, then I would go try to describe all kinds of possible ways of making my name stick. And that was merely just trying to get my name across. While I didn’t face any systemic racial discrimination thanks to all the factors I listed above, through thousands of micro exclusions, I became acutely aware of the existential disadvantages of a minority’s life in a society through my own personal lens. Also being in human resources in corporate America, I had to tackle the subject of diversity in my workplace which gave me a firsthand exposure to the historical journey of diverse, underrepresented communities like the Black, Latin, Asian communities and the efforts across the US both at a government as well as private sector level to try and lift up the underrepresented communities. The under-representation and the racial divides may be far from being resolved in the US but I was struck by the conscious efforts at all levels of the society to have difficult conversations, do the difficult work. (One of the most memorable moments of my learning about the American diversity journey was exactly in a few months of my move to the US, Barack Obama was elected as the first black president of the US. The euphoria, the emotions and the significance of that moment has been etched in my memory forever)

And then we moved to back to India about 7 years back.

And again I went back from being a south asian minority in the US to a dominant caste senior corporate leader in India. I was back to my privileges. But I couldn’t NOT see all possible facets of minorities in India after returning - Gender, religion, regional differences, caste, sexuality, you name them. And that’s because I saw myself as one of them. I could tap into their challenges, their life experiences from my own struggles and experiences in the US.

And meanwhile I also took on Diversity as an area of work for myself within Talent Acquisition.I took on international Diversity leadership roles in recruiting and tried to learn and get involved in understanding this space more & more.

And as I do that, out of all the tough stories of minorities and under-represented communities in India, one thing that continues to tug at me the hardest is that till date in most parts of this incredibly diverse, ?thousands of year old civilization(sometimes called the cradle of humanity ), there are my own country men and women who are not even worthy of being touched, as by merely even accidentally being touched, somehow the others will get polluted.

And the structure and the framework that has created this abject discrimination is Casteism.

Casteism is the racism of India. Or actually Racism was borrowed from the Caste playbook ( as so lucidly explained by Isabel Wilkerson in her American classic book Caste). It’s the elephant in the room, it’s the unspoken rulebook that determines most of what happens in this country (of course unadmitted by most of us, me included).

I am a product of the privileges of my caste. as I have explained at the outset. I went to the school I did, to the college I did, to the respect I got and the inclusion I had everywhere, to the network I could tap into for growing in my career, to the friends I made and to meeting my future wife is all a gift of my caste. Make me a Subhasis Kandh instead of Subhasis Mishra, and my life journey could look nothing like what I have had, for me, the same human being.

Hence now as we conclude celebrating ‘Dalit History Month’ April in India and around the world, I am being tugged by a singular dominant thought.

How do we ‘see’ 240 Million of our Dalit (Untouchable) brothers and sisters in our own country.

Unlike Race, caste is invisible. I can’t recognize a fellow Dalit Indian by seeing them. While the Government of India and the states have done their part in allocating reservations for the SC/ST (Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe) communities of India, but we all know, by no means, it’s anywhere near what needs to be done.

In the private sector, there is no mechanism to identify, measure or track representation of Dalit communities.

So generations after generations, ?in their very own country, men, women and children, ?which are not a small section of our population, by any means - 17% of the 1.4 Billion population of India, ?continue to be subject to lack of access to education, opportunities and economic participation, not only that, but even worse, subject to systemic discrimination, exclusion, hostilities and horrific crime, while ‘India’ rises in its economic might, the middle class gloats in the new found generational success, Indian talent shines in the global stage, India’s soft power transcends borders, but in our very own backyard, there are Dalits whose kids continue to be scavengers because of their caste, continue to be cast away because they are untouchable.

Now, I am no messiah for the upliftment of this entire community of people, nor am I starting a movement, but I have taken a pledge for my own self – which is to learn more, to ‘see’ more, to understand more, the journey and the experience of our Dalit brothers and sisters.

I need a help from anyone who is reading this – if you are from the Dalit community, and or know of anyone from that community who is on this platform, I would love to know your journey, your story, your experience. It will be a gift which I will truly cherish, honor and then hopefully apply in action. Because I believe that the darkness of ignorance will go away from the light of learning and knowledge, and knowledge is the cradle of change. So please inbox me and I would reach out to you. Similarly, if any of you would like to share your knowledge of any work being done in upliftment of the Dalit community, I would love to learn from you.

Meanwhile, my grand ma has passed away long since. Her memories live inside me, her constant encouragement to me as ‘You are the best there can be’ continues to fuel me to be the best I can be.

But I have made one change in my life from her teachings.

Now when I go back to my home town, I have taken that strict admonishment she had for all of us kids ‘Don’t touch them!’ , which still rings loud in my ears, out of my sight and my mind.

I make sure to go to the homes of my farm workers ( some of them Dalit) , I eat with them, I listen to them and nothing is more peaceful then having a simple meal in the cool floors of the mud huts, lovingly cooked by and generously served by a fellow human being.