'It is time to unveil a few truths about a person [Gandhi] whose doctrine of nonviolence was based on the acceptance of the most brutal social hierarchy ever known, the caste system...
What do we do with this structure of moral righteousness that rests so comfortably on a foundation of utterly brutal, institutionalised injustice?
---A. Roy.
The full essay can be found here
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It always amuses you how some people-a certain class of people- in 'the west' will harp on about the mystical east, sufism, the shunning of materialism in favour of some deep and timeless spiritual truths which 'the east' supposedly preserves in its pristine form.
No-one wants to talk about the vast inequalities and striking injustices in 'the east'. Nothing as crude as 'class' should ever be mentioned. We're in the higher realms of the spirit here..please don't disturb us, and pass me my thin latte with cinnamon!
Perhaps there is something in human nature that results in us wanting to draw lines all the time-the damned and the saved, the pure and the impure, the believers and the unbelievers. "Slide over here, you're one of my kind". But if one must talk of human nature then, equally, there is something that will always push us to resist the drawing of these lines and incline us to seeing them as man-made constructs with the sole purpose of establishing or perpetuating the structure of dominance.
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