by blogadmin | Feb 8, 2021 | Blog Post, Delaware, Media Publishing's, Year 2021
Wasn’t the worst supposed to be behind us when 2020 finally slithered out the door? Apparently not for those us living in America. A revitalised pandemic, a slow and inefficient Covid-19 vaccination process and contested elections greeted the New Year. And then came January 6, 2021 and the assault on Capitol Hill. Will that be the end, the worst that will happen? I don’t know anyone who has the answer because this inglorious act may be an old and outdated mishap between my writing about it and you reading it. Donald Trump has only days left in his presidency, but in America we have learned that days can seem like weeks when he gets busy.
Capitol Hill hosts both the United States (US) House of Representatives and the US Senate. That day, when the elected tenants of both of these temples of democracy were going about their most vital work – affirming the collective will of Americans to choose their president and the vice president – pro-Trump thugs and hooligans, in a brazen act of domestic terrorism, stormed the building in an attempted coup. Both chambers were evacuated and the ongoing voting was suspended.
Encouraged by the president himself and his sycophants, this growling, overwhelmingly Caucasian mob assaulted a suspiciously understaffed Capitol Police force, vandalised offices and rushed through the edifice of our democracy at will. Some carried weapons, pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails. Five people died. The mob smashed windows, broke doors, stole or tore up important documents while looting elected members’ offices and occupying their chairs. They desecrated the hallowed halls of our venerable legislative institutions.
Many observers have pointed to the lack of law enforcement presence when peaceful participants in the June Black Lives Matter march were barricaded, tear-gassed and arrested by the large police force. Many, including incoming President Joe Biden, correctly assert that had the insurrectionists been people of colour, the law enforcement response would have sadly been very different.
Trump’s inept and weak attempt at contrition after the smoke cleared rang hollow and was an obvious attempt to quiet the swelling calls for his resignation, impeachment, or forced removal from office.
The American dream?
While the world watched this chaos in a country that has long been considered a mecca of progress and innovation, one that has been preaching to the world for decades about democracy and the rule of law, I slumped in a chair, shocked.
My numbed mind rippled across the oceans to Punjab in India, where I was born and raised. I recalled the America I knew from the movies, the printed word, and talk of those Indians who had become Americans or whose relatives were in America before March 6, 1999, when I first landed here as an employee of a software company.
America had all that I had ever imagined and wanted in a country: power (I don’t mean 24-hour electricity) and strength on a global level; initiative and resources that made it a world leader in almost every sphere; a pathway to success. It wasn’t called the Land of Opportunity for nothing.
It had a democracy in the real sense that was better than the washed and ironed version of the one practiced in India’s parliament; or on the Indian roads by its traffic police. It had law and order that was visible and not just confined to selectively enforced rule books. It had Apple, IBM, HP, Compaq, Motorola, Microsoft, Oracle, Yahoo, Intel, and the others I had read and heard about during my computer science engineering days.
The relative ease of starting and running a business as an entrepreneur energised my dreams after my arrival here. It seemed the country had an impeccable system for everything that worked smoothly and efficiently. Only a couple of things kept it from being perfect: Punjabi wasn’t its national language; rotis and naans were not part of its national diet; and baseball was too different from our south Asian cricket.
I had never bought or owned anything with wheels in India. A few months after arriving here, I had a Honda Accord, followed by other vehicles. I successfully started multiple software companies here, one after the other. My wife and I bought a home on an acre of land. We went on vacations with our daughter and son to almost every part of the world, and we even visited Pakistan during Guru Nanak’s 550th birthday anniversary celebration.
But when people I know in India, Pakistan, Europe, or elsewhere asked me in 2016 how Donald Trump got elected, I had no answer. What I did know was that I would do my best not to let it happen again. I never worked for a political cause with such energy and passion as I did before the November 2020 election. I made 300-plus calls a day to Sikhs and South Asians across the country, wrote cards, raised and contributed money, and digitally defended Democrats and Joe Biden supporters in cyberspace against Trump followers and Republicans trolls.
Why Trump?
It was apparent to me and many other Americans that Trump was not only unfit to lead the country but that he posed a real danger to our democracy. His legislative assaults, incendiary tweets, constitutional brinkmanship, cruel immigration policies, and abuse of power were the hallmarks of his leadership.
In the Republican Party under Trump, these routine and systematic atrocities numbed tens of millions of Americans, gradually desensitising them with their frequency and intensity. He had somehow managed to transform the party into a cult.
One friend, an artist and writer, reminded me: “Trump’s niece wrote a book about him, having little or nothing kind to say, and her final statement was to the effect that before he left, he would burn the house down. Well, maybe he just got others to do it for him.”
Another friend, a Delaware state senator, Bryan Townsend, offered this assessment: “The sight of an angry mob violently storming the U.S. Capitol and occupying the chambers and offices was surreal, in some ways unthinkable. There is no doubt, President Trump stoked the anger and violence; the question now is, how does a President Biden and our political leaders more broadly best advance the agenda Americans so desperately deserve and need without fueling that fire? Thankfully, a transition of power is just days away. We soon will see real leadership in the White House and, hopefully, a coalescing of the American people.”
A New Year, a new way
Is America past its zenith? We will see. I wish and pray for fellow Delawarean Joe Biden’s success, a great leader and man of integrity, who said, “The words of a president matter. At their best, they can inspire; at their worst they can incite.” We hope that he will be able to arrest America’s descent. So, is 2020 really over? For me, the New Year will begin at noon on January 20th.
—————
This column was published online by the https://tribune.com.pk/ on January 09, 2021.
by blogadmin | Nov 5, 2020 | Blog Post, Delaware, DSAC, Media Publishing's, Sikhism, Year 2020
Twenty-one years ago, when I came to America from India, I was amazed by its opportunities. Wasting no time, I started a software company that will celebrate its 22nd birthday next May. Doing business in the country was more straightforward, and accessibility to various institutions was much more comfortable than in India. However, when it came to how our president is elected, I still can’t say I have all the answers.
After a few years here, I realized that not everything between the two countries is different. Both are democracies, of course. More remarkable to me has been how America resembles India in look and spirit during their respective year-end holiday seasons. Homes, offices and markets in both countries are lit up during this period because of the different festivals and traditions each country celebrates.
For Halloween, Thanksgiving, Hannukah, Christmas and New Year’s Eve here during these weeks, India has Dussehra, Diwali, Bandi Chhor Diwas, Guru Nanak’s birth anniversary, Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Diwali is the greatest of them and celebrated nationally in October or November as per the dictates of the lunar calendar. It is celebrated on the same scale as Christmas in America and other Western countries.
Diwali is also called the “festival of lights,” and fireworks are an integral part of the celebration. Thanks to last year’s efforts and the initiative of Jay Muthukamatchi, it became possible for the first time in Delaware to buy and sell fireworks 30 days before every Diwali.
Halloween reminds me of Lohri (a bonfire celebration), which falls in the middle of January. Looking at boys and girls in the neighborhood going from door to door asking, “Trick or treat?” I recall my Lohri days as a young boy going with a group of other boys to various houses on my home street and adjoining lanes asking for “Lohri!”
The grand Annakut celebration at the BAPS Swaminarayan Mandir (Temple) in New Castle. During the celebration, there is an offering of different kinds of goods to God, accompanied by prayer. Annakut is part of the five day Diwali, or “Festival of Lights,” which coincides with the Hindu New Year and is celebrated around the world by millions of Hindus, Sikhs and Jains.
Neighborhood folks gave us cooked groundnuts and traditional Lohri sweets made from jaggery. It was incumbent upon those neighborhood houses to be extra generous in giving where a son’s wedding had recently happened, or they had been blessed with a male child. The gender bias has since largely passed, but unfortunately some of it still lingers on.
I am a Sikh. In Thanksgiving, I see the personification of Sarbat Da Bhala (prosperity, well-being, and glory of the whole universe) spirit. Every Sikh prayer, no matter what occasion, day, time, and place, ends with these three words: Sarbat Da Bhala.
I, too, said these words with everyone else because I had seen my parents, siblings, relatives and other Sikhs do the same. But I understood its essence only after arriving here in America and experiencing Thanksgiving and learning its background. To me, native Indians had enacted and personified the Sarbat Da Bhala’s underlying meaning in the Sikh prayer.
This year, while I am happy to see lights on neighbors’ houses and front yards, I can also see apprehension in many of their faces about what this election and the days and weeks following it will bring. Maybe the lights are illuminating the darkness convulsing our hearts and minds ravaged by the soaring coronavirus numbers, historic unemployment, increasing pain and suffering of the poor and vulnerable, and divisions like never before among this country’s various communities.
Regardless of whether America retains Trump or sends our Delaware’s Joe Biden to the White House, I want and wish that there be a light for everyone in the embrace of hope and peace.
Delaware Air National Guard Adjutant General Carol Timmons (center left) speaks with Charanjeet Singh Minhas of the Delaware Sikh Awareness Coalition at a Thanksgiving prayer breakfast.
Fortunately, I know of many ordinary Delawareans doing extraordinary work toward that goal: veterans in the Interfaith Veterans Workshop group founded by Rev. Tom Davis; members in my writing group, Brandywine Writers Circle, founded and led by Joan Leof; and a host of others — pastors, imams, rabbis, Hindu and Sikh priests in Delaware — who are part of efforts to spread love and peace and defeat hatred and violence.
They are all — in their languages, in their traditions, in their own homes or their places of worship, in their own words and ways — praying for Sarbat Da Bhala.
by blogadmin | Oct 2, 2020 | Blog Post, Delaware, Media Publishing's, Year 2020
As many observers have noted, the human and economic toll from the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak is unprecedented in our lifetimes. The disease spares some and ravages others and will not stop until we find a solution in the form of a vaccine and effective treatments.
One of the first symptoms health professionals look for in a potentially COVID-infected patient is fever; the abnormal warming of the body tells us something is wrong.
There is an unsettling parallel in rising earth temperature, popularly referred to as “global warming.” Scientists, experts, and activists who know and care about climate change are aware of how seriously this planet is ailing. They predict its illness will grow in just a few years to cataclysmic and irreversible levels. The rest of us are ignoring its symptoms: increasing atmospheric temperatures, superstorms, droughts, tsunamis, floods, degraded soils, rising sea levels, and more. These symptoms tell us that the earth is sick and does not have much more time.
If the disease goes unchecked, it will metastasize into global conflict and human tragedy, which will cause even more environmental damage in a devastating cycle of destruction.
President Donald Trump speaks from the South Lawn of the White House on the fourth day of the Republican National Convention, Thursday, Aug. 27, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
I am a Sikh, and most of the world’s 28 million Sikhs live in India’s Punjab region, where I was born and raised. As in other parts of the world, water scarcity and distribution comprise an existential issue in this predominately agricultural state. Drought is a constant reality. In a sad irony, efforts to more effectively manage scarce water resources through more modern farming techniques and seed varieties have caused increased carbon emissions, which exacerbate global warming and lead to more drought in dry regions.
However, the crisis is not isolated to India. Man’s unbridled pursuit of convenience, wealth and territory, often fueled by misguided cultural and religious differences, have contributed to catastrophes around the world. Many of us have witnessed the evidence for ourselves.
Audience members watch from their cars as Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden, seen on a large monitor, speaks during a CNN town hall moderated by Anderson Cooper in Moosic, Pa., Thursday, Sept. 17, 2020. Carolyn Kaster, AP
My former teacher, Tilak Raj Arora, a climber, mountaineer and environmentalist from his high school days and currently working for YMCA in Halifax, Nova Scotia, told me that he remembers seeing the results of Saddam Hussein’s order to burn the Kuwaiti oil fields 30 years ago.
“I could see the soot from there on Himalayan glaciers,” he said. “It trapped the heat from the sun, causing melting.”
The scourge of natural resources exploitation and pollution is across countries and continents, including many I have visited. Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is highly vulnerable. In the past three decades, it has lost half its coral cover, pollution has caused outbreaks of destructive starfish populations, and global warming has produced horrific coral bleaching.
Even in Morocco, a relatively developed African country, the effects of overgrazing and desertification are visible. South American deforestation, along with landslides and urban development, threaten Machu Picchu in Peru. Intense rainfall, heatwaves, and receding Alpine glaciers illustrate Italy’s climate woes. Because of coastal erosion, Norfolk in the U.K. is sliding into the sea, and other towns like York, Leeds, and Somerset are experiencing frequent flooding. The escalating violent and devastating weather and climate-related events in our own country are familiar to us all.
The only hope for mitigating the injuries from our environmental virus is a firm, courageous, innovative, and scientifically grounded national commitment. That starts with leadership dedicated to prioritizing solutions.
“We’ve run out of time to build new things in old ways,” Rob Jackson of Stanford University told Justin Worland of Time magazine.
We have seen the current administration’s retrograde position on just about everything, including climate change. Look no further than the withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris Agreement to reduce greenhouse gases.
Many of us are praying for a new administration capable of healing our pandemic, economic, cultural and environmental illnesses. Some see Joe Biden’s selection of Kamala Harris for vice-president as a major step in that direction. As a presidential candidate, her climate plan put environmental justice front and center. This month, she and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced the Climate Equity Act in Congress. The act would set up a new Office of Climate and Environmental Justice Accountability within the Office of Management and Budget.
Unsurprisingly, women are in the forefront of these changes. Traditionally they are the healers, the ones we turn to when we are in pain, the ones we seek out for solutions, protection, and comfort.
As women continue to assume more positions of leadership, they may offer new points of view that can lead us back from the brink of irreparable disaster.
As my friend Arora said, women “suffer the most and worry the most about what this climate change will do to their homes and their children.”
Therefore, he asserts, “Only women can save us.”
—————
This column was published online by the https://www.delawareonline.com/ on September 18, 2020.
by blogadmin | Oct 2, 2020 | Blog Post, Delaware, Media Publishing's, Year 2020
As many observers have noted, the human and economic toll from the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak is unprecedented in our lifetimes. The disease spares some and ravages others and will not stop until we find a solution in the form of a vaccine and effective treatments.
One of the first symptoms health professionals look for in a potentially COVID-infected patient is fever; the body’s abnormal warming tells something is wrong.
There is an unsettling parallel in rising earth temperature, popularly referred to as “global warming.” Scientists, experts, and activists who know and care about climate change are aware of how seriously it is infected. They predict our planet’s infection to grow in just a few years to cataclysmic and irreversible levels. The rest of us are ignoring its symptoms: increasing atmospheric temperatures, superstorms, droughts, tsunamis, floods, degraded soils, rising sea levels, and more. They tell us that it is sick and does not have much more time.
If the disease goes unchecked, it will metastasize into global conflict and human tragedy, which will cause even more environmental damage in a devastating cycle of destruction.
Like many other parts of the world, plunging groundwater levels in Pakistan alongside unpredictable monsoon is an existential issue in the predominately agricultural state. Drought is a constant reality. In a sad irony, efforts to more effectively manage scarce water resources through more modern farming techniques and seed varieties have caused increased carbon emissions, which exacerbate global warming and lead to more drought in dry regions.
However, Pakistan alone is not facing this crisis. Man’s unbridled pursuit of convenience, wealth and territory, often fueled by misguided cultural and religious differences, have contributed to catastrophes around the world. Many of us have witnessed the evidence for ourselves.
My former high school teacher, Tilak Raj Arora, a climber, mountaineer and environmentalist from his high school days and currently working for YMCA in Halifax, Canada, told me that he remembers seeing the results of Saddam Hussein’s order to burn the Kuwaiti oil fields thirty years ago.
“I could see the soot from there on Himalayan glaciers,” he told me. “It trapped the heat from the sun, causing melting.”
The scourge of natural resources exploitation and pollution is across countries and continents, including many I have visited. Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is highly vulnerable. In the past three decades, it has lost half its coral cover, pollution has caused outbreaks of destructive starfish populations, and global warming has produced horrific coral bleaching.
Even in Morocco, a relatively developed African country, the effects of overgrazing and desertification are visible. South American deforestation, along with landslides and urban development, threaten Machu Picchu in Peru. Intense rainfall, heatwaves, and receding Alpine glaciers illustrate Italy’s climate woes. Because of coastal erosion, Norfolk in the U.K. is sliding into the sea, and other towns like York, Leeds, and Somerset are experiencing frequent flooding. The escalating violent and devastating weather and climate-related events here in America are well known.
The only hope for mitigating the injuries from our environmental virus is a firm, courageous, innovative, and scientifically grounded national commitment. That starts with leadership dedicated to prioritizing solutions.
“We have run out of time to build new things in old ways,” Rob Jackson of Stanford University told Justin Worland of Time magazine.
We have seen Trump’s retrograde position on just about everything, including climate change. Look no further than his withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris Agreement to reduce greenhouse gases.
Many of us are praying for a new administration capable of healing our pandemic, economic, cultural, and environmental illnesses. Some see Joe Biden’s selection of Kamala Harris for vice-president as a historic step in that direction. As a presidential candidate, her climate plan put the environmental justice front and center. This month, she and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced the Climate Equity Act in Congress. The act would set up a new Office of Climate and Environmental Justice Accountability within the Office of Management and Budget.
Unsurprisingly, women are in the forefront of these changes. Traditionally they are the healers, the ones we turn to when we are in pain, the ones we seek out for solutions, protection, and comfort.
As women continue to assume more positions of leadership, they may offer new points of view that can lead us back from the brink of irreparable disaster.
As Mr. Arora said, women “suffer the most and worry the most about what this climate change will do to their homes and children.”
Therefore, he asserts, “Only women can save us.”
—————
This column was published online by the https://nayadaur.tv/ on September 02, 2020.
by blogadmin | Jul 30, 2020 | Blog Post, DSAC, Media Publishing's, Year 2020
It was 1982. I was in my older cousin’s village in India’s Haryana state during my school’s summer holidays.
One morning, while my cousin was watering the paddy fields, which spread all around his tube-well — I saw him signaling a Dalit, or an “untouchable,” girl standing in the middle of the fields. She came over to us. Next, as if the two had been rehearsing this scene for a long time, both silently entered the bricked enclosure that sheltered the well.
“Keep looking…no one should come on this side…ten minutes,” he told me while folding the wooden planks of the room door shut.
I was old enough to know what happened in “ten minutes,” but did not understand the reasons behind the depraved sexual exploitation until much later. The fields, with or without crops, were — and still are in many Indian villages — the only open-air toilets in the places that lacked septic or sewage services. The tube-wells for most villagers were their single source of water and its tanks their most convenient destinations for washing laundry and large pots.
Landless lower castes, especially Dalits, submitted to the upper caste farmers’ exploitation in return for permission to use these facilities. How could they survive without the tube-well water and using the fields?
Just like that young city boy in the 1982 Indian village, I knew nothing about racism in America when I landed here twenty-one years ago. Even now, I struggle with the question, “What is your race?” asked on a form or an application. For Indians, it is easy to identify one’s caste simply because it is part of everyone’s name.
I had read that equality and liberty for all are guaranteed by the law, by the constitution, in America — it is securely lodged in the scripture of this great country. America’s economic and military muscle along with its international clout punished countries it accused of violating human rights. Upon arrival here, however, I learned that the same laws and the same constitution, when first written, failed to prevent one man from owning another. Black was the property of white. Legally. The owner could deed his or her possession to another like the title of a car.
Those who owned black people, stolen and kidnapped from Africa, included twelve American presidents, even the one who declared, “All men are created equal.”
In becoming a citizen of the U.S., I was shocked to learn all this but pushed it aside, ascribing it to a painful past not relevant in today’s America, one that lectures the whole world on human rights and values.
I learned differently on a Thursday in May of 2011, when two white guys and a girlfriend of one of them called me and my two friends “niggers” while we enjoyed a drink at a local establishment. For no reason.
When my friends went out to smoke, these three attacked them. The cops came and took us to the hospital because my friends needed stitches. The white judge gave the most violent of the trio only a six-month suspended sentence despite his long history of violence.
But I finally realized the ugly truth after watching and watching and watching George Floyd’s murder video. Derek Chauvin’s regally planted knee on George Floyd’s neck with his hand in the pocket was a proclamation that the white man is the undisputed master of the black man — a theatrical performance matching Ku Klux Klan (KKK) era public events. Bystanders’ pleas of mercy and “he can’t breathe” warnings gave the choker the high he needed to underscore his sense of superiority, impunity and entitlement.
Chauvin was aware he was being filmed and the whole world was watching him. In KKK tradition, the audience and the witnesses only made him more determined. He knew he had allies across America: The White House resident, Congress, judges, all Americans who elected Trump president for “taking America back” — as former KKK Grand Wizard, David Duke’s tweet proclaimed after Trump’s election and cabinet picks.
The only difference from the earlier KKK days was that Chauvin no longer needed to cover his face.
During their 200-year rule of India, the English abolished Sati — the self-immolation of the widow on the funeral pyre of her husband — quickly and resolutely but left caste cruelties intact.
They are natural allies, racism and casteism. They share so much in common.
Last year my wife was at her friend’s son’s birthday party in a local county park. The birthday boy’s older sibling had invited his black girlfriend and her family to the venue. When they arrived, the host family prayed for the earth to crack open and swallow them. The boys’ grandmother told my wife, “I don’t know what sins I did that my grandson, so intelligent and capable, is showing us this day…I don’t know where to hide my face.”
This colorism is a deeply ingrained issue in India and among Indians globally. In Punjab the saying goes, “Never trust a black Brahmin.” So, even though colorism existed in India before the Europeans’ arrival, the imperialists’ conquests and rule permanently embedded white superiority in Indian minds.
Most Indians in America are upper caste, not necessarily Brahmins, the top caste, but non-Dalits. (In 2003, only 1.5 percent of Indian immigrants in the United States were Dalits or members of lower castes, according to the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania.) They view blacks as Dalits and adore whites as their role models and revere them more than their temple priests. They call whites “fair” no matter how unfair they are treated by them. They are their role models in life and look. That’s why Unilever’s “Fair and Lovely” whitening cream did $500 million of business in India in 2019.
Many South Asians have indiscriminately borrowed the white supremacist lexicon — blacks are inferior, dumb, dangerous, criminals, drug dealers and always on food stamps — and many refer to them as “habshi” — a derogatory Indian term for black people — in their interpersonal and communal conversations. An Urdu translation of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” I am presently reading uses the term in reference to blacks.
I was surprised and disappointed to see the Indian-American community’s apathy toward George Floyd’s killing in my boarding school and engineering college WhatsApp groups and during discussions with friends and colleagues. I was shocked to hear and read, “What’s wrong with police killing a criminal?”
The millennia-long caste apartheid has made upper-caste Indians insensitive to discrimination. Years in college have given them the skills to earn but no reason to learn basic human values. Here in America, they have no Dalit friends. Research and surveys by Equality Labs show it categorically. No wonder that the immutable attitudes and approaches ensure ongoing discrimination.
Do they differ, racism and casteism?
Like most things western, racism was planted with objectivity in mind, namely its perceived economic benefits. In contrast, India’s casteism was primarily perpetuated because of subjective sociological distinctions. It is impossible for the colored to escape racism because skin color can’t be changed or hidden. However, in India today it is possible, though difficult, to sneak out of the caste cage. Those with education or skills can shed the crushing weight of the caste pyramid by moving to big cities where caste is not as visible. Some stop using their last names or change them to avoid caste identification.
Racism’s foundation is materialistic — economic exploitation. Cravings for status and power built the labyrinths of casteism. But their benefits are not mutually exclusive.
The Indians who don’t oppose white racism in support of the Black Lives Matter movement don’t realize that a white supremacist America will hurt and kill their children and grandchildren in the years ahead because they are perceived as blacks. Remember that white supremacy by its very name devalues and vilifies any non-white culture. The racially motivated attacks on Jews, Muslims and Sikhs in this country are proof of that. So why the growing Indian community in this country don’t realize this truth? At first, their numbers were too small to invite the attention of racists. Take the case of H1B visas. How drastically the reaction and reception changed over the last 20–25 years?
Democratic institutions and technological advancements haven’t loosened the grips of racism and casteism as many had hoped and wished. It is interesting to note that virtually all of the most successful Indian executives in America are of the Brahmin caste. If the New World’s most successful companies’ ownership remains white, its top management is becoming increasingly Indian upper caste. Is it an accident that Indira Nooyi (former Pepsico CEO), Satya Nadella (Microsoft CEO), Sunder Pichai (Google and Alphabet CEO), Shantanu Narayen (Adobe CEO), and Arvind Krishna (IBM CEO) — are all Brahmins. Ajay Banga, the Mastercard CEO, is no Dalit. The list is long and growing.
There are many who use data to argue how one race or caste is superior, more capable than others. Is the comparison fair? Haven’t the centuries of deprivation and subjugation played an undermining role in blacks’ lives? Don’t better facilities and opportunities have an enabling role? If not, why has no Indian citizen won a Nobel Prize in science or economics since the country’s independence in 1947? Only Indians who migrated to the U.S. and U.K have: Har Gobind Khorana (Medicine), Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (Physics), Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (Chemistry), Amartya Sen (Economics), and Abhijit Banerjee (Economics).
The only Pakistani, and the first Muslim — ironically, Pakistan didn’t consider him Muslim because he was Ahmadi — to get a Nobel Prize was Mohammed Abdus Salam, but only after his immigration to the U.K. Even the aforementioned Indian CEOs accomplished their stellar successes only after arriving in the U.S.
The solutions to inequality are — as the old saying goes — simple but not easy. Whether a Dalit in a squalid Indian village or a black child in an American slum, only equal education and opportunity over time can improve their lives collectively. As long as those benefits are restricted to the wealthy and powerful and to those of a certain skin color, caste, racism and discrimination will thrive. The availability of a long-term stimulating environment determines how living species grow. Until we commit to providing that nurturing opportunity to all people, regardless of color or caste, we have no right to judge them in ways that are unfair, unethical, and inhumane.
—————
This column was published online by the https://medium.com/ on July 30, 2020.
by blogadmin | Jul 12, 2020 | Blog Post, Delaware, Media Publishing's, Year 2020
I am a Sikh born and raised in India. Twenty-one years ago, when I came to the US, I knew nothing about racism in this country. Even now, I struggle with the question, ‘What is your race?’ asked on a form or an application.
In India, I was aware of the mobs of one religion killing people of another faith, and, people of one caste discriminating against others. No such primitive and uncivilised stuff, I was told, happens in America — the world’s wealthiest and most advanced nation.
I was told that equality and liberty of everyone are guaranteed by the law, by the constitution here — it was securely lodged in the scripture of this great country. Upon arrival here, however, I learned that the same laws and the same constitution, when first written, had allowed one man to own another. Black was the property of white, legally. The owner could deed his or her possession to another like the title of a car. Those who owned black people, stolen and kidnapped from Africa, included 12 American Presidents, even the one who declared, ‘All men are created equal.’
In becoming a citizen of the US, I was shocked to learn all this, but pushed it aside, thinking it is a painful past not relevant in today’s America. I learned differently on a Thursday in the May of 2011, when two white men and a girlfriend of one of them called me and two of my friends ‘niggers’ — for no reason — while we were enjoying a drink at a local establishment. When my friends went out to smoke, these three attacked them. Cops came and took us to the hospital because my friends needed stitches. The white judge gave the most violent of the trio only a six-month suspended sentence, despite a long history of violence.
But I finally realised the ugly truth after watching again and again George Floyd’s murder video. Derek Chauvin’s regally planted knee on Floyd’s neck, with his hand in the pocket, was a declaration of superiority and impunity. He knew he had allies across America.
And just when I think things are changing — the dismantling of offensive statues across America, the removal of Confederate flags, the Black Lives Matter movement, the banning of choke-holds and knee-holds — the President of the United States posts a video of one his supporters chanting ‘white power’.
For someone who worked hard to escape a culture where discrimination is woven into the fabric of life, I realise now that I expected too much, too soon from my new country. But I remain hopeful. Despite their faults, and we all have them, its founding fathers built into the system a mechanism for change — voting.
If we can keep that process free from interference, both external and domestic, we still can keep moving toward a nation of ‘liberty and justice for all’. It is true of India, too.
—————
This column was published online by the https://www.tribuneindia.com/ on July 10, 2020.
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