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One 1990s evening during the Durga Puja festival in the Campus of IIT KGP my wife and I were dressed to kill to visit the Puja Pandal to 'see' and to 'be seen'. My son was already out with his Bengali friends whose main attraction were the food stalls...among other things.
A young upcountry family friend of 10, born and brought up in the KGP Campus, rang our bell and entered for a chitchat. And this is how the dialogue went between she and me:
ME: Puja Pandal nahi ja rahe ho beti? (Not going to the Puja Pandal, dear?)
SHE: Abhi nahi, baad me (Not now, later)
ME: Deri kyon? (Why the delay?)
SHE: Durga Puja hamarey festival thodi hai (Durga Puja is hardly our festival)
ME: Tho, kinke hai? (Then whose is it?)
SHE: Bengali logonke hai (It is these Bengalis')
ME: Aaap ke festival konsa hai? (Which is your festival?)
SHE: Diwali (Diwali)
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I was vastly amused. And recalled my own childhood brain-washes.
My mom (90) was, is, and will forever be a staunch exponent of 'untouchability' in her own household...I mean between she and her kids. After she rushed through all the horrendous chores of her household like bathing, dressing, and coffeeing her half a dozen kids, and finishing cooking for all of us before 10 AM to pack us off to school, she would herself bathe and get dressed in a Pure Cotton Sari, pre-washed, and dried on a wooden pole so high in her kitchen we could never touch and pollute it; and she would enter her tiny Puja Room for her ten-minute prayers and ceremonial offering of the cooked food to her gods and goddesses.
If by chance one of us happened to touch her during her ten-minute ritual, that kid had it in juicy oaths. For, she had to again take bath and change herself into another stepney 'Pure' Sari downloaded from a parallel pole and restart her prayers from 'Love All'. And of course, she would never allow any non-brahmin to enter her kitchen or even watch us eat...that would be intolerable pollution.
And even in our brahmins there are subcastes and sub-sub-castes. In our seaside Village, Muthukur, (like in every AP village 70 years ago), there was a Brahmin Street (Agrahaaram). We couldn't get a house on rent there and we were living among non-brahmins in the Main Road rather unhappily for my mom. But all my friends were gathering every evening in the broad Brahmin Street for our outdoor play and us kids never bothered who was which caste. And when we got thirsty midway, all of us trooped into our Telugu Pundit's choultry-home where a pot of water was kept specially for us outside their house. This is because our Telugu Pundit contributed all of 6 sons for play...Viswanatham being my classmate among his sons.
But one day, all my friends happened to gather in front of my house for play and we were all tired and everyone entered our front-yard and I fetched one glass of water each in turns. All of them slaked their thirst and we resumed our play. But I found Viswanatham nowhere in sight for ten good minutes, after which he ran in and joined us. I asked him where he vanished and he said he went home for drinking water. I kept quiet. After all of us dispersed, I had this dialogue with my mom:
ME: Why did Vishwanatham not drink water in our house? Are we not Brahmins?
SHE: We ARE Brahmins but Dravidas. They are Niyogi Brahmins.
ME: So what?
SHE: Niyogis consider themselves Uppercrust Brahmins. But don't worry...we are superior to Madhwa Brahmins.
For the first and last time I wished I were born in a Niyogi household.
Much later I married a Madhwa Doctor, whose family looked down on us since we were lowly Dravidas...they were jealous of Vaishnavas...who were jealous of Saraswats...who were jealous of...
My 40 years in Bengal washed away my Brahminism (casteism to be replaced by provincialism...my Bengali Brahmin friend was never forgiven for marrying an Oriya Brahmin girl).
Back in AP after all those decades, I feel like a Bat who is neither here nor there since I forgot all caste rules and they intensified them. The day after my sweet wife was cremated, my son, his F-i-L (born and brought up and lived in AP all of his sixty years) and I traveled to meet the Lion Pundit of Hyderabad for the rest of the 13-Day rituals. He is called Lion because he ministers to the umpteen religious needs of Ministers and asked for and got a Mahindra Bolero SUV as a gift from one of them.
The Lion asked us to meet him standing outside his chauffeur-driven Bolero in the Parking Lot of the Necklace Road (spelled Neckless Road by Tea Stall Vendors). As we got out of my son's poor owner-driven Tata Indigo, my son's F-i-L introduced me to the Lion as the husband of the deceased. I switched on my disarming smile (ask Indra!) and advanced a step and proffered my hand graciously. The Lion switched on his million-dollar smile, but retracted a step and did a Namaste folding his two hands and spurning mine. And my son's F-i-L explained to me that my son and I are under a 12-day Pollution Period.
Sigh!
None of us is to be blamed...from the moment we take on this body till the moment we leave it (for another?), we are subject to its limitations. While here, our whole world gets split into two clean mutually orthogonal sets labeled the 'Seer' and the 'Seen'. According to Adi Shankara, the Seer in each of us is nothing but the One non-dual cosmic consciousness while the Seen is but an illusory Passing Show:
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One 1990s evening during the Durga Puja festival in the Campus of IIT KGP my wife and I were dressed to kill to visit the Puja Pandal to 'see' and to 'be seen'. My son was already out with his Bengali friends whose main attraction were the food stalls...among other things.
A young upcountry family friend of 10, born and brought up in the KGP Campus, rang our bell and entered for a chitchat. And this is how the dialogue went between she and me:
ME: Puja Pandal nahi ja rahe ho beti? (Not going to the Puja Pandal, dear?)
SHE: Abhi nahi, baad me (Not now, later)
ME: Deri kyon? (Why the delay?)
SHE: Durga Puja hamarey festival thodi hai (Durga Puja is hardly our festival)
ME: Tho, kinke hai? (Then whose is it?)
SHE: Bengali logonke hai (It is these Bengalis')
ME: Aaap ke festival konsa hai? (Which is your festival?)
SHE: Diwali (Diwali)
********************************************************************************************************
I was vastly amused. And recalled my own childhood brain-washes.
My mom (90) was, is, and will forever be a staunch exponent of 'untouchability' in her own household...I mean between she and her kids. After she rushed through all the horrendous chores of her household like bathing, dressing, and coffeeing her half a dozen kids, and finishing cooking for all of us before 10 AM to pack us off to school, she would herself bathe and get dressed in a Pure Cotton Sari, pre-washed, and dried on a wooden pole so high in her kitchen we could never touch and pollute it; and she would enter her tiny Puja Room for her ten-minute prayers and ceremonial offering of the cooked food to her gods and goddesses.
If by chance one of us happened to touch her during her ten-minute ritual, that kid had it in juicy oaths. For, she had to again take bath and change herself into another stepney 'Pure' Sari downloaded from a parallel pole and restart her prayers from 'Love All'. And of course, she would never allow any non-brahmin to enter her kitchen or even watch us eat...that would be intolerable pollution.
And even in our brahmins there are subcastes and sub-sub-castes. In our seaside Village, Muthukur, (like in every AP village 70 years ago), there was a Brahmin Street (Agrahaaram). We couldn't get a house on rent there and we were living among non-brahmins in the Main Road rather unhappily for my mom. But all my friends were gathering every evening in the broad Brahmin Street for our outdoor play and us kids never bothered who was which caste. And when we got thirsty midway, all of us trooped into our Telugu Pundit's choultry-home where a pot of water was kept specially for us outside their house. This is because our Telugu Pundit contributed all of 6 sons for play...Viswanatham being my classmate among his sons.
But one day, all my friends happened to gather in front of my house for play and we were all tired and everyone entered our front-yard and I fetched one glass of water each in turns. All of them slaked their thirst and we resumed our play. But I found Viswanatham nowhere in sight for ten good minutes, after which he ran in and joined us. I asked him where he vanished and he said he went home for drinking water. I kept quiet. After all of us dispersed, I had this dialogue with my mom:
ME: Why did Vishwanatham not drink water in our house? Are we not Brahmins?
SHE: We ARE Brahmins but Dravidas. They are Niyogi Brahmins.
ME: So what?
SHE: Niyogis consider themselves Uppercrust Brahmins. But don't worry...we are superior to Madhwa Brahmins.
For the first and last time I wished I were born in a Niyogi household.
Much later I married a Madhwa Doctor, whose family looked down on us since we were lowly Dravidas...they were jealous of Vaishnavas...who were jealous of Saraswats...who were jealous of...
My 40 years in Bengal washed away my Brahminism (casteism to be replaced by provincialism...my Bengali Brahmin friend was never forgiven for marrying an Oriya Brahmin girl).
Back in AP after all those decades, I feel like a Bat who is neither here nor there since I forgot all caste rules and they intensified them. The day after my sweet wife was cremated, my son, his F-i-L (born and brought up and lived in AP all of his sixty years) and I traveled to meet the Lion Pundit of Hyderabad for the rest of the 13-Day rituals. He is called Lion because he ministers to the umpteen religious needs of Ministers and asked for and got a Mahindra Bolero SUV as a gift from one of them.
The Lion asked us to meet him standing outside his chauffeur-driven Bolero in the Parking Lot of the Necklace Road (spelled Neckless Road by Tea Stall Vendors). As we got out of my son's poor owner-driven Tata Indigo, my son's F-i-L introduced me to the Lion as the husband of the deceased. I switched on my disarming smile (ask Indra!) and advanced a step and proffered my hand graciously. The Lion switched on his million-dollar smile, but retracted a step and did a Namaste folding his two hands and spurning mine. And my son's F-i-L explained to me that my son and I are under a 12-day Pollution Period.
Sigh!
None of us is to be blamed...from the moment we take on this body till the moment we leave it (for another?), we are subject to its limitations. While here, our whole world gets split into two clean mutually orthogonal sets labeled the 'Seer' and the 'Seen'. According to Adi Shankara, the Seer in each of us is nothing but the One non-dual cosmic consciousness while the Seen is but an illusory Passing Show:
Drik drishyau dwau padarthauh
Tah paraspara vilakshanau
Drik Brahma Drishya Maya
Iti vedanta dindimah
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