For the first nineteen years of my life I hadn't any idea of the cultural and social fabric that made India. My primary schooling was at an IB school in Bangkok, and most of the kids around me were rich. The tuition fee paid here was nearly as much as what my dad made on his own, so he wouldn't have put me in that school if it weren't for the full funding we received from the Indian Government. So for the first four years of my education, I was around kids whose mums and dads were mostly stinking-rich. Like any other place on the globe, this place also had many Indians, and I remember having lunch at school with Indian kids most of the time.
When we were back in India, I got the first taste of what my class of society – the middle class – was like. Kids were brash and I got my first dose of bullying. There was more shouting, punching, running around and sweating – I learnt to swear, and we all found that cool. The standard of education was nothing compared to what I had experienced earlier, and that hit me the most. I can almost say that my early impressions helped me understand the intellectual differences across sections and classes of society. I knew them well, and over the years my natural inclinations led me towards better education and the more refined. All through these years in India, I lived in the capital and it goes without saying that I rarely came across people from rural or economically disadvantaged backgrounds.
I'm in college now, in a campus where there are people from economically and socially diametric strata of society – rich, poor; sons of cobblers and domestic workers, sons of diplomats, doctors, and engineers. Our campus has students who are a subset of India's brightest minds, and even in such an intellectually charged Diaspora one can easily spot the tendency to cluster based on region/caste/language. A closer look indicates clustering based on socio-economic status too.
Article comments
1 - prabhat singh
Its been miracle that our country is able to hold its substantial amount of diversity intact,even after 60 years of independence.but regionalism spruce up its evil face now and then.
2 - Anirudh Jayaraman
I am getting your point, Prabhat. I wouldn't call it a miracle, though...perhaps a strained one
3 - mohit
yeah, it tends to bother sometimes, but i guess we now have become habitual of it.
4 - ADDY
I guess rather than speculating on our unity its better if we try to strengthen it. We being the younger generation should take the reins from our forefathers and built the India which is true unity in diversity...
Not taking nethng away from ur post anirudh, well written..:).
5 - misha
i don't think truly there still lies any importance for the quote unity in diversity as works of disunity can be seen in political field itselr