Wall of Shame!-a poem

By Chinnaa


My dear world citizen,

We have heard about walls separating nations; But in India we

witnessed a wall dividing two different castes, the Indian

version of Apartheid.


They belong to India as its citizens, reside in Tamil Nadu as

Tamilians, they share common culture in terms of their food,

costume, language and geography.

But they are divided into non-dalits or casteists or purists, and

dalits or outcastes or impurists.

What a strange thing!

They take pride in identifying themselves as Dravidians, a race of

high civilization and centuries- old.

But alas, they have lost somewhere in between as hierarchical

casteists!

They live in the information superhighway age, but their behaviour

and thoughts are primitive and stone-aged.

They will use Mobile phones but their casteist moorings are

immobile in nature.

What a Shame with what we have in our midst, a wall of Shame!


(These thoughts were written after a news report in Tamil Nadu

that a village in Madurai district. has a separating wall with live

electricity on it, that separates the uppercaste Pillaimars and the

lowercaste dalits. It is different story that after the media reports the

state government ordered the demolition)