Indian Instincts

write about our notion of dirt in India in the context of love because of our peculiar inability to embrace it. Our love for our fellow Indian citizens, or, for that matter, for humanity in general, is often carefully directed only towards those we do not consider ‘dirty’. In the past, status in India was prescriptive, a consequence of one’s birth. The lower castes were perceived as ‘dirty’. Today, status in India can be acquired by other means such as wealth, lifestyle and political power. But this has clearly not made people more egalitarian in their outlook. The definitions have just been reworked—of who the ‘dirty’ people’ are—and incorporated into society’s new pecking order.

Poor people, the homeless, homosexuals, even women, are apparently on the low end of society’s pecking order today. And by habit, we feel that these ‘dirty’ people are undeserving of love and compassion. These sections of our society, in turn, often make do with receiving less of these emotions. There is evidence from behavioural science and economics, the work of Mullainathan and Shafir, which shows that scarcity creates a psychological ability in everyone struggling to manage with less than they need.⁶

I found this trait to be linked to an evolutionary mechanism. We have a primordial ability to nurture and take care of those we do not consider ‘different’ from our own selves, and in that sense, consider part of our group. It is this instinct to protect one’s clan that has helped preserve several animal species, even humans. And so, in a stratified society such as India, we only consider those who are at our ‘level’ to be part of our group. Earlier, this was defined by caste, and now, it is increasingly by socio-economic status. Those who are at a socio-economic level below ours are not part of our group and we cannot care for them.

We cannot even perceive the pain of those ‘below’ us in status, because we are unable to empathize with them. We can argue that empathy in the human species is also born out of a survival instinct. It originates from the perception abilities of animal groups that need to be able to interpret the appearance of other animals to predict their behaviour, so that they can take appropriate action such as attacking, hiding or playing dead. While empathy is valuable for survival, an important precondition for it is that we must consider the subject of our empathy to be like our own selves. We typically have empathy for those in whom we see our own selves in some way. But when we consider someone inferior to us (or even superior), we find it difficult to empathize with them.

In India, inequality permeates several aspects of our personal life. Often, arranged marriages in India are also based on the principle of inequality, and not love. Large parts of India have a patriarchal society. Here, the groom and his family are superior in status to the bride. They may ask for many gifts (dowry) from the bride’s family, and impose rules upon her against her wishes. According to media reports, in 2010 alone, grooms and their families have been reported to have burnt alive 8391 brides on pretexts such as disobedience and lack of dowry. A decade before that, in 2000, there were 6995 such cases.⁷ In the majority of arranged marriages, however, since they have the same cultural background and family support, the couple adjusts to each other. Many of these marriages are stable because both do not have equal power, and therefore do not step on each other’s toes. In a couple that comes together based first on love, they form certain said and unsaid rules by which both are equally bound. In contrast, in an arranged marriage, it is only one (in most cases the husband) who leads the way, and the spouse follows. This is one of the several reasons for India’s low divorce rates—0.3 per cent in 2011 as compared to about 50 per cent in the United States.⁸ The ‘arrangement’ of arranged marriages seems to last and last.

This is why, in comparison to the topsy-turvy emotional route that love takes us through, Indian society prefers the stability induced by the inequality of an arranged marriage. No wonder our epics, ancient scriptures and sages warn us to be wary of emotions. Marriage, not love, has become the anchor for family, community and society in India while love here is for the movies and for God—both not easily reachable for ordinary mortals.References

Chidbhavananda, Swami, ed. 1965. The Bhagavad Gita: Original Stanzas (Tamil Nadu: Tapovanam Publishing House).

Dutt, Apoorva. 2015. How and why number of young Indian couples getting divorced has risen sharply. Hindustan Times, 4 January.

Krishnamurti, Jiddu. 1952. Ninth talk to boys and girls at Rajghat, 19 December. http://jiddu-krishnamurti.net/en/1952/1952-12-19-jiddu-krishnamurti-9th-talk-to-boys-and-girls.

Shafir, Eldar, and Sendhil Mullainathan. 2013. Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (London: Macmillan Publishers).

Varma, Subodh. 2012. Dowry death: One bride burnt every hour. Times of India, 27 January.

6Parenting

A visit to the city of Kota reveals a million real stories about parental pressure on children in India.

Kota is India’s capital city when it comes to test preparation, which has spawned a $400 million exam industry here.¹ Aspiring students come to Kota and study in the city’s ‘test preparation schools’ for as long as three months to several years—an essential rite of passage for many seeking admission to India’s top colleges. They dream of winning admission to the exclusive IITs, the sixteen public colleges whose graduates are recruited immediately by global companies offering large salaries. Graduating from one of the IITs, considered the Ivy League of engineering education in India, is a ticket to an elevated social status and a guaranteed job in India or Silicon Valley in the US.

Every year, about 1.5 million students take the IIT entrance exam, but less than 10,000 are accepted into the institutes. In 2016, about 160,000 students from across India flocked to Kota’s schools, but only a few were successful. In the meantime, twenty-nine of