By Aditya Aamir
The Hindu caste system and its tyranny is the talk of the town globally after Jack Dorsey sat down with a bunch of women journalists and unknowingly or knowingly placarded ‘Brahminical Patriarchy’ and got smashed for holding a view not voiced in India . Post that faux pas, a debate has been let loose on the semantics behind inserting ‘i’ and ‘a’ – you don’t spell ‘Brahmin’ with an ‘i’ if you’re talking of ‘Brahmanical Patriarchy’ because the ‘Brahmin’ is a ‘caste’ and if you attack the ‘Brahmin’, it’s attacking Hinduism, gotcha?
Now, how would Jack Dorsey know that? He is a Missourian, a bigoted racist, says the butt-hurt Brahmin, highest of the Hindu castes. Whose tyranny should be called out, says the longhaired dude in Vermont to the Twitter-dumped crew-cut alt-right peccant in San Diego. The two don’t always agree, but this once they do: Why is this “spineless billionaire” apologizing to the pan-India Hindu nationalist? And then get burnt by the left-liberal from the other end!
Neither has a clue of what the Hindu caste system actually is. Vermont dude says that but for the West, the Brahmin would be running amok in India and that “Silicon Valley” has done a lot to put the Brahmin in his place, which pleases crew-cut in San Diego because he lives closer to Silicon Valley. Vermont dude makes the distinction that “politically” castes no longer play a role in India and that born a low caste, you can live in mud for the rest of your life and that there’s a half-and-half chance Brahmins will do well in life as “priests and yoga instructors!” San Diego prefers silence to sound on that.
Both agree that the caste system is a form of tyranny practiced in India and Jack Dorsey shouldn’t be pandering to Hindu bigots. “Why, if he’s been called a racist bigot by the Brahmin, he should be the one who should be kicked out of the platform he created – Twitter,” says Vermont dude. “Jack Dorsey is a spineless ***hole. He should know what to hold up and what not to say, how to run a business? Who cares if the Brahmin is offended? It’s an irony that Jack Dorsey is getting the same type of double-sided double-edged sword treatment that Twitter gives to ***holes who have nothing else to do but sit and post.”
In any case, concludes San Diego, Twitter is an algorithm and algorithms cannot recognize the literal from sarcasm or humour. A simple off the cuff ‘I will kill you’ said in joke on Twitter will be taken literally and then it is threat and intimidation. Twitter is primarily a notifications medium and highly censorious, lopping off handles for weird reasons; for example, suspending the twitter account of a Jewish-American activist for a tweet on female genital mutilation (FGM).
Jack Dorsey and Twitter are determinedly left of centre and the women journalists who flanked Jack are also affirmatively of that bent of mind. The Brahmins lashing out at Jack don’t like this even if they themselves were of that ideological state of mind till the other day. The argument now is that Twitter should have taken a more representative set of voices to tell their sore-stories to Jack Dorsey instead of the Hindu-bashing, essentially Brahmin-singling women journalists, one of whom is a “Christian Shill” who looks askance at the caste-system prevalent in her own community.
Vermont dude, if he takes a flight to New Delhi tomorrow, would be surprised to see how much caste plays a role in Indian elections. He will learn about ‘soft and hard Hindutva’, read about the Ram temple brouhaha and the Sabarimala imbroglio; of the lower caste bridegroom who rode a horse and was unseated for doing that. He will learn that Yoga makes business magnates out of ‘mendicants’ and that India is full of engineers who can’t make the cut because they lack essential job skills.
He will be stunned to know that Indians themselves cannot make anything of the confusion surrounding the Hindu. There is the “Hindu-lite” and the “Hindu-hard”. Never before in the history of the subcontinent has the Hindu been so much centre-stage, mostly fighting each other. It’s no longer 15-minutes of fame, it is 17-minutes to raze. Lovely. Vermont dude has no idea who the Hindu is. The same as the so-called Hindu doesn’t have. Jack Dorsey, if he isn’t spineless, should hold up a ‘Who is a Hindu?’ or ‘Is there a Hindu?’ placard. (IPA Service)
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