This whole business of Untouchability, in my opinion, has been rather overdone and overexploited in our country by clever politicians posing as social reformers and by cynical godmen masquerading as sanctimonious soul-saviours and they all come in all “varna-s”… Let me hasten to add that by “Varna” I mean “of all hues and shades of groups in society” … I am not referring to any caste or community.
BTW, I ask myself often these days if the Wuhan Virus hasn’t made Untouchables of us all without any exception? If you were to pause a while to think deeply and calmly about it, without a prejudiced or indoctrinated mind, you too, I would reckon, be asking yourself this: aren’t “social distancing”, “vaccine nationalism”, “Covid passports”, “serological profiling” … all now the latest forms of “தீண்டாமை”, “theendaamai” or Untouchability that is now being practised, or being practised reticently, all across the world?
These days, I also have begun to perceive and reflect upon Untouchability less and less as a social issue and more and more as profoundly philosophical conundrum. I confess that in the way the whole world appears to me today, the Untouchability question seems to be really far more about only levelling inequality amongst human societies … and precious little about actually creating equality. And elsewhere outside human societies that I see, Nature seems to take both equality and inequality in its stride without kicking up too much of a fuss, frenzy or fracas about either of them.
We humans invented Democracy so that, as a system, it might serve us as a political leveller; we then devised Taxation systems so that they would act as an economic leveller; and now, unimaginably so, it is Covid, an invisible and pathogenic virus, that has come around into our lives and, lo and behold! our great doctors and medical scientists have effectively turned it suddenly into a worldwide social leveller! But then I ask myself, “Are these great human systems truly levellers of inequality or its accentuates”?
And, finally, I also ask myself, in moments of introspection, who can ever deny that it is only Death that is the ultimate leveller? Death indeed levels all equalities and inequalities of every mortal kind and, so, when we die, we all turn Untouchables indeed, don’t we? Nobody ever wants to touch the dead… ! Isn’t that the raw, naked truth about the universality of Untouchability?
So, looking at the whole subject in an unusually philosophical way, I am beginning of late to find myself wistfully wishing that no Man would, for God’s and humanity’s sake— not just for now but for all times to come— go on and on, continuing with this nasty business of making such a big needless fuss and frenzy about Untouchability. “Touch-me-not-ism”, in truth, is really nature’s way of immunising itself against itself … against the pathogens that exist within nature. And that, for all I know, is perhaps the greatest lesson that the Wuhan Virus has taught this puny, vulnerable world, the home in which we all live and which we call Planet Earth. Will we listen to it and heed the lesson?
Sudarshan Madabushi