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  • Caste-Capitalism Nexus – An Overview

    In this post, I’ll describe how caste and capitalism exist as closely related structures that reinforce each other in modern India. I begin by defining caste and capitalism. Then I describe how caste forms the bedrock for capitalism in India. And finally I talk about ways that capitalism reinforces caste, completing the loop that forms the nexus.

    Some caveats

    Firstly, it is important to note that any social theory has limitations. The society is vastly more complex than any single theory can explain. But individual theories are still useful as they explain some parts of the society, and can be combined with other theories to form a more comprehensive worldview. Therefore, while critically reading this post, try to think about the potential for it to explain and predict social phenomenon, and about the events or situations it cannot explain or will fail to predict, rather than trying to say how this is all stupid because something else can explain all of this. (I’m especially worried about you Marxists)

    Secondly, the definitions used in this post are going to be entirely mine. Of course there’s no original idea and everything that I write will have been influenced by other people and their works (which I’ll try to quote wherever I remember exactly where I got an idea from). But, more importantly, there is a good chance these definitions are flawed and therefore do not really define the concepts that I am discussing. Accordingly, please apply your discretion when drawing conclusions.

    Thirdly, my lived experiences are that of a very privileged person. This can often be seen as a hindrance to understand a topic like caste. But in this post I will try to rely majorly on my own insights from having lived inside savarna ecosystem, thereby not having to rely much on second hand lived experience. This is a valid approach that can be categorized under “critical savarna studies” as described by Ravikant Kisana.

    Fourthly, please have patience with me as I go through thought exercises. Mine is a method that tries to arrive at the truth through generating multiple hypotheses and being very much unafraid of being judged for such hypotheses. It can be triggering to people on either side of the anti-caste — casteist spectrum.

    Defining caste

    Most savarna people deny caste by defining caste as “(merely a) category for the job you’re doing”. As per their definition someone who does knowledge work is a brahmin (and so on…), and it has nothing to do with birth. But this is not the reality of how caste is practiced and if you need explanation for how there is no flexibility in caste assignment and how it is entirely based on birth, this post is not for you.

    Many definitions of caste among sane people then describe how caste looks externally. For example:

    • caste is a fixed social hierarchy in which membership is through birth and birth alone
    • the essence of caste is endogamy
    • caste is a division of laborers, not a division of labor

    The last one specifically is a response to people who claim that a society will need to have different people doing different jobs and that it is inevitable that there is a hierarchy and stratification like that based on job (division of labor). The division in reality is not that of labor, but that of who can do what labor. Certain sections of people are restricted to doing certain jobs — and this assignment is based on their birth — and that permanent assignment is what is called as caste.

    I was in the Scouts program in school. When we do a camp, we are divided into groups of 8 called a patrol. There are several roles in a patrol — leader, assistant leader, treasurer, cook, equipments handler, tent handler, and so on. The roles keep rotating every day in an elaborate ceremony. Imagine if a kid was forever stuck in a role like cook, they would never be able to go around and do the fun things in the camp. Every kid can understand how it is only the right thing to do to rotate the roles.
    While there is division of labor, there is no division of laborers in the scout patrol. Everyone gets to do every role. Nobody is forced to be stuck in any role. The caste system ensures that people are forever stuck in roles — whether they like it or not, whether they’re qualified for it or not. And that’s why it is a division of laborers, and not a division of labor.

    The savarna defense at this point is to claim that nobody forces anyone to do any job, at least in 2025. That there is upward mobility that has been made possible by capitalism and disappearance of caste. These are not true as we discuss later in this post. But the existence of this defense makes it important to define caste in a different way. And that is where I come up with an operational definition of caste which will both explain how caste continues to exist and also make it easier to understand the connection with capitalism.

    I define caste as a person considering another person as a lesser human based on their (caste) identity. Unlike the earlier definitions, this definition is based on introspection of what goes inside a savarna person’s mind when they are being casteist. The parentheses around “caste” makes this definition have two forms. In the narrow form, caste is defined as: a person considering another person as a lesser human based on their caste identity, and in the broad form caste is defined as: a person considering another person as a lesser human based on their identity. In the broader definition of caste, therefore, it is possible to include gender, appearance, race, tribe, and several other forms of identity. We will try to use the broader definition sparingly.

    It is important to be very critical about this definition before we proceed. Let us first see how we can practically apply this definition.

    A very common form of caste discrimination is focused on what people eat. You see brahmins on social media calling people “rakshas” (demon) for eating meat. This demonization of people is built over a hierarchy applied to food, where certain food are considered the best and certain other food are considered the worst. And then this hierarchy is applied to the humans who eat those food too. And that’s used as an excuse not to be near those humans.

    So, how does our definition hold against this? There is a person seeing another person as less human (as a demon). But is it based on caste identity? The savarna person reading this will be like “no it is not based on caste identity, it is based on the food they consume”.

    But here’s where we need to distinguish between rationalizations and reasons. When a person says they’re discriminating against someone not based on what their caste is, but based on what they eat, they’re rationalizing. What is actually happening is that this person is discriminating based on caste identity. And then they retrofit the rationalization that it is based on food choices.

    If the discrimination was indeed based on food choices, and not based on caste identity, then the brahmins would have to check lunch boxes before they discriminate. On the days a dalit person has fruits and nuts in their lunch box, the brahmin would have to embrace them. On the days a brahmin friend of his brings chicken, the brahmin would have to stay away from him. Even if the latter happens, the former doesn’t happen. Those who claim that they discriminate based on food choices, actually don’t check food choice every day. They just assign general food choices based on caste identity and follow the pattern of discrimination.

    And so, seeing the other person as less human is actually based on caste identity.

    And the proof of this is what happens when it comes to marriage. When it is time for a brahmin person to get an arranged marriage, the family will start looking at a matrimony website dedicated to their caste. Why? Some people will openly state that they’re casteist and that they will only approve marriages within their caste. But some others will mask their casteism in explanations like “see, people of other castes will have different culture and we can’t adjust to those. They will eat meat, for example”. But matrimony websites are not based on diet or culture. They’re based on caste. So, any explanation other than caste that they give is actually just a rationalization of their caste based choice.

    Another advantage of defining caste this way is that it can be used to identify casteism on a day-to-day basis. A savarna-passing dalit (a dalit person who can speak like and mingle with the savarna crowd and can appear to a savarna person as another savarna person) will suddenly start getting discriminated against when the people they work with recognize they are dalit. This is why there is a concept of closeted dalit, and “coming out as dalit”. While everything else — job, location, name, appearance — remains the same, someone coming out as dalit, and consequently facing discrimination can be identified as caste through our definition.

    The need for the broader definition

    While the narrow definition works, why do we still need the broader definition? How is it that sometimes caste is not based on caste identity?

    This is where things become a bit messy. Have you heard the story of the cat to be tied before pooja?

    There was a cat that lived in a temple. It used to run around a lot and eat the pooja items. Tired of this the poojari started tying the cat to a pole before starting pooja. He would do this every day. After a couple of years the poojari became sick and started having his son poojari as assistant. Since he couldn’t run behind the cat, he would ask his son to catch the cat and tie it to the pole. The son would do it every time before pooja.
    After a few months, the older poojari retired and the son took over as the main poojari.
    Every day poojari junior would come, tie the cat to the pole and do pooja. All was going well till one day when he was on the way to do the pooja, he found the cat dead. Without wasting time he caught another cat from the neighborhood, took it to the temple, and tied it to the pole before starting pooja.

    The story of the cat tied to the pole might seem like it is about the stupidity of rituals or brahmins. But it is a problem that all humans face. They do not operate objectively. They are slaves of habit.

    The human brain isn’t rational. We have the ability to reason, but the reasons come after we have already made the choice. And the choices are made by using shorter circuits in our brain — habit, stereotypes, and patterns.

    Even when being casteist, human beings sometimes stop using the “logic” of caste identity, and fall back to proxy indicators — appearance, language, attitude, etc. Even though the rational thing (for casteist people) is to think of another person as a lesser human based on their caste identity, sometimes people can use other identifying factors to base this on.

    In other words, for someone to be casteist, they don’t need a birth certificate of the other person’s caste, and they don’t even need a self-declaration of their caste, but mere markers of caste background is enough.

    “While it may be possible for an educated, middle-class Dalit to pass for upper caste, it is never easy. If someone is curious about your caste, they can sniff you out in a thousand ways—your name, manners, dress, diet, family customs, ritual practices. The very fact this person is curious means they have some doubt.”

    ~ Sujatha Gidla

    If we take that argument another step forward, we could also question whether caste identity is really relevant in being casteist. We could wonder whether caste is at its core about treating some people (any people) as inferior and thinking of oneself belonging to a superior group. We could argue that as long as people get a target to feel superior over, it doesn’t matter to them what identity they use to ascertain that superiority. We could even say that this is the basis of competition between castes among brahmins themselves, for example.

    But I do not want to make such an extreme analysis as it doesn’t really contribute to our discussion. Also, it could be easily seen as erasure of caste, and equation of caste with other forms of discrimination like gender, and so on. It is sufficient for me to demonstrate that the broader definition of caste as treating another person as a lesser human based on their identity is useful to explain some forms of casteism where caste might not directly be obvious. And with that we can end this section.

    Defining capitalism

    Most definitions of capitalism operate around private property and profit. If you get the drift of this post, you should be expecting me to define it in my own way. And I will. After all, as I quoted from NCERT textbook in my last post, defining things for ourselves is a very important aspect of critical thinking.

    Unfortunately, a lot of people use this freedom unconsciously and define capitalism in strange ways. To them I would suggest that sometimes it is useful to read social science textbooks to learn about a topic too.

    Many, for example, see capitalism as equivalent to industries (big machines in factories and the like). They equate capitalism with economic growth. Subconsciously they’re operating on something they’ve heard in their childhood as “socialism = bad, capitalism = good”. In discussions when someone blames capitalism for something, they jump to its defense saying “had it not been for capitalism, you would all be so poor now”.

    The problem is not just that they see capitalism as the right answer, it is also that they define capitalism in a way where there’s no space for anything else to even be competing. They define capitalism as everything good, and they define everything else as everything bad. So, even before I define capitalism myself, I’m forced to create room for alternatives.

    Firstly, consider whether there are different flavors of state control of the market possible. The answer is yes. It is possible for the state to have a low touch (less regulations), or a high touch approach (lots of regulations). And before anyone says “oh, in true capitalism the market decides everything”, I’ll say without the state’s role in mediating there wouldn’t be any capitalism. The state ensures, at a minimum, law & order situations that allow the “free market” to start operating. If finance wasn’t so tightly regulated an industry, it would be impossible to operate any capitalistic system. Whether the state should tightly regulate prices and get embroiled in external trade using things like tariff (reference indeed to what’s happening in the capital of capitalism right now) is of course “optional” add-on. Whether high or low, there is always the state’s involvement in the so-called “free” market.

    Secondly, consider whether innovation has anything to do with private ownership and profit. Do human beings innovate only when the incentive is money in their bank account? Is there any role for incentives like fame, love, belonging, companionship, purpose, or joy in human desire for innovation?

    Thirdly, be conscious of the truism that human beings are selfish. Selfishness is a necessary element of capitalism and since capitalism is everywhere it’s been hammered into our minds that human beings are, by nature, selfish. Question this earnestly. Think about how much altruism could also be part of human nature. Think also about the conditions which will make people act selfish or altruistic.

    Hopefully now, you can begin to at least see capitalism as a spectrum, if not see alternatives to capitalism. And in that spectrum, I have the space to define the ugly version of capitalism that is all around us. I define that capitalism as a system in which “my profit” is considered a justifiable reason for doing whatever the fuck.

    Here are some things that capitalists do without any worry to protect or increase their profit:

    • destroy the planet
    • destroy the planet and claim that they’re going green
    • destroy democracies
    • kill competition
    • bribe decision makers to get decisions in their favor
    • forge accounts
    • hire people and exploit them, fire people whenever
    • set different salaries for different workers doing the same job
    • pay people as low as one can get away with
    • lie, mislead, and manipulate
    • not care about equity or justice (unless it is profitable to do so)
    • grab power and abuse power
    • intimidate, threaten, and kill people
    • abuse law to silence people

    While this list can go on and on, there are two patterns to recognize. One, that profit is the only value in capitalism and no other values exist. Two, that a lot of people in the society believe that capitalists are justified in prioritizing only profit and that there is nothing wrong with it.

    And with that let us get back to caste and look at what it does in the society such that it prepares a fertile soil for capitalism.

    Caste and its manifestations

    When savarna people try to erase caste, they restrict caste to physically violent forms of caste-based discrimination. They say things like “oh, but it is only in rural India that caste exists”, “oh, but among the educated there is no caste”.

    Their imagination of caste is exemplified by Bollywood movies portraying caste as the dalit family in a village facing ostracization and violence. Bollywood hasn’t shown caste as vegetarianism, as anti-reservation sentiments, or as various forms of sophisticated favoritism. In the limited savarna imagination, caste can exist only if there is a well and some people are prevented from taking water out of it.

    So much so that when literally that shit happens within their households they don’t see it as casteism. Domestic workers not being allowed to use glass or toilet. Workers being forced to use different lift in apartments. Not shaking hands with or sitting next to certain colleagues. Literally untouchability.

    I’ll repeat. Untouchability exists today. In various ways and forms. In the most elite places.

    If you follow any social media accounts of anti-caste people, you will also know that caste-based violence is a day to day reality for many people too. Rape, murder, dishonor killings. I will not document a lot of that in this post because the savarna urge would be to define caste as just all of the gruesome things that caste does and to shut their mind.

    What I’m interested in this section is to discuss the indirect manifestations of caste in our lives — the casteist assumptions that guide elite decision making that perpetuate systems of injustice.

    Let us start with education.

    Caste makes teachers treat students differently. Caste creates in teachers a judgement of how much one can learn, and they calibrate their effort accordingly. Their patience and their love is rationed and those at the lower end of caste hierarchy receive less affection and attention from teachers.

    This starts at very young ages. And kids grow up internalizing what they’ve been told they can and cannot do. Some are given wings. Others get their dreams killed.

    The higher in education you go, the gap widens considerably. Especially when the opportunities for education start becoming competitive.

    Notice that I haven’t mentioned anything about the compounding effects of overlapping issues above. For example, generations of caste based marginalization lead to many students being the first generation of learners in their family. This means they wouldn’t have had their parents schooling them at home. And this makes it extra difficult for them in the classroom. Similarly, wealth differences correlated with caste makes it difficult for students to get access to various things that help in learning — including even the prohibitive cost of applying for various competitive exams.

    The reason I mention compounding effects in a separate paragraph is to be clear that “oh, but this is not actually caste, it is class” is a false argument. It is caste compounded by class, gender, and other factors. And often the class difference is the result of caste.

    Now, let us look at opportunities.

    How are opportunities distributed in our society? Take job opportunities. Most jobs are fulfilled through personal networks. Even when there is a job advertisement, it is circulated through WhatsApp channels that mirror personal networks. Take funding opportunities. The call for a grant or scholarship might be on a public website. But the URL to that is distributed through email groups and twitter channels that are all again mirrors of personal networks. My point is that most opportunities in our society are distributed through personal networks. There is no central notice board where all opportunities are equally accessible to everyone.

    And how are personal networks formed? For a lot of savarna people I’ve seen this starts with family circles. “Oh, I found this chartered accountant through my uncle and he helped me with formation of my company when I was 22”, “Oh, so <famous person XYZ> is my aunt”. Some savarna folks recognize this as a nepotism allegation and claim that there is nothing they can do about it. But most of them are blind to such privileges. To them it feels natural to have a chacha who’s helping them get their break.

    Even when people don’t rely on their family circles for growing their personal networks, their caste identity helps them. It is easier for a savarna person to strike up a conversation and build a relationship with a random savarna person. Sometimes they bond over their shared caste identity. Regardless, they find it easier to trust each other and open doors for each other.

    And remember how it is not always the literal caste identity. Often it is about proxy markers like appearance, confidence, accent, or relatable cultural references. Many people don’t realize how they’re judging some people as more capable merely by how they present themselves.

    That brings us to wealth.

    If you limit someone’s education and opportunities, can you expect them to grow wealthy? No.

    But even in isolation wealth has a compounding effect by itself. Rich becomes richer. That also means that those who start with assets will find it easier to grow wealthy.

    My parents are both alive and in government service in Kerala. They both make lots of money for themselves and savings and investments. I stopped taking money from them about 10 years ago when I finished MBBS. But, I’ve never had to worry too much about making money. I could take risks because I know that if something goes horribly wrong, I will likely get help from my parents. Also I could save whatever I earned. I didn’t have to send it anywhere. I also had financial literacy. And all of this financial freedom allowed me to have an unconventional career that allowed me to become a programmer, a public health activist, and so on. That unlocked many revenue streams for me. In turn, I become even more free to take even bigger risks.

    Many savarna folks start businesses by getting investment from family & friends. This investment can even come in forms of people working for free, because their needs are met in other ways. And once things get going, you can erase all the investments and attribute everything to your hard work. The same is true for folks in academia, or non-profits.

    All of this is why it is said ad nauseum by anti-caste folks that savarnas have social capital and that is the biggest form of caste privilege.

    Aside: At this point it would be unfair for me to not calm the agitated savarna reader who’s going “Hey, but I grew up in poverty and nobody helped me become who I am.” Yes, buddy, I hear you. You are totally aathmanirbhar self-made. This post doesn’t apply to you.

    The problem isn’t social capital per se. The problem is that there is no acknowledgement of social capital. Those with social capital go about their lives and build concepts of what is “just” without the acknowledgement of how privilege is distributed in the society.

    They therefore find it completely acceptable that there is piss-poor standards in most schools, colleges, and training centers across India. There is no push for better education. They find it simply alright to have very few elite institutions that provide reasonable quality of education. They consider it fair that the opportunity to reach these are gatekept by entrance examinations. They don’t even see a connection between these entrance examinations and the worsening quality of education that prioritizes examination focused rote learning.

    When it comes to reservation they oppose it tooth and nail. One of their arguments is “well, instead of having reservation in higher education there should be universal schooling that creates a level playing ground”. Yes, savarna folks care about universal education exactly for the five seconds it takes them to say that sentence.

    If only they cared for it a few minutes more, they would have begun to realize the enormity of the task that lies ahead of us in creating a level playing ground, or even a fighting chance for millions of Indians.

    And that’s the finest of savarna qualities. They talk about huge problems with a graceful smile. They speak about things with a calmness that can only be achieved by someone whose ass is permanently placed in comfort. They do not ever see the need for radical change. If you speak to them about radical change they will gaslight you into thinking that you’re an impractical and arrogant activist who’s not interested in change. They will convince you that incremental, slow change as part of the status quo is the only way to do anything. And then they will continue to do nothing.

    And in that inaction, they enable the perpetuation of a harmful and violent status quo. They normalize all of the violence, all of the discrimination, and all of the resistance to change. They empower the mindset that there are lesser humans and their lives don’t matter, at least not in this generation. They delay change long enough for this generation to disappear and another generation to start fighting the same battles.

    What caste, therefore, creates is not just a hierarchy, but also a resistance to change. Caste through its intricate string-pulling ensures that the hierarchy is seen as acceptable and inevitable. It legitimizes suffering and gives people an excuse to be violent.

    And that is where it meets its closest friend.

    Capitalism cements all injustice in place

    To undo violent hierarchies in the society, we have to actively intervene with humanity and humane values. Capitalism through its single-mindedness on profit leaves no space for values. Therefore, capitalism acts as a cement that solidifies hierarchies in place leaving no wiggle room.

    This could be surprising. The promise was that capitalism doesn’t care about your caste, and therefore anyone can rise up in class through capitalism. The promise was that of upward mobility. But here I am, claiming that capitalism does the exact opposite.

    The claim that capitalism doesn’t care about caste comes from the idea that everyone in the capitalistic system is paid based on market value. And therefore if a dalit can gain enough skills they will be well paid and can rise up in class. The if in that sentence needs a big stress. We already saw above how caste creates systemic barriers for people to gain education and opportunities. The market does not see those barriers. The market only sees how much profit the person in front of you can generate. Therefore, the capitalist indirectly uses caste based logic to hire.

    It is not just indifference. Caste-based hiring allows the capitalist to make more profit than what caste-blind hiring allows him to do. You can exploit someone more if they are already seen by the society as less of a human! You can pay them lesser than other humans. You can make them work extra hours. And you can make them do jobs that other humans would refuse to do.

    Vice versa, you hire charming savarnas for the good jobs. Regardless of how mediocre they’re in their work, they can operate smoothly in the system. They are low-risk hires because they are allowed by everyone to make unlimited mistakes.

    Capitalism’s far greater contribution towards caste is in building and maintaining larger structures that perpetuate caste.

    The biggest of such structures is the state. Capitalism operates governments. The most recent example is Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Every politician in power is a representative of capitalism. Narendra Modi is himself a capitalist who operates through a puppet named Adani. Everyone bows to the pressure of money that capitalism puts on them.

    The influence is not just on political leaders at the top. It falls on all leaders at all levels, and bureaucrats too. Through such tight control of the state, capitalism then determines what gets state’s assent and what gets state’s dissent.

    The state in turn allocates less budget to education, health, livelihood, etc, and makes that money available for the capitalistic needs. With lesser budget to those sectors, there’s further degradation of schools, hospitals, and jobs. People become even more poorly skilled, sicker, and get trapped in jobs that barely allow them to survive.

    Capitalism also silences the civil society, including academicians and non-profits. It does this in two ways. Firstly, it makes invalid all logic other than economic logic. Any research has to be centered around economic growth. All NGOs have to work towards scalable, sustainable models. Secondly, it puts people in dilemmas where they have to choose to retain their income or give it up to pursue relevant problems. It does this by controlling how activities are funded. Civil society is funded eventually by capitalists directly or by capitalistic logic operating through state or citizens. Therefore, these people are always held accountable by the capitalistic system to itself. And capitalism doesn’t like to fund trouble makers.

    One might say, but it is not all about money, the civil society can decide to operate without money. Yes, but capitalism is making it increasingly impossible to do that. It makes more and more people think about work and life only in terms of transactions. It destroys safety nets like free healthcare and that in turn puts the fear of death in activists. These days capitalism also tightly controls everyone’s attention, thereby depriving activists and civil society ways to organize effectively.

    Q: How do you kill the most radical organization?
    A: You fund it.

    You can easily destroy an organization by putting money into it. When money flows into an organization everyone’s thinking gets distorted. All radicalism gets defused into market logic. The latter part of the organization’s life will revolve around how to keep money coming in. People will start distrusting each other. Work will start getting quantified and values will vanish. It will very rapidly adopt capitalistic thinking and become part of the status quo.

    Capitalism puts every person in a hamster wheel where they are constantly running without reaching anywhere. While caste normalizes social hierarchies, capitalism gives people a permanent distraction, a permanent excuse to not care about social hierarchies.

    Conclusion

    Caste and capitalism are intricately tied with each other, especially in 21st century. Seeing them together can give us deeper insights into both of them.

  • ‘Democracy’ is a Useless Word

    Democracy is a word that’s vague and has multiple meanings. It is often used as an excuse for not doing anything. The use of the word should raise suspicion about the intentions of the speaker.

    Most people when explaining democracy start with an even worse definition of the word: “government of the people, by the people, for the people“. This was uttered by an American politician in 1863. Like most political speeches, it is designed to sound profound but leaves enough room to play soccer within that definition, let alone misinterpret it according to convenience.

    The clearest word in that sentence is “government”. Democracy is seen there as a system on how to operate an extremely large group of people (known as a “country” or a “nation”). But the 4 remaining words — “of”, “by”, “for”, and “the people” — give us very little information about what democracy is.

    The words of the people can either mean it is a system of governing the people, which would make it redundant considering that there’s already government before it which means the same, or it could mean it is a system which is composed of people, which would make it mean the same as by the people.

    When it comes to by the people, we have to think about the history of when this was being used. It was used at a time when some people were considered royal, or of a different class, and these people were operating the government. In that context by refers to redistribution of power.

    For the people can also be understood in the same context as having a direction and purpose which is in the benefit of the people as opposed to only benefiting the royal class.

    By far the most disturbing word there is the people. It was 57 years later in 1920 that women could vote in national elections in the United States of America. So when Abraham Lincoln said “of the people, by the people, and for the people” it didn’t include women. And that’s the only definition of democracy that most of us can recite.

    To be fair, today’s NCERT textbook seems to be really trying to make us think past that useless definition. Quoting Ribiang and Lyngdoh Madam from it:

    Ribiang: But why do we need to work on a definition? The other day you quoted Abraham Lincoln to us: “Democracy is government of the people, by the people and for the people”. We in Meghalaya always ruled ourselves. That is accepted by everyone. Why do we need to change that?

    Lyngdoh Madam: I am not saying we need to change it. I too find this definition very beautiful. But we don’t know if this is the best way of defining unless we think about it ourselves. We must not accept something just because it is famous, just because everyone accepts it.

    Such a fascinating call for critical thinking in Class IX social science textbook! The rest of the chapter is fantastic too and it talks about free & fair elections and constitutional rights. It ends by saying that there is an expanded notion of what’s democracy when people say sentences like: “We are a very democratic family. Whenever a decision has to be taken, we all sit down and arrive at a consensus. My opinion matters as much as my father’s.“

    When I say democracy is a useless word, I’m mostly concerned about this expanded scope of the word which is applied not at nation-state levels, but at smaller levels like organizations and groups. In discussing that, we will look at the meaning of the word in its form-of-government sense too.

    What people mean by democracy

    A large number of people mean “majority rule” when they say democracy. This is where you have fascists destroying institutions and putting political opponents behind bars. In smaller groups, this attitude translates to “let us put this to vote”. If a “democratic” organization makes decisions based on what wins a majority vote, it is a majoritarian organization.

    Some others explicitly call this out as majoritarianism and consider a democracy as one where the rights of the minority are upheld. There is greater emphasis on a previously agreed set of rights and protection of these rights. In smaller groups this operates as a “consensus-based decision making”. Every individual will have the right to veto a decision and there will be an attempt to form a consensus.

    We can already see how complicated the latter would be. Regardless of how much emphasis there is on consensus, it is easy for a dedicated individual to prevent consensus formation. Consensus formation requires a shared desire to reach consensus. And this becomes disproportionately more difficult in larger groups.

    There’s another reason why consensus is difficult.

    “Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated. We must realise that our people have yet to learn it. Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic.”

    ~Dr B. R. Ambedkar

    If democracy is a decision making process, and it is a consensus based decision making process and not majoritarianism, then there’s a value system that’s required to be shared by everyone such that there is consensus. That value system is called constitutional morality.

    Constitutional morality is composed of values like liberty, equality, and fraternity. Non-majoritarian democracy can exist only when these values exist.

    Can non-majoritarian democracies exist?

    At the scale of a nation state, it is impossible to have a non-majoritarian democracy. Let’s take India even before Narendra Modi. The Aadhaar project, for example, came up in that India. It was vocally vetoed by several thousands of people. Even the Supreme Court eventually declared it unconstitutional. Yet, Aadhaar was made a reality by a government that wasn’t even called fascist.

    It is with that realization that the constitution of India goes to great detail about fundamental rights and how to protect them. While the decision making shall always be majoritarian, the fundamental rights and institutions like judiciary leave a loophole through which those left behind can negotiate.

    And as long as the majority has not gone fascist, these loopholes allow enough space for those others to live peacefully. And vice versa, the moment majority turns fascist, these other things crumple and the majoritarianism shows its true colors.

    In other words, a non-majoritarian democracy is a make-believe game played by a majoritarian democracy when there’s no crisis. The moment there’s a crisis, those who hold power will come out and sort things out in ways they want.

    At the scale of nation-states this happens through raw physical power, through police, army, gun, and machines. People are physically put in jail, or murdered. Some of this power is now operational through virtual spaces and can manifest as blocking website, taking down channel, and so on. But even these blocks are enforced through physical network infrastructure that’s operated by human beings.

    It is also interesting to note what happens when there is a military coup in a “democratic” nation. The constitution, the election, the institutions, the people, they’re all the same. But the guy with the gun is now ruling the country. How’s that possible?

    It is possible, because at its core, there’s nothing called a democratic government. There is raw physical power, and in a complicated series of social role-plays, this is often held by a power center which also happens to be elected by a majority. If the social role-plays are gone, then the whole thing collapses into its true form.

    Surely these don’t apply to small groups, right?

    One could be mistaken that smaller groups — like an online discussion group, or an NGO — do not have such central power. After all, how many times have we heard “this is a democratic space” being used in these contexts?

    Look at how decisions are made and enforced in these spaces, and you’ll see the same pattern as in nation-states. There is a complicated social role-play. But eventually the decision making power is vested with whoever legally controls the NGO, or whoever is the administrator of the group. If you can kick someone out, you hold the ultimate power in that space.

    So, all of the consensus process and “democratic decision-making” in these spaces are actually power delegated by the ultimate authority.

    For a thought-exercise, let us imagine that there is an online group, and through some technical glitch nobody can get kicked out of it. Isn’t that the ideal democratic group?

    As long as there are no decisions to make, this works out. And in a large number of online groups which are merely spaces for people to spend time talking to each other, there are no decisions to be made. And therefore this works out.

    But if there is the tiniest decision to be made, it no longer will work. Say someone says “let us change the group name”. Suddenly there’s the need for a decision making process. And till that is established first, the name will likely remain the same.

    Democracy is biased towards the status quo

    Akshay

    Let us do say the group is really interested in this problem. There are several possibilities.

    If everyone in the group likes a new name, the problem vanishes. The name gets changed. This is perfect consensus. But this rarely happens. This is easier to happen in very small groups. This is easier when the group is largely comprised of people thinking similarly or like each other.

    If a large number of people like a new name, but a few like the old name, the problem takes on a new dimension.

    • Those who are in the minority could face social pressure and agree to go with the new name — consensus through social pressure — and the name gets changed.
    • The group might decide that till everyone agrees on the name, it won’t be changed, and the name will remain the same.
    • The group might just decide that the majority vote will decide the new name — majoritarian democracy.

    Did you notice how I sneaked in “group might decide”. How will the group decide how to decide this problem? How will the group know whether to go with a majoritarian vote or a consensus process?

    This is where no group is void of power hierarchies.

    Even in a group where everyone is an administrator, those who joined first or those who are more senior in real world could hold more power. If, say, this is Beast Games and a hundred people were randomly picked into a group at once, there would still be differences in physical attributes that give some people more “power”. Someone might look more intimidating, someone might speak more persuasively. These “natural” leaders tend to gain power.

    The other possibility is that there are two or more leaders who emerge and they have different ideas as to what should happen. In this situation, if the stakes are high, the group will split into factions.

    But often what happens is that there is no high stakes, there’s not much to gain by splitting the group, and things will just continue based on the energy of the most vocal person/group. Those who disagree might either live with the choice, or just leave the group.

    Over time this will lead to the group degrading in what it seeks to achieve by retaining the energy and enthusiasm of a very small “core” active group. And they become the power center, and the group now has a power hierarchy.

    Let’s do a different thought experiment. What happens if one member of the group just unilaterally decides to change the name? Social norms prevent this from happening usually, but there can still be people who violate this. The following could happen:

    • The action can get reverted by someone else
    • The group just discusses it for a while and moves on (with the name remaining changed)

    What if the name change is indeed reverted, and the deviant person changes the name again?

    These might seem esoteric situations, but a lot of “norms” are violated consistently in various groups. And whether these are problematized depends on the people in the group. And whether these are addressed depends on the power hierarchies in the group.

    And remember we are operating in the ridiculous constraints of our thought experiment. In most groups, there’s real power that’s obvious and straightforward to see. And all decisions ultimately are enforced through these power structures. And the decision making process is consequently determined by these power structures.

    Just think about the work of Women in Cinema Collective in Kerala film industry. Most woman were facing harassment from men. This could be considered “violation of social norm”. And after a lot of hard work and deep politics things perhaps changed a tiny bit. WCC problematized the issue. But who can “address” it? Problematizing helps and is only the first step. But enforcement of justice is left to those who wield real power, which in case of Malayalam film industry is those who hold the money (or those who hold the guns).

    Democratic groups are groups playing social role-play under benevolence of power

    As in the nation-state, a group which describes itself as “democratic” is just a group which plays the social game of democracy under the supervision of benevolent power structures. The rules of the game are often ad-hoc, made by and imposed by the power structures.

    We might consider that human beings are social animals, and such social constructs are how we always operate. But in this essay what I’m trying to argue is that this fact — that a democracy is just a game of entertaining participants under the supervision of a kind dictator — is often not realized by the participants themselves. And that has to do with the vagueness and uselessness of the word democracy.

    Nobody is allowed to question what a democracy means. It falls like a command that stops all further discussions.

    • Does it mean that everyone will agree with everyone else?
    • If there are disagreements, how will those be resolved?
    • Are there some basic rules everyone is expected to follow?
    • If so, are these rules themselves amenable to change?

    What use is this analysis?

    You might see groups that don’t have answers to these questions that still exist. And then you might show that as examples of why these questions are irrelevant.

    And I will agree with you when it comes to certain groups.

    There are groups whose purpose is to be a space where a large number of people will put their attention. The idea is to just be a notice board where things can move. A ‘digital town square’ or a ‘digital public square’, an example of which is the now defunct Twitter.

    For such a space decision making is unnecessary. Anyone can post anything. Free speech is the only right to protect.

    But if any group claims to be anything more, like:

    • Pro-people, pro-poor
    • Action group
    • Movement group
    • For a fairer world
    • Safe space
    • Caring space

    If anything more than “a public square” is in the group’s description, then the use of the word “democracy” is a red flag.

    If you are pro-people or pro-poor, you have to do things and change things for people. You have to necessarily be an action group. And an action group needs to have clear decision making structures.

    If you are a safe space, you have to ensure that there’s psychological safety for everyone involved. And that requires very strict ground rules, quickly enforced, about how one can speak and what one can say.

    When people do not have the energy or commitment to make a space pro-people, or make it a caring safe space, they hide behind words like democracy. And this leads to the group becoming just a public square.

    A public square is not bad in itself. But being a good public square requires its own commitment. Again, if you lack energy for that commitment, just hide behind the word “democracy”.

    Democracy in that sense is a very useful word. It helps people avoid spending energy. When you’re confused about what to do with a group, just call it a democracy and be done with it.

  • All the world’s a stage

    I have this weird issue. I tend to be non-conformist. I notice the performance of societal roles. I am more painfully conscious when I have to perform societal roles myself.

    The first time it became a real problem was when I started practicing medicine. You just can’t be yourself in the consultation room. Doctors have to be chameleons. They have to adapt themselves to the patient and “perform” a dance that contributes to healing. And I couldn’t get myself to do that.

    I had this peculiar philosophy. I didn’t want to answer things with confidence when the science itself was uncertain. I didn’t want to act like I’m caring when I didn’t really care. I didn’t like wearing the white coat. I didn’t like playing the doctor role. It felt like a lie.

    Why is this performance necessary? Because human beings are irrational. We don’t use logic to operate. We use social cues and emotions and biases to operate.

    A doctor has to appear smart, because otherwise the patient will assume the doctor is incompetent. And so on.

    I changed myself. I rationalized the performance in ways that made sense to me. The consultation room is a special place where you have to prioritize healing and no other philosophy matters. So, some “lying” was okay.

    It didn’t stop there, though. Leadership needed performance too. You’ve to be chatty when you’re really tired, you’ve to lead with vision when you’re lost, and you’ve to inspire even the people you are angry at.

    And I rationalized that too.

    The world really needs leaders so that we can change it for the good. And we can’t let philosophy come in between.

    What’s this philosophy, you might ask. It is a form of anarchist thought. Anarchists want every human being to operate through their own agency, as capable and rational beings. The performance of leaders and doctors could be seen as “manipulation” by anarchists. At least that’s what I used to think about these.

    That this philosophy is utterly impractical, is the strongest argument I have discovered against anarchism.

    Human beings are human beings. They’re not perfectly capable beings. They like being led. They rely on a shoulder to cry on.

    Yet, the anarchist dream is too deep in my mind that I’m not been able to get rid of it.

    I work closely with a person who does plenty of successful activism. He was telling me how when he goes to meet decision makers he carries a box of chocolates or some gift like that. To me this was unacceptable bribery. These were dark tactics to get what we want. But his logic was undeniable — the world needs to change and that was more important than any purist philosophy.

    That is the difference between an anarchist and a socialist or a pragmatist. An anarchist cares deeply about the means to the end. The socialist cares only about the end and wouldn’t mind a bloody revolution. The pragmatist would be okay with some shortcuts.

    Let me make it more clear. I want the world to be more rational, egalitarian, honest, and so on, and I don’t like using the tools of today’s oppressors to reach there. And psychological manipulation (power games, etc included) are part of those tools.

    Inside my mind it is the same that I apply to consultation room and management positions. I want people to get better without me having to employ the wrong tools.

    The places where this creates problems are infinite.

    I can’t stand my extended family members and their routine patriarchal performances.

    I can’t stand companies/organizations and their bullshit capitalistic policies.

    I can’t stand academicians. Not a bit. Their jargon and their credentials and their ways of claiming exclusive rights to discuss what they’re discussing. Their hypocrisy and their exclusive focus on their careers and publications. But more irritatingly, the reverence with which others look at academicians. The way people go “Oh, wow! This person is from IIT! (/Harvard/Oxford/blah blah blah)”

    In my first visit to JNU, I was fuming about the opulent waste of resources that it was and Swathi had to put a lot of effort into shutting me up.

    When people say “OMG! This was published in Nature (or Lancet or whatever)” my blood boils.

    There could be other emotions contributing to this too. Envy, superiority complex, know-it-all complex, all of that.

    But if you believe me, the biggest problem for me is the societal roles and the unquestioning conformity by everyone to those.

    I realized this today when I was attending a public health writing workshop by Nivarana. I was listening to people talk about how to write a story, how to write in simple language, how to pitch, etc. And I was struggling with the “performance” that journalism was.

    There is a particular societal role for a journalist. They’re supposed to be arbiters of truth. They are supposed to write in a particular tone, one that conveys a sense of reporting of the truth. The reader, on the other side, is expected to play the role of taking in the truth without question.

    In light of the shit-show that Indian journalism today is, I’m particularly disillusioned by the performance of the journalist role.

    There is a rigid script that journalists follow. You start out with an uninformed audience, you introduce certain hooks, you establish authority through some expert testimonial, and you conclude the narrative in a particular direction you want the reader to go in.

    My philosophical discord is with how everyone buys this shit. Truth isn’t packaged as neatly as journalism makes it out to be. And behind every piece of journalism there is a human playing the role.

    Like judges in courts. They’re performing too. Acting like some wise ass.

    Yet human beings are like “this is how it has to be!”

    No. This is just a particular social order created in a particular space and time.

    Why am I writing all this?

    Because I am tired with my philosophy. I want to go beyond and be like regular humans. Earn some brownie points in the human world. And even though I am deciding to do that I think my philosophy and my pain is valid. What I write may not be meaningful to everyone or be added to the anarchist library. But I hope that there will be at least a few people who resonate with this particular sub-niche of agony.

    How will I rationalize journalism then?

    One way is to think of it as mass education. Like teaching, but at a larger scale. As an intermediate strategy till people are able to educate themselves.

    Another is to imagine it as fiction. I mean, I don’t have a problem with fiction because it comes with a label that it is a performance art. Perhaps journalism can be seen as a performance art. The sentences and the style can give joy to the readers. Make it about creating art.

    A third way is to think of it as reclaiming spaces. But of course this makes sense only if we put under-represented ideas and thoughts into those spaces. We can’t play by their rules and call it reclaiming. It maybe possible to cleverly subvert the rules and reclaim the spaces.

    tl;dr is that I’m struggling to practice anarchist philosophy and forced to rationalize the performances of societal roles to be able to thrive.

  • Nirbhau Nirvair Niramaya

    Nirbhau Nirvair Niramaya

    Ajay (AN) introduced to me the above words at Kozhikode during the mid-annual mfc meet last year. It means without fear, without hate, with love. The last one was added to the Sikh saying by AN themself.

    When I met AN at the meet, I was brimming with negative energy (likely hatred) at the institutions AN represented and their politics. I projected all of those at AN too.

    But we had long chats. And we ended up hugging. And it was the most useful for me.

    I don’t like hating people. But I hate it when people are perpetuating and reinforcing systems of injustice. And countless experiences have taught me to be sceptical of privileged caste men who are progressing in their career without explicitly addressing these injustices.

    In the larger society, there’s internalized misogyny. Where there’s an inherent hatred towards women. In the smaller society of social justice work, there is an internalized hatred towards savarna men. I have that internalized hatred. (Also towards doctors, academicians, and so on, but that’s a different post).

    Except I don’t like hating people. I’ve been trying to adopt a love ethic. And this was a contradiction.

    It is probably a contradiction that cannot be avoided. The world sees a lot of suffering. And the suffering doesn’t happen on its own. There are people propelling systems of oppression. And those people deserve intolerance. (Paradox of intolerance).

    So to completely eliminate hate, we would need complete elimination of suffering.

    Yet, my hate was sometimes being directed at the wrong people. People who were trying their best.

    For example, AN above has a life story very similar to mine. Hating the violence of medical colleges, going to work with very marginalized communities, using technology in transformative ways in some places, and being stuck in larger economics of technology and health. The hatred was unjustified. And I turned to love.

    After that, it was Parth’s (PS) turn. There was this day on Twitter when Cyriac Abby Philips had retweeted a casteist video and blocked everyone who called it out. I had indirectly called PS an asshole for asking me to be patient with CPA that day. (2023-12-18).

    Then a few months later I apologized for calling PS an asshole. (2024-02-12)

    Hello Parth.
    I saw that you changed your name on Twitter. I assume that it is related to your introspection and growth on the topic of caste. I congratulate you for the same.
    And on the same note I apologize for being unnecessarily mean to you on Twitter in regards to the Abby Philips situation. There are indeed many of my own biases which led to me calling you an asshole. I should have shown better behavior. I also saw that nivarana is having technical issues. I have been working on wordpress for several organizations like tribalhealth.org and saakarnataka.org
    If you need technical assistance, let me know.

    Unfortunately, PS had blocked me on WhatsApp and didn’t receive that message. In the same mfc meeting at Kozhikode, I suggested that a bulletin made by younger folks at mfc should have just been released as articles on nivarana.org even though I disagree with certain politics of Parth. Sebin (SG) was in the audience and asked me later as to why I disagree with PS. I told the above story and SG told me how PS’ idea is not to become a Global Health expert, but to settle in Assam taking care of palliative care needs.

    So I sent that note on email. (2024-08-12)

    PS replied immediately appreciating it and looking forward to working together.

    Later that month, nivarana website broke down again. And this time Parth reached out to me to redeem my offer to help. I helped to get it back online. Then PS asked me to join the team.

    We had a long phone call where I grilled PS about every narrative I had built in my mind. About caste, about plagiarising, about appropriation, and so on. Turns out I was wrong with my narrative on all those. I was wrong on enough counts that even if I had found something to hold PS responsible for, it wouldn’t have mattered.

    I joined the nivarana team that day (2024-08-28).

    It is unlikely that my emotion in all these was purely hatred. There could possibly be elements of envy too. Swathi shared a therapy insight with me once about how we envy people who are doing things we wanted to do.

    There might also be frustration that society isn’t changing fast enough. I’m pretty sure I was also of the belief that “calling out” was an important aspect of social change.

    That last point has been crucial. How do you reconcile calling out with love? To call someone out you’ve to be convinced they’re wrong. You’ve to refuse to “understand” where they’re coming from. You’ve to invalidate their experiences and shout above their voice. That’s how calling out works. It’s incompatible with love.

    In parallel I had also been developing another way of demanding change. It involves framing every wrong as an education problem. To use the language of a loving teacher. (As I’m writing this I remember reading about “calling in” as opposed to “calling out”)

    But that mindset also can’t be applied for everyone. When people who are in positions of power and have many years of life and experience over me are being problematic, it is difficult to reframe the problem as an education one. I can’t be “mothering” these weirdos.

    I’ve found two more mindsets that can help in this situation.

    Don’t feed the troll mindset

    This one is where you consider those people as trolls, and then apply the sane advice of not feeding trolls. By engaging (even through calling out), you’re amplifying their ideas, giving them too much importance, and in general giving them fodder to continue.

    Just stop engaging. Ignore. Mute. Silence.

    If pen is mightier than sword, silence is mightier than pen.

    I’m too busy for this shit mindset

    In cancel culture debate, there’s this weird “nuance” argument made by some people (like Arundhati Roy) that it is okay to engage with the art of problematic artists. But my take has always been this:

    There are literally hundreds of other pieces of art.

    You don’t need to engage with problematic artists. Because there are so many more artists on the planet! And they all need your attention too. Why waste it on a problematic person?

    I heard something similar from Bhumika Saraswati when I asked her about how she deals with the contradiction, she said “I don’t have the time for it.”

    By doing so much more in the time that it takes us to hate others, we will be able to avoid hatred.

  • ‘The Good Place’ is Good

    ‘The Good Place’ is Good

    Swathi and I started watching ‘The Good Place’ after we finished watching ‘A Man on the Inside’ (thanks to Pooja’s recommendation in the South Central podcast) and craving for more Ted Danson.

    There are 4 seasons and we finished it within a month!

    It was a whirlwind ride on philosophy. Although not as exciting as Matrix, The Good Place’s take on afterlife is much more relevant to our every day life.

    I have to include some spoilers ahead to speak about my favorite parts.

    While there are interesting episodes discussing philosophical concepts like trolley problem and free will, the parts I really loved are the satire on people.

    There is the good place committee. When the situation arises where they have to stand up and do something, they go into writing “strongly worded” letters and forming a selection committee for forming the committee that will deliberate on the issue. This is an apt description of much of the “progressive” society which keeps expressing their collective shock and disbelief in the same words and manner forever.

    Then there’s the character named Brent – a very accurate depiction of a savarna man. Completely delusional about his importance and contributions. Immune to feedback. Absolutely incorrigible. Total pain in the ass.

    There are so many characters which are possible only in The Good Place universe. Janet, the all knowing (not a) robot. The Judge. Michael. It is worth watching purely for the intellectual exercise of thinking about these characters.

    And then there are so many real world characters. Michael again, Eleanor, Vicky. The story, through these characters, weaves issues like love, friendship, sacrifice, workplace rivalry, jealousy, boredom, and purpose into the fictional world seamlessly.

    I liked The Good Place for its exposition of the philosophy around “doing good”. It is a must watch for activists.

  • Who’s the Default Cook in your Home?

    There’s plenty written by women about how unfair division of household chores is the classic symptom of patriarchy.

    They’ve written about how it is not just about cooking, but also about the mental burden of thinking about the house — about grocery shopping, about making a list for grocery shopping, about keeping a mental checklist of other household details.

    Socialized as a man, I’ve had to learn a lot of this the hard way in my house living with Swathi.

    I’ve written about how I hate cooking. The harder question for me is to figure out whether I would have hated cooking if I was brought up in a culture where I’m expected to cook. I can keep thinking about how I am not a foodie, how I eat most meal in a couple of minutes, how I love washing plates, and so on. Yet this question will never be resolved.

    But Swathi had some very difficult conversations with me where I’ve realized it doesn’t matter whether I like cooking or not. It is a household chore, and it has to be taken care of. Like if the pipe in the bathroom is broken, it’ll have to be fixed. Or the bulb will have to be replaced. Or the internet has to be recharged.

    Cooking, grocery shopping, and shopping list building are household chores that one has to do regardless of whether one likes them, or is good at them.

    If two people are living in a house, they’ve to divide the chore.

    You live in an unequal society where it is acceptable to take services of a domestic worker. But still talking to them and describing what to be made, and ensuring ingredients are available are all remaining chores. And they have to be shared by members of the household.

    If this sounds complicated, think of how difficult it is for Swathi. She likes cooking for joy. And if I’m even a tiny bit lazy, she will become the “default cook”. And then she will be wondering whether she’s suffering from patriarchy or just enjoying something she likes. These western ideas like feminism have ruined her ability to like cooking.

    Not just that. She now has the additional burden of having to do a PhD in figuring out whether my dislike for cooking is an “Akshay problem” or a “man problem”. Whether it is an unacceptable remnant of patriarchy, or whether it is an ignorable trade-off.

    So instead of torturing her, I try to handle the household an equal number of days. And like many other things I’ve had to learn (like not misgendering people, not making ableist assumptions, being aware of my biases, etc), this also becomes easier as I practice it. And I’m also trying to reframe cooking in my mind such that it becomes an enjoyable activity for me. I think of it as a break from work, as a time to listen to podcasts, and so on.

    It is an ongoing struggle where I fall back to my old patterns of starting with my phone and work every day morning, and it becoming too late, and then me suggesting “let’s go outside for breakfast”. But like exercise, I manage to do it on some days. And I hope to have more such days.

  • Read Everything

    In hindsight, this was the most important advice I got as a child. Read everything. Newspaper. Books. Textbook. Children’s magazines. Even the paper which the shopkeeper uses to wrap vegetables in.

    I followed it religiously for most of my life.

    I used to wake up and read the whole newspaper from first page to last. I would read every sentence in my textbooks. I would finish all the books I started. And I would subscribe to every blog I liked on Google Reader and read each post from them.

    One could argue whether this advice is sound. Even for myself it became impractical as the amount of text around me grew. I couldn’t read all sentences of the medical college textbooks (mostly because I was busy doing many other things). There was an explosion of blogs on the internet. While I used to read every message in every WhatsApp group I was in, I found this also to drain a lot of my time.

    But all the while, I’ve been noticing one pattern. There are people who do not read. And they land up in all kinds of trouble.

    This is starkly visible in navigating websites. You can put all the warnings and give people all kind of preparation on what to do on a website. But they’ll still go “I couldn’t figure out how to do this”.

    I used to assume this was a problem with “tech literacy”. That people were afraid of technology, and they didn’t bother to lovingly explore.

    But I’m beginning to form an alternate hypothesis. People are having difficulty with technology because they don’t read!

    They don’t read the description written under a checkbox. They don’t read the warning messages that they’re pressing “OK” to. They don’t read instructions in an email. They read nothing.

    And there could be many reasons why people don’t read. Some people don’t know how to read. Some people have not developed reading fluency to be able to quickly read a sentence or a paragraph. Walls of text are scary for some. This post is not about criticizing people.

    This post is about opening up a potential. If people could read, they could

    • learn about things on their own
    • verify facts by themselves
    • operate independently
    • gain wisdom from umpteen number of books

    There is so much written online about topics like gender and caste it genuinely surprises me how people are eager to “unlearn and relearn” in any online courses. Hello? Why did you not unlearn stuff till 2025?

    But now I think their problem could be that they are not used to reading.

  • No, You Don’t Understand Intersectionality

    Most people who use the word intersectionality understand it as “sum of various identities”.

    Ask them to explain what intersectionality means and they’ll go “Oh, so think about a Dalit woman, she’s doubly oppressed — through caste and through gender”

    This is a crude and problematic understanding of intersectionality.

    Firstly, it leads to what’s called “oppression Olympics”. You start looking at various identities that can be put on a person and then literally count the number of such identities. Then you call them “most oppressed”, “less oppressed”, etc. You compare oppression.

    Secondly, it frames oppression as something that’s static, mathematical, and homogenous. You make intersectionality all about “Dalit women”, “tribal women”, or “black women”.

    And thirdly, you lose the whole point of intersectionality.

    The idea of intersectionality is to not see everyone with a particular identity the same. It is to see whose realities are left out when speaking about a group. One early example is in a women’s right convention, Sojourner Truth standing up and saying “Ain’t I a Woman?“

    It is also about realising oppression isn’t a commodity item that adds up neatly when identities intersect. Say a company has a policy to hire 50% women and 50% from scheduled caste. If the company hires 100 people strictly following this policy, how many scheduled caste women will get hired? 50? 25? 0?

    If you think about intersectionality mathematically, the answer is 25. If you think about it with my preamble in mind, you’ll say 0. But the real answer is “closer to 0”. All women hires would be privileged caste individuals. And most scheduled caste hires would be men.

    Scheduled caste women will get left out from both categories, except the few with class privilege who might get selected. And there will be 0 people with visible disabilities among all the 100.

    You can’t ignore the intersections of “other” realities when you’re talking about intersectionality. It is those “other” factors that make intersectionality different from addition.

    When most maternal deaths in a state are indigenous/tribal women, it’s intersectionality at play. But it is also intersectionality when Dalit men and savarna women call each other out on twitter. And it is indeed intersectionality illustrated when all the CEOs are savarna men. And it is intersectionality which lets you look at things outside the larger identities of class, caste, race, gender and go look at the numerous smaller identities and situations that shape a person.

    One could say “we don’t need to understand intersectionality like this to be able to work for social justice”. And they would be limiting themselves. This understanding of intersectionality is what makes it possible to find solidarity and allyship across movements, to be nuanced when it comes to cancel culture, and to be not stereotyping people based on two or three of their identities.

    This understanding of intersectionality is also a starting point to examine how power operates differently in every moment, every interaction, and every relationship.

    And it’s also the foundation for a love ethic.

  • The Logic of Social Justice

    Today in a discussion at IPH, Meena said “we should all fight against discrimination”. And Prashanth asked “Isn’t that your personal politics? What if people don’t agree with it?” What Prashanth was really asking was “Is there any logic to the demand for social justice?” “Isn’t it just politics?”

    This is the same discussion I had over lunch with Viswanathan (CVN) at MFC’s mid-annual meet in Kozhikode. CVN is widely known for saying “Science is the only way of knowing” which I have wrote about in the past. In the meet also CVN made the same point (I have posted a transcript of the comment here). CVN told about the enlightenment project

    […]By the term “modern society”, I mean a society that upholds the values of “liberty, equality, fraternity and justice”. These values, which we call constitutional values, are really values of ‘Enlightenment’ – or ‘European Enlightenment’ if you insist.

    Enlightenment project is a sociopolitical project that nobody likes in today’s India. The right wing hates it, the left wing has only contempt for it. Of course, this was always a minority’s concern in our country, historically speaking. Unlike the ‘National movement’, this ‘movement’ – if you can call it that name – came up from the ‘depressed castes’. If I am to name a few ‘big names’ that would represent this camp, almost everyone comes from the Dalit-Bahujan background. Mahatma Phule, Babasaheb Ambedkar, Thanthai Periyar, Mahatma Ayyankali, Sahodaran Ayyappan – all from the depressed castes. This is a movement that developed as a response to the day-to-day existential insults heaped upon the depressed caste people over millenia.[…]

    So while eating chicken and ghee rice, I asked CVN, “if you say science is the only way of knowing, how do you know that the values of enlightenment is what we need to work towards?” I was asking what’s the “logic” of working for social justice. 

    CVN initially said “This is outside the realm of science. It is a question for morality.”

    But I wouldn’t relent. I was like “We KNOW that social justice is the right thing. And ‘science’ is the only way of knowing. Then what’s the logic with which we say social justice is the right thing?” I said it was important for us to articulate that logic or if not we wouldn’t have any way to convince others that it was important to fight for social justice.*

    *I actually said that we do have a few other ways. One is to use guns. Another is to use love. And that I am exploring the latter. But the quest for a logic was so important.

    CVN sought more time to think about it.

    And that brings me to an important fight with the postmodernists. In mfc group, I’ve had several sleepless days debating with a bunch of people who think that we have no way of knowing whether homeopathy, ayurveda, etc could be bullshit. That there’s a “possibility” that these are true. That our ability to know the “truth” will always be influenced by where we’re coming from. They think we’re living in some crazy world where we can never know anything, and just everything could be true.

    In that fight, it became clear to me that there is some sort of “logic” which I was looking for in everything. That it is this “logic” or rationality that I was calling science. In another discussion with Prashanth we decided to not call it ‘science’ because it was confused by several people to mean the establishment, but to call it ‘jnana’ or so.

    So, science (broadly construed), or rationality, or ‘jnana’ whatever you call it, is how we tend to get answers to everything.

    Then what’s the science of social justice? What’s the logic of social justice? 

    How do we ‘know’ that social justice is necessary?

    That’s the crux of the challenge.

    One way to answer this would be that this is beyond the realm of science. That it is politics. Or morality.

    If you’ve gone through Michael Sandel’s famous course or book on “Justice”, you’ll notice that MS gives many different “logics” – utilitarianism, libertarianism, Kant, Aristotle, etc. But again, the choice is left to us. So we’re again left with the question of “what’s the logic of our choice to work for social justice and how do we objectively describe it to a skeptic?”

    Let’s do the 2024 thing, and ask Claude.ai what it thinks.

    You’ve raised a profound and challenging question that gets to the heart of moral philosophy. You’re correct that there’s no universally agreed-upon, objective foundation for pursuing justice or any other moral goal. This leads us to the realm of metaethics – the study of the nature of ethical statements and judgments.
    There are several perspectives on this:

    • Moral Realism: Some philosophers argue that objective moral truths exist independently of what any individual or culture believes. Under this view, pursuing justice could be objectively right, even if we can’t always discern what justice entails.
    • Moral Relativism: This view holds that moral truths are relative to cultures or individuals. From this perspective, justice is indeed optional, as it’s just one of many possible value systems.
    • Moral Non-Cognitivism: This approach suggests that moral statements aren’t truth-apt (capable of being true or false) but are expressions of emotion or prescriptions for action.
    • Evolutionary Ethics: Some argue that our sense of justice and morality evolved because it was beneficial for group survival, but this doesn’t necessarily make it objectively “true.”
    • Pragmatism: This view suggests we should pursue justice because it leads to better outcomes for societies, even if we can’t prove it’s objectively correct.

    You’re right that, in a sense, all moral frameworks are “optional.” There’s no physical law of the universe that compels us to be just or moral. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that morality is arbitrary or unimportant.
    Many philosophers argue that even without an objective foundation, we can still have robust, rational discussions about ethics and justice. They suggest that we can use reason, empathy, and shared human experiences to build ethical frameworks that, while not objectively provable, are defensible and beneficial.
    Moreover, from a practical standpoint, societies need some shared ethical framework to function. While the specifics of what constitutes justice may vary, the concept of justice itself seems to be a near-universal feature of human societies.
    In the end, whether to pursue justice (or any moral goal) is a choice we make as individuals and societies. But it’s a choice with profound implications for how we live and interact with others. The lack of an objective foundation doesn’t negate the importance of these choices; if anything, it makes our moral deliberations even more crucial.

    That should settle it. If generations of philosophers haven’t found an answer, can we really find a logic to social justice?

    But there’s an alluring charm to the search for a logic. If only we had an objective way to say justice is right, we could go about our lives much more easily. We just have to tell everyone the logic and abracadabra they are now working for social justice too. The whole world could just be transformed.

    Yet there’s no logic. And therefore the fight for social justice is hard. It is an illogical choice. It is something we enter into through our own free will. And so all the methods of how we transfer “knowledge” comes of no use for us. Because it is not “knowledge”. Social justice is a choice. How do we convey our choice to someone else? That’s the question we actually need to answer. 

    As I’ve written before, after exploring power and realizing it doesn’t work I’ve been exploring love as a framework for this. I’ll write soon about how this has been working out for me in the last two years.

  • How the World Should Be and How the World Is

    There are two modes of thinking in society and social work. “How The World Should Be” mode, and “How The World Is” mode. There is a constant friction between these two. This friction explains hundreds of debates I’ve been in and many of my own moral dilemmas. Understanding this friction and being able to categorize arguments/politics into these categories helps in navigating the human world.

    Let’s start with simple examples.

    Examples

    Example 1

    Situation: Let’s say you’re driving on the road. You drive at a reasonable speed using indicators and avoiding sudden movements of your vehicle. Suddenly someone cuts lanes and jumps in front of you forcing you to break and swerve to a side. Another vehicle behind you hits your back.

    How the world should be: “Nobody should be cutting lanes all of a sudden. That’s dangerous. People who do that should face consequences.”

    How the world is: “People cut lanes. People drive unsafe. You can try to drive defensively, yet you can get involved in an accident. And you will face some or the other consequences.”

    Example 2

    Situation: You’re taking a sick patient to a hospital. You dialed 108 emergency ambulance service which is supposed to be free. After reaching the hospital, the ambulance team wants ₹₹₹ from you.

    How the world should be: “Ambulance service should be free. Healthcare should be free. People shouldn’t have to suffer from lack of money in accessing healthcare”

    How the world is: “There is a lot of corruption. People demand bribe in healthcare in many different ways.”

    Example 3

    Situation: It is election time. Politicians are using religion to swing votes. Issues like healthcare, education are being neglected.

    How the world should be: “People should hold politicians accountable and not let them get away with corrupted politics”

    How the world is: “People are voting for the corrupt politicians (for whatever reasons they may have).”

    Differences

    As might be obvious from the examples, there are several differences between how the world should be and how the world is.

    It is easy to see how the world is. One just has to live in it. Every day is a lesson in “the world as it is”. It doesn’t take much effort to understand and study it. It is accessible to everyone at all times. It is, in fact, unavoidable.

    The world that should be is an imaginary world. It requires us to think of something that doesn’t exist already.  It is set in the future. It is described using values, morality, and philosophy. It is harder to envision.

    The world that should be is controversial too. Different people believe in different futures. There is often mutually exclusive worlds that come up. You can’t have hyper-industrialized cities and clean air together. You can’t have an authoritarian state and a democratic state together. You can’t have religion and science together. Sometimes the imaginations aren’t that starkly different, but they’re still different in nuanced ways. It is those nuanced differences that leads to very many debates and fights within progressive groups.

    Implication

    The differences between the two ways of looking at the world immediately leads to the following important points.

    There is a vast amount of things to know about how the world is

    What’s happening in the world? How do human beings behave? What guides their actions? Is there any predictability? Why is there corruption? Why is there caste? Why is there religion? Why are people violent? Why is there inequity? Why is there gender? Why is there sickness? Why is there hate? Why is there love? Why is there harmony? Why is there peace? What is it that makes human beings tick? How do humans survive? What is the human spirit?

    There is a vast amount of things to know about how the world should be

    How might the world be? How would it be organized? What will be the weaknesses of that world? What would the strengths be? What challenges will we face? What human potential will we unlock in that world?

    There is a vast amount of things to know about how we can reach the world that should be from the world that is

    Knowing how the world should be is one thing. Knowing how to get from here to there is another thing. Any action we need to take towards the world that should be should start from the world that is. Firstly because that is the only world we have access to (by the laws of physics). But more importantly because it is the same people we are talking about. It is the same human beings. It is the same world that we want to transform.

    We need theories of change. We need experiments and examples. We need strategies, intermediary states/goals, milestones, checkpoints, and so on.

    Many dilemmas are manifestation of the friction between these stages of change

    I have struggled thinking about power. I hate hierarchy. And I see power as the core of hierarchy. In my “how the world should be” thinking, I used to constantly do things to give up power. But then, I discovered that without power it is very hard to do anything useful. This was very hard to accept though. I found even more reasons to not gain power. I said “Love is Enough“. But love wasn’t enough. “Love without power is sentimental and anemic” says Martin Luther King. 

    Here’s how the above framework helps in my dilemma.

    How the world is: Power centered and hierarchic.
    How the world should be: Love centered and anarchic/anti-hierarchy.
    How do we go from here to there: Power and love applied as needed for the change.

    There is another dilemma that’s been with me since my childhood. That of religion. I am a rationalist. I do not even use the word “atheist” to describe myself because I don’t want to discuss the idea of god even for saying that there is no such thing. For a long time I stayed with the idea that religions should be rejected en masse. Then I realized that a very huge number of human beings are deeply religious. So as per the framework this is how it should be resolved.

    How the world is: Religious and intolerant.
    How the world should be: Rational and secular.
    How do we go from here to there: Infuse rationalism into and through religion.

    This is very much in line of how Gandhi uses Gita and Rama to make Hindus become better. Or how Ambedkar uses Buddha to make life better for many people. Religion has been used by them creatively. They infused modernity into religion.

    Conclusion

    If you find yourself in the middle of a heated debate with people who are politically aligned, or with yourself (dilemmas), see if you can categorize the sides into “How the World Is” and “How the World Should Be”. Then think about how you would strategize for going from here to there.