Excess baggage

I remember a scene vaguely in a Sathiyaraj movie where a kid asks him why he was using his caste as a surname and Sathiyaraj gets a paradigm shift moment. I look round and see that this is not an isolated case, the naming I mean.

A whole lot of people proudly put their community or more specifically their castes behind them as if it is some honorary degree. The question is why?

This is a land which has given birth to many religions and the predominant way of life, it is not a religion mind you threw up some rules on who does what and so came the class system where one prayed, one sowed, one traded, one ruled or something like that and the rest they say is history.

Today I know a “Vanniya Kula Kshatriya” if you understand something of the language you understand that it would amount to a “trader class warrior” and he is sitting in a software company. Isn't this a fair sign of how obsolete some of these "rules" have become.We have left so much behind and yet we hold on to so much of the past, even today this excess baggage serves very little to a normal man except the few who make a living out of it. The political parties will head this list and their very raison d’être is something that is worth nothing more than a piece of paper which is needed to get some benefits of the governments misplaced largesse be it education or a job. For everything else the paper can remain in the cupboard till the big day when a match is made. Marriages may be made in heaven but the right “communitications” are made down here.

Let us move ahead people from the divisions of the past and let not an inter caste marriage become a jaw dropping event. Ironical that you can change your faith and you have the freedom to do so but you cannot do anything about your caste or community. To sign off a small joke I picked up:

An honorary degree is like the curl in the tail of a pig:
- it follows the main part of the animal
- it is highly ornamental
- in no way does it improve the quality of the ham

(Read the same replacing degree with caste)