The little things that seldom matter...

There is a team in Chennai that does a very commendable project in connecting blood donors and those in need.  Blood is a very precious donation that can be easily done by everyone subject to certain physical and health requirements but the mismatch between requirement and supply can be high and that is why Team Bleed and others like them are great and deserve every bit of support they get.

This topic is however not just about blood donation but about how blood must ideally be segregated in our country after donation. Today at present blood is segregated by O+/-, A+/-, B+/- and AB+/- (hope I got them all) but in doing so they are forgetting one important thing; the provenance of the blood. How can the blood not be tagged with the caste of the donor in this caste mad country? How can the sacrilegious act of transfusing the blood of a lower caste person to a pure higher class person be permitted? How can a doctor from a lower caste operate upon someone from a higher caste? When places of worship are purified because of the presence of someone from the lowest class, how can the defiling of an upper class body be permitted by impure lowest class blood or hands?

Hardly surprising that for small things like blood or organ donation, caste is ignored because when it comes to other things like entering a place of worship it is criminal forgetting that the place may have been built by the same people who are not permitted entry. It is not worth a second thought when the rice is grown by a lower caste but it cannot be cooked by the lower caste. It is hardly surprising because in our country we have our priorities right, the small things seldom matter.

(Image courtesy: Google Images)