Touch-me-not-ism
A Dalit lady teacher has been bearing the brunt of the Dalit-non-Dalit divide deeply set in the society, particularly in the villages of the hills. Trial started for her after she was posted in a school based in a forward caste- dominated village in Pauri district. Since then she has been facing acute problem of accommodation. She neither managed it in the houses owned by the Dalits nor in those owned by the forward caste people. As things stand, the houses the dalits own are too bad in shape for rent and the forward caste people refuse to give her accommodation on rent because of her ‘debilitating’ caste. She was thus forced to take a house outside the village.
She trudges all the hilly way to reach the school every morning. A villager confided that the schism was so strong that even the natural calamity that befell the district in 2014 failed to flatten things. All the villagers took shelter in higher places for safety. Those from the forward castes were forced to stay in houses owned by the Dalits. But they merely stayed and refused to take food. Such an antediluvian practice prevailing in Pauri district, which boasts of begetting two chief ministers, reflects it in poor light, say the observers who know that things are too deep for the highfalutin platitudes to erase.
Sighs of re-jig
The police department re-jig has exulted some and left others sulking in despair. As it was a long overdue process, many IPSs and other cops were waiting expectantly in anticipation of plum postings in the district they had set their hearts on. However, a lingering dispute over the transfer of a high profile IPS kept things stalled for many months. Patience wearing thin with the expectations soaring sky high, an IPS asked his colleague whose problematic transfer was stonewalling the reshuffle to fix the matter with the appropriate people at the earliest so as to remove the impediment to the fulfillment of their hearts’ desire. But what finally unfolded is that while the IPS dispute around whom kept things hang fire for months got what he longed for his colleague who was sounding impatient got nothing.
To his sorrow, his desire to get posted to a bigger district was unfulfilled. He was posted to a place which is bereft of any aura. He even was shunted out of the district where his writ ran before the cursed ‘re-jig’. Gloomy-faced, he was found reconciling himself to his sad plight while explaining things away as conundrum thrown by enigmatic destiny.