Lived reality & general disillusionment of youth in India

My savarna parents too had their share of difficulties with delayed salaries (my mom was not paid her salaries for 6 months in a row on couple of occasions), she had no maternity leave, she had sold sarees in trains as well as once home from her gruelling work schedule, hour long train commutes to work in extremely crowded trains, under-employment and had to single-handedly fund my education & home expenses. My dad has suffered redundancy on number of occasions but thanks to my mom he was never allowed to take refuge in alcohol or other addictions. My education in a private school was of pathetic standards & I magically started scoring good marks only after I joined private tuitions of my own school teachers. My school days were horrible because i was effeminate and was bullied at school and in my neighbourhood. I found refuge in art and pursued architecture with a big hope that arty people are not necessarily masculine but that assumption was far from reality. I was assumed gay by my mom and i readily confirmed so. My mom who had worked so hard to raise me well against heaps of odds was heart-broken & depressed. She took her sweet time to come to terms with my sexuality. By then i had completed my college days and was very upbeat about the far-right BJP’s sponsored mirage of Shining India. I had forgotten the wounds the city had faced during the communal riots after the mosque’s demolition..and far-right Bal Thackeray had seized power claiming to develop the city to the standards of Singapore and Shanghai. He had invited Michael Jackson for a musical concert, Enron for building india’s biggest power station fired by gas and not the polluting coal. He delivered his promise of building 40 big & small flyovers. Opened up the development of defunct power looms for building high-end housing & office tower blocks. However we all were distracted enough to miss the fine print. All this was done to jack-up the property rates which had fallen because of the outbreak of riots in early 90s. Under Shiv-Sena - BJP rule series of bomb-blasts & terror attacks took place. We were fed that muslims are harbouring terrorists from Pakistan and numerous muslim families were robbed of their bread winners for having links with terror groups and this continues till today. Shiv Sena once in power was positioning itself as pro-development and sole proprietor of hindu pride & dignity. Many fell for this propaganda as there was no other choice left. It won the hearts of poor people allegedly across castes and religions as it regularised many informal settlements. However only the small pockets of informal settlements with most workshops/ small & medium scale enterprises run by relatively uppercastes in caste hierarchy got regularised for paving the way for gentrification of certain city pockets. Many small such pockets were and are still getting gentrified but large ones are still standing strong against the gentrification agenda. 

Coming back to my sympathy seeking savarna self...i had to witness this mirage of rapid development, gulp the brahminical agenda that to have stakes in this fast pace development one has to vote for far-right parties, diss and dehumanise lowercastes because they are having it too easily thanks to whatever little social security and assured representation in academics and public -sector jobs. Caste would only cross my mind when it came to seeking an admission to good college or a post in government sector. My savarna privilege thanks to my hard-working, humble parents had me pursue my post-graduation in UK, a feat in itself to have secured an education loan after having it denied twice by a bank meant mostly for savarnas & inspite of having all my parents savings there & then later by a public sector bank because the housing secretary, a nosy brahmin wont sign the no-objection certificate for mortgaging my parents house. Finally i abuse this secretary and my parents apologise and get his approval... i take my flight to UK with much hope only to get entirely disillusioned by the lived reality. Rents were expensive, professors were socialist, some were neo-liberal and chinese at the same time. The realities were full of contrasts. Socialist labour party had lost because of heaps of goof-ups and declaring war on Iraq, banks had failed, economy was in shambles and my sex-life was only limited to mostly closeted pakistani and Indian men that too not beyond one-night stands. My grades kept falling and i failed to write a thesis properly in the first attempt. Only my pro-socialism professors helped me through, another Indian origin professor dealing with issues pertaining to the developing-world was involving socialism-driven students to suggest quantitative & qualitative solutions to provide livelihood & dignified housing to people from Mumbai & other impoverished locales amidst rapidly developing economies. It was all very interesting to see socialists committing resources for valid solutions and to have socialist professors sincerely helping a rabid, right-winger student like me finish his thesis. The aspirational middle-class in me oblivious of caste consciousness started masquerading as a responsible democrat to begin with. I had to return to India because i could no longer afford the expensive & dull standard of living in UK at a time India was preparing to elect a mass-murderer as the prime-minister from a party i admired for being pro-development inspite of the fact it had demolished a mosque by criminalising the whole of muslim community. I suddenly change my guards to an extent that i openly assert my wish to convert to Islam, become extremely polemic against the prime-ministerial nominee and lose my mind as he becomes the prime-minister with sheer 29% vote share. My uppercaste, middle-class privilege lands me a job, lets me pursue a tall-building project although a silly residential one to house families who insanely believe in Vastu-Shastra...a pseudoscience of sorts which dictates planning of modern air-conditioned housing apartments. The worst part of the building was a seperate pair of lifts meant only for maids & service staff. I lose interest in the project under the guidance of an uppercaste, abusive senior who had tolerated other brahmin uppercaste employees for no purpose in his organisation. I quit, join a MNC, there too i get disillusioned by an extremely authoritative lady senior whose sole purpose was to undermine every individual who seemed comfortable in his/ her skin. Then joined an employer who would not pay his employees on time. Each passing day post my post grad was enduring as it was before my post-graduation. My lived reality was not changing for good and it isn’t changing for better even after compromising heaps to settle in a hostile & unprofessional work environment surrounded by supposedly meritorious but extremely unprofessional uppercaste seniors who are champions at casual sexism, casteism, heteronormativity after having travelled repeatedly to the civilised parts of the world ruled by namesake social democracies. I am utterly a disillusioned self and sure most others are but thanks to roundtableindia & its contributors i have finally been convinced that oppressive forces are smartly at work to help only very few secure the means & resources of production. Race, caste, gender hierarchy can immensely help consolidate resources and favour the very few. This lived reality is unbearable to live because the disenfranchised, disenchanted & disillusioned are being fed a ‘rag to riches’ propaganda to tolerate socio-economic evils which helps the privileged increasingly oppress and displace the majority.