How to make india better place essay

The oceans bathing its shores on three sides and the mighty Himalayas to the north have given my country natural boundaries. Once again, the attraction of the mountain has attracted many adventures to this land of rich culture. Our state is secular. On his knees breathe the happy disciples of the different religions of the world. We have a unique culture that has been vested throughout the centuries.

There is a lot of diversity among our people. We speak several languages, we worship many gods and yet we have the same spirit, the spirit of India, which crosses all parts of our country and binds us all together. We have great unity in diversity. Basically, Indian culture is tolerant and absorbing.

His nature is assimilative. The democratic installation facilitates the process. Diversity in all aspects of society serves as a source of strength and wealth. The different ways of worshipping and believing represent the underlying uniformity.

They promote a spirit of harmony and fraternity. This goes beyond all considerations of religious, regional, linguistic diversity. India is rich in dialects and languages. Twenty-two languages constitutionally enjoy official language status, but Hindi is recognized as the lingua franca of the nation. Although different regions have different regional affiliations, they are all Indian. Indian dance and theatre are brilliant examples of unity in diversity. But like the premises, the power of the political, governmental, and intellectual elite, which have traditionally been its clientele, is on the wane.

This power is increasingly challenged by the commercial elite who frequent the new hotels. It is much too early to say what the precise outcome of this development will be; it is by no means certain that the business and commercial interests will come to unequivocally dominate the society. Nonetheless, India is clearly a much more bourgeois society than it was 25 or even ten years ago. While the middle class is clearly becoming more prosperous, the fate of the vast majority of the population is more uncertain.

On average, life seems to be improving for people in the villages but less dramatically than for the urban middle class. The increased prosperity of some is paralleled by the impoverishment of others. Many agricultural and artisan jobs, which in the past have offered some level of security and penurious subsistence, are disappearing, leaving unemployment and acute poverty. The economic development I have described cannot obscure the fact that the average Indian is still extremely poor by Western criteria.

Still, this fundamental fact should not cause one to overlook the important economic development now in progress. II My thesis is that dirt and development are two of the most striking characteristics of contemporary India. Yet so often is the Western visitor overwhelmed by poverty and dirt, the significant improvements are overlooked.

Dirt existing alongside of development may seem contradictory. Should not development begin to transform dirt into cleanliness? How can a society that is so stunningly dirty—and some would say getting worse in this respect—also be in the midst of fundamental economic growth? There are at least two answers to this question. First, development nearly always produces dirt.

Utter unnatural neglect, putrefied nature, comes to be his life-element. Nearly all urban centers in the midst of rapid development have their share of dirt and filth. Urbanization per se seems to create problems in maintaining cleanliness, as New York, Newark, and New Orleans all know. Since economic development in India and elsewhere is linked to urbanization, it is not surprising that development leads to more dirt.

While there is undoubtedly some truth in this first answer, it is too simple. Dirt in India is not only or even primarily a result of growth and urbanization. Other Asian cities are experiencing rapid growth but their level of dirt seems different from that of Indian cities. Something is distinctive, if not unique, about the quantity and quality of dirt in India. If India is to be understood, we must understand the nature of this distinctiveness. First, we must answer a preliminary question: What is dirt?

In her near classic work, Purity and Danger, anthropologist Mary Douglas says that dirt is simply matter that is out of place. Dirt is a form of disorder defined only in relationship to some system of order. The point is obvious—after it has been said.

The rich earth of the Mississippi River delta or an Iowa cornfield may be soil but is not truly dirt until it is on the living room carpet. In other words, dirt is deviance. In traditional India dirt is primarily social rather than physical.

In the past Indians have been more fundamentally concerned about the social cleanliness and purity of groups than the physical cleanliness of individuals or objects. Stated another way, the kind of order that has been most important to Indians is social order rather than physical orderliness. Indians are not indifferent to the order and cleanliness of physical objects—far from it. But the most important kind of order concerns the appropriate relationship between social categories of people.

What constitutes physical cleanliness is largely derived from the nature of social purity; physical order is defined by the nature of the social order. At the core of this traditional social order is the caste system, a complex and controversial human institution whose roots extend deep into antiquity.

According to the classical religious texts, the population is divided into four ranked categories called varnas: the Brahmans who are priests, the Kshatriyas who are warriors, the Vaisyas who are farmers and merchants, and the Sudras who are the servants and laborers. In addition to these four categories there are the untouchables, who are in principle outside the system but in fact are an integral part of it.

In the actual society—in contrast to the classical texts—each of these five categories is in turn subdivided into more specific castes that tend to be associated with a traditional occupation. There are hundreds, if not thousands of castes that are members of the Shudra varna: barbers, carpenters, blacksmiths, goldsmiths, potters, cowherders, flower growers, vegetable gardeners, grain parchers, tailors, and bangle makers—to mention only a few of the most common Shudra castes.

These are categories rather than actual social groups. There may be thousands of local caste groups that fall into or compose one of the caste categories. The actual caste structure in a given local area is composed of a small proportion of all of these possible categories. There are nearly always some type of Brahmans and an array of Shudra castes in a local area. Often there will also be groups that claim Kshatriya or Vaisya status, but in many areas these groups are not represented.

These local caste units range in size from a few hundred to maybe tens of thousands and are the actual social groups that make up the system. Usually these local groups are endogamous. That is, they marry within this group or select spouses from an allied group of very similar status.

It is not uncommon for there to be more than one of these local endogamous groups belonging to the same caste category in a given area. For example, there are often more than one group of Brahmans or cowherders in a given area who do not intermarry or dine together, even though from the point of view of other people they belong to the same caste.

But from their own perspective substantial enough differences may exist among all those called cowherders so that there are quite distinctive segments who do not intermarry or dine together. These local groups are hierarchically ranked with the Brahmans at the top and the untouchables at the bottom.

In a local area there is usually general agreement about what groups are at the top and the bottom of this hierarchy. The exact ranking of those groups in the middle is subject to dispute, but most of the disagreement is over whether a particular caste is just above or just below another local caste group, not over the general location of these castes in the local hierarchy.

If the elementary concern has been social order, then the essential thing that had to be kept ordered—and hence clean—were social categories. People must not be allowed to stray out of their categories, for to do so is to create the worst kind of disorder—religious and social—and to threaten others with the most contaminating kind of dirt and impurity. It would be considered a terrible event if a Brahman were to fall into a cesspool full of human excrement.

We may have seemed to stray from our focus on dirt, but we have not. This opposition underlies the hierarchy, which is the superiority of the pure to the impure, underlies separation because the pure and the impure must likewise be kept separate, and underlies the division of labor because the pure and the impure occupations must be kept separate.

Moreover, most would agree that notions of physical cleanliness and dirtiness are integrally related to notions of the social status of different caste groups. III Because ideas about physical cleanliness and the concepts of social purity from which they derive are from one to three thousand years old, they are not completely congruent with a Western germ theory of disease.

For example, water, used in the ritually appropriate manner, is religiously purifying even though it may be highly contaminated with pathological organisms. Stated another way, the elaborate efforts at purification may restore order—and hence cleanliness— from the Hindu religious point of view, but it may or may not increase sanitation from a Western scientific point of view. Other systems of order and purity simply have a higher priority.

What makes the situation particularly confusing is that at certain points classical Indian notions of purity and modern Western concepts overlap to a significant degree. For example, the Indian preoccupation with frequent bathing, washing of clothes, and cleansing of cooking utensils obviously has much in common with Western notions. The third point is that in traditional India cleanliness and purity are to a significant degree an inexpansible resource: if some are to be clean and pure, others must remain polluted.

This is related to the concept of dirt being rooted in social relations. The purity of the upper caste was in large measure dependent upon having lower castes responsible for the removal of waste and dirt. Most untouchables and the lower status Shudra castes are traditionally associated with occupations involving the removal of dirt and filth. More accurately, sweepers removed all animals who did not have hooves; a slightly higher caste removed hoofed animals. Today those sweepers who live in the cities are usually the municipal garbage collectors.

Barbers remove hair and nail pairings and in South India clean the bodies of the dead. Washermen clean clothes but are especially stigmatized because they are expected to clean clothes soiled by menstrual blood. The key point is that in the traditional concepts of Hinduism, for some caste to be clean and ritually pure, others must be dirty.

In the language of game theory, cleanliness and purity are to a significant degree a zero-sum resource; there is only so much to go around; the question is how will it be distributed. Hence public sanitation systems, which raise the status of the work done by lower caste and untouchables, may be seen as a threat by the upper caste orthodox. This concept of purity is largely implicit rather than something Indians frequently discuss and debate.

Such a conception of dirt and purity is strange to Americans for whom cleanliness has long been next to godliness. And not only is cleanliness a sacred value in American society; like salvation it is in principle available to all who truly seek it. For Americans, cleanliness is an infinitely expansible resource, and dirt is something that can be eliminated. Ironically, this optimistic notion of cleanliness may be what seems strange and peculiar to future generations.

As we have increasingly been confronted by the problems of litter, contaminated water, nuclear waste which will be dangerous for thousands of years, and an unemployable underclass that seems largely impervious to either liberal or conservative strategies of development, the infinite expansibility of cleanliness seems more and more problematic. At the very least it appears that some of the things many people seem to want—more automobiles, fast food, disposable containers, and more energy—will have to be limited and regulated if we are not to be awash in our own garbage.

Hence, if the Indian concept of purity as a limited resource seems strange to us, it is no more inherently illogical than the optimistic American illusion that our ability to create order and cleanliness is virtually unlimited. While this notion of cleanliness as an inexpansible resource is primarily relevant to the purity and impurity of the social groups which make up the caste system in India, it is implicitly carried over into attitudes about the physical world.

Much of the physical space in India is ordered in terms of its relative religious purity and impurity. The rooms of every orthodox Hindu house are ranked in terms of their relative purity and hence accessibility to outsiders. Purest of all is the kitchen area usually including the space for household gods where food is prepared. The more concerned a family is with religious purity, the more elaborate and rigorous will be the rules for preparation and serving of food.

Similarly the more restrictive they will be about who can partake food in this area. At the opposite extreme are the toilet facilities. Areas that are associated with human excrement are for the orthodox Hindu inherently polluting. Purity can be fully restored only by a complete bath and a clean set of clothes. This does not mean that the purity of the toilet area does not vary; the area must be purified regularly so as to minimize the polluting effect that using it involves.

Moreover, for the orthodox upper caste someone else must clean it; their purity can be maintained only if such work is carried out by others who absorb the pollution that is inherent in the task. Since cleaning of toilet facilities is considered inherently degrading, it is left to the lowest and most deprived strata of society, who understandably are not always enthusiastic about their work.

Moreover, since even supervising this task too closely contaminates one, the work often tends to be done in a rather perfunctory manner. Other rooms have an intermediate level of purity. The veranda or court yard is purer than the toilet area but still has a tendency to be polluted because of its openness to outsiders. Living and storage rooms will rank in between the public areas and the kitchen. It is, at least for traditional orthodoxy, conceptually impossible to keep everything clean.

The very process of day-to-day life involves biological functions and social contacts that are inherently polluting. The best that one can hope for is to maintain a relative purity. This purity is relative in two senses.

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