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Ssc  SOCIAL STUDY CIRCLE   di

                                                           (ESTD 1982) 

                                 dalitindia

www.dalitindia.com                                 dalitindia@rediffmail.com

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DALITS' FAMILY LIVES

 

          We Dalits are basically land based Rural People.  Even those belonging to the Urban Areas and Cities have grown up with Urbanisation, and seen the Cities vertually growing around them.  But most of us hold very little land.  Hence We are landless Agricultural Labourers, used to hard work during the agricultural seasons, and total idling off-season.

 

          We are thus used to work as labourers under the landlords, or other cultivators, and look after our Chicks and Hens, and tend the Pigs, or otherwise mostly others Goats and Cows.  We are very good at these and are used to being browbeaten, shouted upon, abused and kicked around.  With no jobs, no work, and no entertainment, time hung heavy on our heads, and We never knew what to do other than fight amongst ourselves over petty and small little issues.  We are thus past masters in quarrels and fights.  Of course We are very good at petty quarels, small and long fights, crudely settling small disputes, and to be happy ourselves with our beedies, cheap cigerattes, country cigars, also our liquor, and fights over the later.  Men and Women, boys and girls were both without any exception good in these quarrels and fights.  These provided good entertainments.  And with little other opportunities and exception, Cinema and their horoes and heroins, villians and vamps provided us appropriate roal models for us to copy dream or emulate  With little or no lands or anyother property, or job with regular income and wealth, there was vertually nothing at stake.  So We as boys and Girls are used to freely choosing our partners in life, quarreling and fighting within and outside our marriage and families, going in for quick on the spot divorce without any stigma within our communities, and remarriage.  These past experiences, happenings in our close and far families and amongst relatives, memories and models prove to be dangerous precedences.

 

          Most of us are first generation literates, employees and city dwellers.  Some of us are a little better off, being the sons and daughters of factory workers, sweepers in Municipal Corporations, peons and attendants in small firms and Govt Offices or Public Sector, or at the most Clerks and School Teachers.  Therefore, We do not know how to adjust to a life of a busy competing city, or a responsible life as Engineers, Doctors, Managers ans senior officers, and successful husbands or wives, fathers or mothers, sons or daughters, and brothers or sisters or in-laws.  When it comes to marriage, We do not know how to choose our partners, brides and grooms for our sons and daughters, or how to pick up and settle alliances.  We are often influenced by money, power, position, temptations, unspecified unspoken assumed hopes speculations and impracticable dreams about the future.  We want to make a quick and spectacular gain through marriage with our spouses and by the help of our in-laws.  When to get overnight change our lives and be transformed into a big and higher World.  When these fail to materialise We become disssapointed, despondent and frustrated ruining ourselves our families in-laws, other relatives and friends.

 

          Some of our well placed officials and authorities use their positions and contacts to fish for big fries freshly entering services, oftemn unmindful of the status of their families up-bringing growth and experiences as children, students and in their youth.  The youngsters also hoping to climb quickly through the hierarchy with the imaginary influence support backing and help of their senior in-laws soon find that their in-laws were only individual officials who had gone up merely due to their Service with Seniority and primarily because of Reservations.  Hence they could really not be of much use in lifting them up in the caste conscious prejudiced biased anti-Dalit Govt Hierarchy.  Meanwhile, their spouses being the off-spring of senior officers have very high bloated unrealistic egoes more than the parents, which crudely and adversely impinges on their poor up-bringing, childhood experiences and mannerisms picked up in their own life, as well as on their poor village parents.  As result their personal life and relationship with their spouses, parents and in-laws get highly strained.  Their spouses living with protected bloated egos under their parents find life different out in the world, when they have to make it and live by themselves.  With poor and little help fom their partners from a poor village background they quickly run aground in no time.

 

          The above are invariably true in most of the cases, except for those landing in Services like Defence and Railways, where living in big colonies in closed circles the new husbands and wives find some role models to emulate and examples to copy from friends, equals and neighbours.  There the Problems are of a different nature.  Except these, other SCs&STs find their married life miserable, unlivable and do not know how to run, manage and live with their families.  Those who live somehow make a poor life as an allibi for a life, after having married.  Those who had married for money, relatives and others back from their Villages, or the other castes from schools, colleges, training institutions, service colleagues, office mates, end up with a very very miserable lives, with unequal and incompatable and unmanagable partners.

 

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