Birth is a beginning…not an end, unlike how the Caste System in Nepal treats it.
When a hill so-called high caste Hindu counters a member of another caste describing the challenges in their lives because of the caste they are born into by saying that they too struggle and have had to work hard to get as far as they have gotten in life, they are basically making a false-equivalence argument. What is a false-equivalence argument anyway? I go into the details by using an analogy -- that of climbing Mount Everest.
Being told again and again that very little or no caste-based discrimination exists in Nepal, I started documenting, on Twitter, news reports about just that -- caste-based discrimination. The articles I shared in the tweets were mostly about discrimination and mistreatment of Dalits, the lowest caste. In this blog post, I have reproduced all the tweets in that thread.
Nepali society struggles to make social progress for a number of different reasons. One of the reasons is that we have a number of social stigmas and many subjects and issues are taboo. In other words, most Nepalis live in denial of many issues plaguing the society. Here are a number of those stigmas and taboo subjects.
The first step to addressing them is to admit to the fact that they are issues. Then we can have honest conversations and discourses about them and find solutions for them.
The fourth one in the series about Nepal needing a revolution…a revolution of the mind.
Here’s more of one of many MANY reasons why.
Men using their positions of power to thwart women's drive and squash their potential by focusing on her body is a form of violence. This is the story of a young, driven, and talented woman who was a victim of just that!
When we raise and educate children using violence, of course, they grow up to be violent, especially the boys. No wonder, domestic violence is such a major issue in the country. We have to do a number of things to curve that. One of them is to eliminate the use of violence against children, whether at home or at school. We should instead raise and educate them compassionately and by engaging with them in a healthy and developmentally appropriate manner etc.
