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.
The story of two young Nepali adults in love but struggling with a dilemma that many like them do: they are from different castes and their parents don't approve of their desire to get married and start a family. But the comments under their story on Facebook, where I found it, fills me with hope!
An educational exercise that explores how the realities of power, authority, and societal values influence our perceptions of the world. If you are an educator, you could easily do this with your students at school or college or university.