RussianLadyAbroad

The casts system is presented in a very bad way to all Europeans, but I have seen a different side of it on the very first day in India. When your grandfather was a jeweller, your father is a jeweller, you have no choice but to become a jeweller as well. You will not fight for a place at a university of architecture to become an architect, you will not try to collect money for a career of a politician – because you are born to become a jeweller – and you accept it. But you may dream to become a bank works in your next life, if you wish! I believe, this is the main reason why India had so many talented people for many centuries – professional knowledge, generated within the centuries, were transferred to every new generation.

At the same time, we will never be able to understand it in Europe or in the US. “From nothing to everything” is our goal – while in India you are already born with everything you may have. This is the difference, this is the reason, why we will never be satisfied with what we have – but Indians will be. This is the main though we seek in India while developing our soul with Yoga and ancient philosophies. But we will never find it, because this is not the kind of answer we are looking for.

The collective social mind in India means supporting each other. Everybody in a cast system has his place. I have seen people who were born on the streets to beg being children of beggars whose parents were street beggars as well. Haven’t you notice that those people somehow receive food and water to survive? Because the care about other casts is deep in the roots of the Indian social system. A man from the middle class, for instance, would not iron his clothes or shave his beard by himself. He would give this job to others, pay for their services and therefore support their families with money. My travel guide in Delhi being from a “middle class” caste supported six families on the weekly basis, saving her own time for being a guide for us. You might bite me for that, buy I found this system much more humane than the one in Russia, when those buying caviar in the supermarket ignore old people without any money even for bread.