At first sight, with his well pressed black uniform and stars over them on his shoulders, he appeared to be a cop. When he saw us, he gave a smile and quipped, “So, you are from Bombay, huh?” It is not hard to recognize Indians from their face. He told later that one of his friends had been to Mumbai and apparently he had also taught him a word or two about Hinduism as he was beaming with excitement when he chanted “Hare Rama Hare Krishna” in front of us. I had to explain him how India extends beyond the city Mumbai and how its culture extends beyond Hinduism.
All this took place as I was waiting for the train at an underground Metro station in Atlanta last Saturday. The guy then went on to ask me whether I felt away from home in America and was the land too foreign to me? Then he went on to speak about his own cult, the black population of USA. The African-American population is considerably high in Atlanta. He began to say that how America has never accepted them as their own and how the black themselves have forgotten about their own roots. He expressed his anguish over the fact that none of the blacks today knew their ancestral African language. He also lambasted the ladies who were attempting to follow the whites in terms of fashion and mannerisms. He was particularly annoyed by the fact that it was not long ago that the white women used to get transplants in their different body parts, mostly as a provocation from the figures of the black women. But nowadays it was the other way round with the black women imitating the whites in fashion.
As the man was going through his discourse, I noticed a logo over his shirt pocket which read “All Blacks Panther Party.” The next thing I noticed was that I was sitting in the midst of a lot of black people around me. It was then that I realized that his lecture was in no way a means an attempt at acquainting a foreigner to the American history that has seen the blacks suffer a lot through the ages. (By the way, I already had come to learn a lot about their struggle after my visit to the High Museum of Art and the Martin Luther King Memorial site earlier in the day.) Evidently, he was just trying to inspire the black community, which he clearly felt hasn’t got its due even after the Civil War and King’s revolution of the 60s. After the train came, I saw him continuing with his speech, directed at the blacks once again.
Its insteresting and strange at the same time that a developed nation like America too is not free from the racial inequity. But perhaps the only big difference of this with the much maligned caste system of India is that when its the nation to the call, all rise up equally. Anyway, the American government has done all it can to bring them at par with the whites in the social structure. And that doesn’t mean reserving seats for them in top educational institutions and government jobs. In India, the different castes have been used brilliantly by the politicians for their survival and some have gained benefits just because of the virtue of their being at the lower ladder of the caste structure. Very much unlike the fact that Barrack Obama is knocking at the door of White House not because of some partisan politics that has paved his way all through. He has achieved all this through his individual brilliance and hard work. He didn’t need any reservation in Columbia University and Harward Law School or to get a Presidential nomination for that matter.
