Rishi Sunak and India

The announcement on Oct 24 of Rishi Sunak's appointment as PM was understandably big news in the UK.

In India too!

One, it was on Diwali, and coincidence was instantly picked up.

Two, he got married in Bengaluru in 2009, a celebrity event.

Three, the new PM's father-in-law Narayana Murthy, who co-founded Infosys, is a household name in Bengaluru. So much so that it was as if the next-door-neighbour had become the UK PM.

The Prime Minister's mother-in-law, Sudha Murty, is equally famous. A computer engineer, she is a very popular author of children's books, educationist, and philanthropist.

Not surprisingly, one of the jokes doing the rounds was that parents here have a new career goal and benchmark for the children! (See, what Rishi has become ...!")

On Oct. 24, soon after it was known who the next British PM will be, Vidyarthi Bhavan, the iconic restaurant here tweeted a photo of him at the restaurant.

#RishiSunak is going to become the next PM of UK.
Happy to know that he will be the first Indian-origin & the youngest British Prime Minister.
We wish him good luck & may he become the most successful PM of UK by sailing through all the turbulence pic.twitter.com/JhWLtcVTu2

— Vidyarthi Bhavan (@VidyarthiBhavan) October 24, 2022

(By the way, I had written about Vidyarthi Bhavan in an A to Z Challenge post last year.)

All this excitement in India will die down soon.

Hinduism and India are the last things on the new British PM's mind. 

He'll be extremely careful and not do anything that might be seen as being partial to the country his wife, Akshata, is a citizen of. Not to mention the controversies linked to her, which he seems to have survived for now.

Caste: The Lies That Divide Us by Isabel Wilkerson

Though India has made commendable progress in various fields, we are still not free from the shackles of over 3,000 castes and more than 25,000 sub-castes.

True, it's a legacy of the past. But sadly, modern-day education, knowledge, awareness, affluence, etc., have hardly been able to rid the society of caste-based prejudices.  

The fact that caste is a major factor in all elections has only ensured that it stays in public discourses.

In this well-researched book, award-winning American journalist Isabel Wilkerson delves deep into both caste as well as race. 

She narrates many real-life stories to describe the dehumanising impact of stigmatisation, and how the system has got perpetuated by the power vested in the dominant groups.

In India, there are also cases wherein because of their beliefs like "reincarnation" and "life after death", some people, who are victims of subjugation, quietly accept their fate, as the inevitable consequences of the "bad deeds" in their "previous life".  

Why this book needs to be read is because the historical knowledge of this system will help us leave it in the past, and dismantle it from the present.

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