I’m a former medical resident from Mumbai. I am in a Whatsapp group with my peers
from Medical College. As expected, there is an active conversation in
the group about the suicide of the Dalit doctor in Mumbai, allegedly due to casteist slurs by senior residents.
Along with that there is a relatively healthy conversation about
religion, hindutva, NDA, the 2019 elections, Modi etc. I generally keep
myself quiet in this because of several reasons. But I decided to break
my silence and ended up posting this.
Considering that I did
my post graduation from Mumbai, I guess I can throw some light on this.
It's a bit of a rant, but I hope to address a few points.
Racism
(regionalism) and ragging/discrimination go hand in hand in my hospital.
In my case, casteism was not applicable because I was born to Brahmin
parents. But I did get discriminated for being from the the South, being
different, being a musician, etc. despite being not too bad at Hindi.
The people who perpetrated the coincidental happened to be, voila,
upper caste Hindus.
This discrimination is more among the senior
residents upward. The nurses, assistants, and staff were super nice to
me. So I was able to pull through.
I had to isolate myself from
orthopedics/surgery etc residents because these departments seemed to
have more people with such tendencies. I thankfully got a resident from
psychiatry (someone who thought like Sebind, ironically) as a room mate.
That led me to me hanging out more among his friends. Eventually, I
came out to them and they were super cool with that.
In other words, I was more accepted by residents from other departments who were generally broadminded.
Most
of you don't know that that I have been under treatment for depression.
You may remember that I was on the quieter side of things in my first
three years in our college. I have had suicidal tendencies through my
undergraduate, postgraduate, post-postgraduate lives.
I
eventually got diagnosed and treated at the end of my postgraduate
tenure. One of the reasons that I took a sabbatical was because of this
discrimination/ragging aspect, which seeps through the hierarchy
everywhere, but especially in North India in surgical fields. As someone
said, for every publicized suicide, there may have been 10s not
publicized, 100s of suicide attempts, and 1000s of victims who have
somehow managed to pull through. Like me.
What about Mumbai
itself? I get discriminated on a regular basis because I'm South Indian
and because I'm dark. Restaurants, pubs, hotels, live events, what not.
The
common denominator in all of this is this. Lack of "education",
relative upper caste origin, religiousness, lack of evidence-based
thinking, all leading up to herd mentality and lack of tolerance.
Guess
what drives all of this? The current government. They may not commit or
admit to atrocities, but they still don't clamp down on happenings.
There is no open stance apart from empty platitudes. Who are they
serving? The corporations. Who's benefiting? Upper caste more than lower
castes. Who's feeling insecure? Any minority, let it be religion, caste,
orientation, gender, etc.
Whatever truths/lies people want to
tell themselves to put a coat of paint on what's going on, I will not
believe it because I'm a minority in many counts, despite being born
upper caste.
And the irony is that these trends are so evident
in my own family/extended family, my partner's family, my ex-orthopedic
peers, and some among us here.
Guess some of you may get a hint
of why I (have preferred) prefer to distance myself from some of these.
Basically, I'm trying to protect myself.
All I have to say is
this - the world is going darker for the minorities, including the
economic one. This is being driven by religion, which is one of the most
potent forces that can be harnessed to bring and keep people to power.
Such trends are cyclical (~20 years), but the extent of damage unleashed
on the persecutees can take 100s of years to reverse.
