"Equality"?

With Independence Day around the corner, we were surrounded by images if ‘India Shining’. Television, the newspaper, and programmes at college and at home celebrated India’s diversity, culture, progress, wealth and energy. I felt proud and privileged to be a citizen of THE country to be in right now – the centre of scientific and economic progress, in the running to be the world’s next super power. I felt proud to be Indian…until one scene made me wonder…

The Oberoi is my dad’s favourite place to eat in Bangalore. It being fancy five-star hotel, I consider us lucky to be able to eat there whenever we please. We had dinner there a few days before Independence Day. It really had been a lovely evening – brilliant food, to be eaten in air-conditioned comfort. On our way out, we passed a young girl standing outside the Chinese restaurant, with a baby in a pram. She wore a shabby maroon sari, with the end of her pallu tucked into her waist. Her hair was tied tightly in a braid – in start contrast to the blow-dried curls of the women she watched through the window. She watched the sleeping baby and I found myself wondering if she really was all that old herself.

A few days later, we celebrated independence. We celebrated our progress, our economic growth, our freedom of religion and expression… I celebrated my privilege of doing what I please, my supposed ‘equality’ with anybody else. But as I did, I couldn’t get out of my mind the face of that girl – not much older than me – and her silent plea for the ‘equality’ I was born into by accident.