Life held too close to chest,

leaves gasping 

for fresh breath, 

Find in me

the courage for a reset 

Feel freshness,  

hold lightly, the silken threads

Trust in resilience 

and destiny 

Find wonder 

Step outside 

wander  

Happy birthday they said. Thank you said I. 

It’s my 45th today. 

The cake is cut at midnight. The family video calls. Maybe it was the distance or the closeness. I said thank you to my parents and my sister for tolerating me all these years. For the first time, I felt grateful for their being vested in me all these years. My mom recalled how my sister would never hit me. mar doongi. She would say. Full show. But worrying about how it would land if she went ahead! It took me more than half of my life to see how that bracing back her anger- 3 years separating her from me – shaped her then. How her brace shaped me and my nothing can happen to me attitude. 

My life has been about me, mostly. There has been space for an “and” at best. Person and me. Experience and me. Purpose and me.

Or is it experience for me. Purpose for me. The and becomes the for. And in the process, Me becomes the never growing up baby, that needs to be always fed and taken care of! 

So today, I wish myself a happy birthday. Wish myself less self absorption. More grace. Less mirrors on my walls. More space in my room.

Time for the feast now. 

Finding our victim voice is easier. No one likes to be a perpetrator. More so if you are in the development or aid sector. You start working for benefit of the other and gradually, unconsciously, begin to represent them. Their voices become illustrations in your stories. Their stories become case studies.

Reality is messy and multiple.  The solidarity in struggles is real. The transformative stories of change are real. The echo becoming the voice is equally real.

Work in the social sector, for those of us from privileged sections of society, is not just about making the world a better place. It is about putting our privilege to work. Society works to keep caste invisible. It is upto each individual to accept their status as beneficiaries of this broken system. Lifting the veil over our own history brings shame and pain. Institutions have developed sophisticated ways to cope with these difficult feelings. 

Think about this. Any PPT you have made, which is worth its slides contains photos of farmers, students, children and mothers. Their identity, often nameless, becomes an exhibit in an argument you need to make.  You, a beneficiary of the system, are unconsciously appropriating identity of the oppressed, to make a point about their needs and how you are going to be helping them. In the process, there are usually benefits – additional funds may get allocated, enabling policies may be formulated. One may argue that there is no misuse, it is for greater benefit after all. But such representation is fitting their voice in your narrative.  

How is this voice placed on platforms? As ‘voices from the field’. A space for being heard is created, which is then deliberated by ‘panelists’. This does contribute to new insights for those in the room and a new experience for those sharing their experiences. These voices also add to the increased credibility of the event as one that presents all perspectives. When was the last time you attended a conference organized by those from the community, where you were ‘voice from the field’ and panelists later talked in another language?   

So, why are these boundaries so difficult to transcend? 

Insights are “takeaways” – you can package them and take them back home. Transformation can’t be packaged.  It is where exchange happens – emotional or intellectual. something shifts. By segregation of community representatives and ‘sectoral experts’, space for dialogue and opportunity for transformation is lost. Status quo is, unconsciously, maintained.

Does this imply that development efforts don’t change anything? Change happens. It happens in pockets, fabric of society remains lightly challenged, largely unchanged.   Change happens in villages and in communities. It happens in another world , far from the offices of the development actors.

If a caste analysis was to be done on staff of philanthropies or nonprofits, we can expect to see the pyramid to be largely lower caste and female at the lower rungs, upper caste and male in leadership and power. This is in line with the trends in public institutions. Three out of four anchors of flagship debates on television are upper caste. No more than 5 percent of all articles in English newspapers are written by Dalits or adivasis. A study of a digital inclusion project showed that content creators were rarely from the Adivasi community.  

‘But I work for others, the marginalised’. This used to be a solace for me, to explain my own personal stand in this unequal world. 2020 has revealed how structural inequality is unconsciously hidden, often behind good intentions. I now examine my intention. Am I here to create a legacy? Am I here to put my privileges to work? To be a change agent, I need to actively seek out and embrace the discomfort that transformational spaces bring.   

“naach na aaye angan tedha” – an old Indian adage. Don’t blame the stage, if you don’t know how to dance. It captures the deeply feudal or fatalistic thinking of India. It puts individual capacity above a broken system. The stage cannot change, dancer should kindly adjust and learn to dance on slippery slope. A development sector professional who has accepted their own status as beneficiaries of this broken system, will begin to see more spaces for drawing attention to the slope, not just the dance. Baggage of one’s own caste and class privilege must be unbundled and explored on the road less travelled.