Freedom from within House

Yesterday I have read the book Untouchables by Dr.Narendra Jadhav, such a inspiring book. It’s a full of stories about struggles and freedom of his parents in pre-independent India.

A bit from the book review:

• “At the end of the book is an addendum written by Jadhav's daughter, Apoorva. It's a little alarming that she sounds exactly like the sorority girl that she is. An undergrad at Johns Hopkins, a pre-med, she uses sentences like "the beauty of my ancestors' efforts is that they were not in vain." But it's true: Damu and Sonu toiled to get their children the chance to succeed—and they have.”

From The Telegraph review:

• No one is more painfully aware of this debilitating socialstatus quo than Jadhav himself. Which is why the ever-conscious Mahar is constantly wracked by references to his low caste — from his teacher, from the upper-caste south Indian to whom he gave a lift and his colleagues. Jadhav, a noted economist, banker, former official at the IMF and now head of economic research of the Reserve Bank of India, asks, “Why can’t they accept me for what I am? …Why did they always have to judge me on the basis of my origins?”

From the Outlook:

• The memoir thus bears testimony to the change of mindset in a Dalit family in the course of a single generation. A similar change has been under way in millions of other Dalit homes, not in full measure, not wholly reassuringly, but a change under way all the same. It is young Apoorva, Jadhav's young daughter, who reveals in the epilogue what emancipation truly means: it does not matter one whit to her that she is a Dalit for, in a resurgent India, she has no reason to flaunt that tag or to suppress it. She has become what her forebears had always aspired to be: just normal people who are neither aggressive nor apologetic about their identity.