By Lavannya Anand
After years of not even coming close to winning, the Indian women’s hockey team made us proud by putting up a major fight against britain in the bronze play offs. Even if we lost the medal, we gave Britain a run for their money, and ended up losing 3-4. One of the players, Vandana Katariya, made history by becoming the first Indian woman to score a hat trick at the olympics.
We, as Indians, have a history being casteist. In these modern times, especially when the person in question is bringing us pride, the last thing you’d expect would be for people to be yelling casteist slurs outside her parents’ home, and openly passing derogatory comments about her. Yet this is exactly what’s happening. Vandana happens to be of what ‘we’ consider to be a low class. And Indians seem to think it is their job to make her life difficult because of it.
In my opinion, we should be over caste already. It’s a dated concept that divides us into groups that represent parts of Buddha's body. Like ethnicity or gender, we can’t control what caste we are born into. However, caste was huge in India, and it would be naive to think all of casteism has disappeared, especially when we haven’t even developed enough to stop being a third world country. It’s understandable that especially in rural areas, casteism is still pretty predominant.
Nevertheless, I honestly thought that making history for India in the Olympics would be enough to get people to look past their prejudice. At least, for one person. Apparently, all it did was remind them that someone of a lower caste could be more capable than them, and there was clearly no route to take but yelling slurs outside her parents’ home.
Vandana is not standing for any of this. She used her platform to openly comment about the harassment and the police arrested a number of the people committing the crimes. While that is good to hear, it serves as a reminder to us that even if we live in a more developed area, things like this happen in our country everyday. They’re probably not going to stop soon either. It can be easy to forget what our bharat is really like, but we can always try our best to stay informed and spread the right ideals when we can.
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