Work and Space: Musings on breaking the shackles of caste and gravitational economy
By: Shashank Chandra
Tags: Social Mobility, Mwc Work, Caste, Space Exploration, Social

Work and Space: Musings on breaking the shackles of caste and gravitational economy Shashank Chandra Aug 23·7 min read

Why we are forced to see our identity in our occupation?

We the modern progressive people may not like it but the fact remains that we are often defined by what we do. Some enlightened people may be able to see past this definition but the society can’t. And why society is not able to or rather not willing to see past what we do? Because it is in the interest of people at the top of the society to limit people by what they do lest they challenge the prevailing structure and end up dreaming about doing what is being done by those who would rather hold on to the enormous privileges they enjoy than let them be claimed by others. They set the tone which is adopted by every subsequent layer down the hierarchy creating a vicious circus of vying for superiority based on increasingly superficial criteria. People’s energy thus drained never get a chance to blossom into anything threatening for the top. The ceiling at the top is rather impermeable, still society creates layers of ceilings of increasing imperviousness at critical stages, to destroy the possibility of even a miniscule push at the top. The top remains unchallenged and unexpanded and we the people remain frustrated and constricted.

How not just people but entire communities are stunted?

The push at the top disappears completely if entire communities and not just individuals are defined by what they do. Enter the Indian caste system. A system so sophisticated and so cunning that thousands of years of evolution could hardly make a dent in it and yet so simple that hordes of semi-literate masses accept it as their natural manifest destiny without much of a second thought.

This destiny not only decides what you do but also what you dream about to do. And here in lies the sophistication of the caste system — it controls your environment in such a way that you grow into a bonsai which can be neatly put in its place in a balcony of an apartment even if your potential is to grow into a banyan tree sprawling across acres of land.

Any ground you spread into is the ground the other has to concede or so the other believes. Breaking the new ground is beyond their perceptive capabilities. They never stretch their imagination; they don’t have to. But they excel at what they do and that is to systematically and clandestinely remove all that you can hold on to in your march towards a higher or better ground. A ground where they are ensconced or a new ground where they would be made irrelevant.

Their relevance is incidental, parochial, tribal and depends upon the myth that without them is the anarchy. An anarchy so fearsome that you will willfully exchange your freedom for a semblance of an order. An order where communities stack up in tiered compartments so neatly that there is very little chance of one layer ever encroaching upon the other in a degree as to ever become a threat to the invisibility cloak of the caste.

This invisibility is the core of the deception of the caste system and it works both ways, it hides the hurdles, it lulls people into believing that they could be whatever they want to be but at the same time it limits their wants and opportunities and makes them believe that that’s all there is to it. From the other side it hides the privileges enjoyed by people in the top tear by making that tear so distant that people never ever even stumble into it. After all its very difficult to dream of achieving something which six degrees of your own relations have never achieved it.

How to kindle our dreams?

Dreams are smothered in many ways but in the presence of a systemic oppression there is only one way to kindle them. That way is to imagine the new ground, a ground which is yet not contested, where oppressor has still not put his layers of constriction. Jews have shown that repeatedly, they were excluded from all opportunities in Europe — from land ownership, from government service, from many established trades. They broke the new ground in finance. They were restricted in higher education in US but they broke new grounds in entrepreneurship and ended up creating altogether new industries like Hollywood.

A new industry was created when shackled with inanities of socialism and corrupt government Indian engineers (mostly of the privileged caste backgrounds) discovered outsourcing. A new industry is created when latent opportunity meets frustrated and restricted workers; but even here one essential ingredient — the agency of the workers, which enables them to get educated or skilled and move away from an old restricted field to a new field without much structural hindrance is something which is allowed by caste system to only selected few. The caste system condemns the people forever in a ghetto of an occupation with very strict barriers to move about anywhere else.

Mobility is something which doesn’t come naturally to this civilization we have created on earth. The caste restricts mobility of one kind (the most pernicious restriction of it all), countries restrict mobility of another kind (movement of people across borders) and capitalist economies stifle mobility of the kind which we can call moving the focus from a quarter to five years or ten years into the near future. Despite thousand of utterances praising innovation, research and development the fact remains that most of the money in a capitalist economy chases the opportunities of quarter-to-quarter kind.

Day to day money making opportunists who lack any vision beyond a quarter could never have created a private space travel enterprise. It requires people with different kind of relationship with work. The people who would have still been madly working even if they were born without a stomach to feed. They work for money, yes, but mostly they work to fulfill their vision. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are made of stellar stuff. They live to work. Howsoever strongly we may criticize Jeff Bezos for being unfair to workers and partners, the fact remains that he would still have earned enough to fund a private space travel enterprise had he enabled ideal conditions at Amazon.

Perhaps nobody can enable the ideal conditions anywhere. Subaltern Indians can’t wait for ideal condition of a caste less society to emerge before striving to claim their destiny and the troika of Musk, Bezos and Branson couldn’t have waited for this planet to get rid of all the chronic problems like global warming, poverty, and the sharp business practices before starting this new industry of private space travel.

Commercial space faring, which is enabling the human economic activities to go beyond the pull of earth’s gravitation the very first time, is for the 21st century what industrial revolution was for the 19th century and the information revolution was for the 20th century. It is breaking of the biggest new ground. The banyan tree of humanity was always looking to sprawl into the universe. It couldn’t be contained in the confines of earth as a bonsai forever.

90% of India’s population which belongs to suppressed castes is the single biggest concentration of bonsais in the world. They have been stunted (literally too) by the machinations of the 10% of the people of the privileged castes sitting at the top of the hierarchy of the society. Perhaps these bonsais will sprawl into the new grounds. Perhaps the space at the top of the caste pyramid was too small and not worth fighting it over. Perhaps these bonsais were waiting for the gravitational shackles of the humanity to come loose before breaking open the shackles of the caste forever.

Is breaking free the wrong thing to do?

Work may not be worship, yet the work is what we yearn for most of our lives. Ask any unemployed; or even employed for that matter. Work gives us self-esteem and independence and makes us look at our future with confident eyes that we would come very close to fulfilling our potential. Yet for most of the workers, as future unfolds itself like a fog lifting slowly from a road in winters, it only makes visible the hidden constrictions one at a time. And their relationship with work starts changing. You make a man a janitor and condemn his next generations to be forever janitors, see how he looks at the work. You make a man a sell side analyst in the securities market and condemn him to be forever a sell side guy then see what kind of relation he would have with his work. You make a man a robot on an assembly line and see if he comes to work every day with spring in his steps. Caste system is one extreme example of confining people and limiting their potential for the fear of not toppling the apple cart of dominance of the privileged castes. Modern economies limit people’s potential by sacrificing them at the altar of efficiency, again to protect the privileged at the top. We complain about lack of talent and yet we waste massive amount of human potential by condemning people to do same kind of work forever.

Indian caste system has experimented with specialists for centuries. A farmer does farming for generations, a warrior remains a warrior for generations and a priest remains a priest till hell freezes over and yet Indian society was one of the poorest societies in the world. Efficiency is no guarantee of wealth and prosperity. Doing the wrong things efficiently only takes you to your doom sooner.

Is spending billions for private space faring enterprises wrong thing to do? Is destroying people’s caste-based identities wrong thing to do? Are you struggling to see the parallel I am trying to make you see here? If yes then perhaps you have never felt the suffocation of being bonded to an occupation you can’t grow out of or frustration of not having the wherewithal to soar in skies which you see day in and day out. As universe expands forever, human beings grow forever and no barriers should hold them back. Breaking the bonds is always a right thing to do, whether the bonds are of gravitation or of caste.