What is the Fidelio system used in hotels?

Why have Brahmins been such pessimists in the past and still continue to be?

• An article I was born a Tamil-brahmin (of the iyengar caste)  and had my upbringing mostly in Hyderabad and other parts of Andhra  Pradesh. My early upbringing was under the totalizing spell of the  Tamil-brahmin sub-culture—in terms of language, food, circle of friends,  aesthetics—so much that my access to other social worlds was cut off by  sheer prejudice nurtured by the family. An extended spell of hostel  life since graduation helped me escape familial colonialism, but I  carried with me all the unearned privileges and the earned prejudices of  a brahmin birth. College and university life (1990-1997) exposed me to a  burgeoning student dalit movement in the post-Ambedkar centenary phase,  though I did not make immediate sense of Mandal or the Ambedkarite  movement. While working on my M.Phil. With the English Department of  University of Hyderabad, I took up my first journalistic job—as a  subeditor—with Deccan Chronicle, Hyderabad, in 1996. I literally walked  into the job, unalive to the fact of how brahmin privilege works in  unstated ways. While on my first job, I acquired some political and  cultural perspective on the several ‘caste issues’ I faced in university  life, and in my own life, on reading Kancha Ilaiah’s Why I am Not a  Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva, Philosophy, Culture and Political  Economy (Samya, 1996). I wrote a full-page review of the work in Deccan  Chronicle, which I began by introducing myself as a brahmin, quite like  Ilaiah foregrounds his shudra-OBC identity. I then discovered the  writings of Ambedkar. Around the time, my marriage to my non-brahmin  partner also caused a rupture in my caste self, and forced a rethink on  my own undying brahminism. I began writing occasionally on caste in  Deccan Chronicle, and also commissioned others to write, and this did  not necessarily mean writing about dalits. The fact that I was a  born-brahmin enabled me to express a few anti-brahmin ideas with ease. Starting  1998, I was with the copydesk of The Indian Express, Chennai, for a  year where I did manage a few analytical pieces on caste against several  odds. I was still not a reporter. In 1999, I joined the  brahmin-dominated desk of The Hindu. I had always considered The Hindu  as my last option since my grandmother used to say after I completed my  M.A., “Wear a namam [a caste mark worn on the forehead], and tell them  you belong to such and such iyengar subcaste; who knows we may be  related to The Hindu editors! They will certainly give you a job.” I was  utterly embarrassed by this frank advice, but also knew that there was  truth in this claim since The Hindu had a fair share of namam  journalists. After circumstances forced me to quit The (New) Indian  Express, when I did seek employment with The Hindu, I did not use the  caste card like my grandmother would have wanted me to, but I do realize  one’s brahmin-ness is not necessarily or always inscribed on one’s  forehead or caste tag (which I did not bear). The advantages of being  born in the ‘right caste’, I think, equally helped me with my other  jobs, as also in other spheres in my life, sometimes without my even  being aware of these advantages. Since mid-2001 I have been working  as the Chennai correspondent of the weekly Outlook—my first reporting  job. Here, to my own surprise, I have had greater success in writing  occasional analytical articles and news-reports on brahmin hegemony than  in writing about oppression of dalits. Again, my being a non-dalit, a  born-brahmin, has, I think, enabled me in several invisible ways.  Perhaps this has partly enabled a tolerant reception to some views  extremely critical of brahmins in a mainstream media forum. After  marriage, I moved away from my parents in Hyderabad, to Chennai in 1998  and exposure to the mostly debrahminised (yet strangely anti-dalit)  Tamil political and intellectual cultures heightened my brahminical  guilt and pressured me to seriously rescript my sense of the  ‘personal’—this was almost a conversion sans a formal change of  religion. This primarily involved two issues. i) Unlearning the  brahminised variation of Tamil that I spoke: Tamil-brahmins speak a  Tamil that is markedly different from that of nonbrahmins; it carries a  heavy dose of sanskritic influence. I speak, read and write Telugu as  well; and though Telugu brahmins sometimes have a stylistic inflection  distinct from nonbrahmin Telugus, they do not attempt to fundamentally  change the language like Tamil brahmins tend to do. Within Tamil Nadu,  given the penetrative thrust of the periyarite nonbrahmin movement, some  brahmins self-consciously use a slightly debrahminised variation in  their public sphere–usage while relapsing into the unselfconscious  comfort of a brahminical register in the domestic sphere. Several  brahmins do not even bother to effect such a switchover and unabashedly  speak a brahminised Tamil all the time. However, increasingly in Tamil  Nadu today, with the nonbrahmins seeking to imitate the brahminical  register, certain brahminical modes of expression have crept into the  nonbrahminised mode of speaking. Being born and bred outside Tamil  Nadu, I had never really been exposed to the nonbrahmin way(s) of  speaking Tamil. The only Tamil I knew was what my parents and circle of  relatives made available to me. In Chennai, with active support from my  wife, who belongs to the land-owing Tamil shudra community of gounders  (classified as OBC), and a few other friends, I gradually weeded out the  brahminical expressions I was prone to. After six months of conscious  efforts, I could speak a decent, nonbrahminised Tamil. Even then, the  brahminical Tamil embedded in my subconscious would occasionally slip  out and cause me embarrassment. This continues to happen, but rather  infrequently these days since my interaction with the brahmin community  now is almost negligible, given that I am estranged from my family and  relations. ii) The second crucial change effected in my personal self  was with respect to food habits. The family I was born into ate only  vegetarian food. Egg, boiled, was a rare indulgence, that too as a  dietary supplement since I played tennis during my childhood. This too  had to be done secretively by my mother without my grandparents coming  to know of it. I knew how to cook, partly because I helped my mother,  and handled kitchen duties whenever she menstruated. After marriage, it  was I who cooked and was in charge of the kitchen. In our early days in  Chennai, when my partner sought to eat meat, mostly chicken, she would  buy it from hotels. At her behest, I used to try it occasionally, but  did not enjoy the taste. Since I approached the issue politically, I  understood that my inability to appreciate the taste of meat owed not to  an inherent, ‘natural’ repugnance to it, but rather to the fact of my  lack of exposure to its taste. For the first eighteen years of my life,  my tongue had been colonised by vegetarian home food. In my six years of  hostel life, I was too conservative and brahminical to have tried meat.  Most crucially, I was not politically conscious those days. Not liking  the idea of my partner having to buy oily meat from hotels, I decided  that I would at least cook it at home. Soon, I began tasting it. Over  the years, I have come to really enjoy it and realise what I had been  missing all these years. What really got me hooked to the taste of meat  was my liking for kebabs—burnt mutton. (In 2003, I also savoured  succulent beef kebabs at Bade Miyan in Mumbai thanks to my friend  Sharmila.) Since 2001, I have turned quite a decent meat-eater. Yet,  nonbrahmin friends would point to how I am a bit clumsy in my inability  to clean up the bones dry. Today, we cook mutton, beef, all kinds of  seafood and chicken at home. I have not yet conquered pork, though I  love bacon the way it is served continental style. Eating meat should  hardly be considered a means of running away from one’s brahminic  identity. Historically, the brahmins consumed all kinds of  meat—including beef. Pulao made of veal (tender calf) was a delicacy  served to the guests during the vedic period. It was only Buddhism that  forced the brahmins to swing to the other extreme and give up on meat  altogether. Just as my dalit friends who rediscover and revert to  Buddhism, and hence turn vegetarian, are not ceasing to be dalits by  refusing to eat meat, I would not cease to be a brahmin my merely eating  meat. It is not a certificate of progressiveness or regressiveness. But  when the choice of not eating or not eating certain foods is not based  on self-made decisions but based on irrationally inherited caste  culture, then as rational human beings we need to rethink and question  the same. Why this conscious effort at making, and now marking, these  changes in my personal self? Do I want to pass for a nonbrahmin? Does  one cease to be a brahmin just by speaking a different register and by  eating different kinds of food? I have seen several brahmins in the  modern, urban context assuming progressive postures—as liberals,  marxists, feminists, poststructuralists, radicals of various hues. These  are largely public postures. In the private sphere, they tend to remain  true to their castes. They tend to marry within caste (even  accidentally falling in love with a person of the same caste), sometimes  even go through traditional marriage rituals and justify it as meant to  satisfy parents/ relations, they even indulge in some rituals for the  dead, they continue to eat what they have been used to eating. In the  personal sphere, the language of modernity takes a backseat and the  premodern caste self is allowed a free reign. In other words, not much  changes in their personal lives. My fundamental problem was: how can one  don a progressive hat in public and continue to indulge in practices  inflected by one’s caste in the personal realm? How can one be modern  and feudal at the same time? I was convinced that the personal and  political had to be made compatible and complementary. I could not be  someone who keenly engaged with Ambedkar’s ideas, interacted with the  dalit movement, benefited a lot intellectually from my interactions with  dalit and nonbrahmin friends, and yet keep intact a brahminical core. Not  that a conscious rescripting of the ‘personal’ makes me cease to be a  brahmin. For all effective purposes, I shall remain one. I cannot erase  the unearned privileges being born in this caste have given me. I  believe caste will continue to function for me not as an originary  identity but as a social location that I cannot often exit. Since both  the identitarian and hierarchical aspects of caste function in a  relational, relative sense, I cannot individually cease to be a brahmin.  I cannot annihilate my identity as a brahmin unless all individuals  belonging to all castes begin to do so. Who I am will continue to be  defined in relation to what others are. Of late, I have come to be  deeply skeptical about my brahminhood as an originary identity. Castes  are essentially maintained by patriarchy. My father and grandfather  (father’s father) claimed that we belong(ed) to the ‘Kousika gotra’.  Kousika is another name for Vishwamitra, the mythical sage who figures  in the Hindu myth Ramayana. Vishwamitra, a kshatriya by birth, aspires  to be a brahmin, a brahma-rishi (super-brahmin) in fact. The brahmins,  led by brahma-rishi Vashishta, resent Vishwamitra’s aspirations. Today, I  see the entire Vishwamitra story in the light of my reading of  Ambedkar, especially his ‘Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Ancient  India’ (see Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Writing and Speeches, Vol. 3, pp  151–440, especially Chapter 15 titles ‘Brahmins Versus Kshatriyas’ pp.  392–415). Ambedkar describes Vishwamitra as someone who was ‘anxious to  become a brahmin’. Vishwamitra was probably someone who was the first to  question the birthright of the brahmins to be the interpreters of the  vedas and sanskritic knowledge that the brahmins monopolised. He goes on  to overcome the various obstacles that Vashishta and other brahmins  throw in his path and finally becomes brahma-rishi. If my father,  grandfather, great grandfather and so on trace their lineage—their  gotra—from this mythical Vishwamitra, then by default they are admitting  to having had nonbrahmin origins. The Vishwamitra story is of course  myth, not history, but since most Indian history is spiked with a heavy  dose of myths, we have to give such myths some credence, especially  since identities claimed today are based on sustaining and believing in  such myths. What I am saying here could of course be interpreted a  clever, brahminical way of trying to claim a ‘nonbrahmin’ origin for  myself! Far from it. The myth/story has not been completely told. If  Vishwamitra is being discussed, how can Menaka be forgotten? This dancer  from heaven should have been the devadasi equivalent of those mythical  days. Vashishta and his cohorts are supposed to have sent Menaka to  distract Vishwamitra from the meditation/ penance he had undertaken to  become brahma-rishi. In what comes in storybooks, and even TV serial  interpretations, Menaka dances an ‘item number’ and seduces Vishwamitra  (on TV Meenakshi Seshadri as Menaka seduced N.T. Rama Rao who played  Vishwamitra’s character). Menaka bears Vishwamitra’s child as well. What  is the guarantee that the patriarchal lineage that my father traces  does not lead to Menaka? I could well claim to be a Menaka-putra! If  Vishwamitra could be ‘tempted’ by Menaka, how many men, over several  generations, in such a patriarchal clan, might not have been tempted by  various women? Similarly, brahmin women could have had affairs with  nonbrahmins. What about my mother’s gotra? Before she married my father  she claimed to belong to ‘Koundinya gotra’ of her father. But the  patriarchal marriage system changed her gotra to my father’s. What about  my father’s mother’s originary gotra? If women have to always lose  their father’s gotra with marriage, how reliable can these gotra  lineages be? Besides, when we can be definitive only about motherhood  and since patriarchy is largely inferential, why should we believe  patriarchal lineages? Where would all this lead brahmins? How far should  we dig? My contention is that all stories/ myths/ beliefs about  caste identities can similarly be interrogated and demolished. Caste—and  the caste system—sustains itself not because there has not been enough  miscegenation. There should have been several intercaste affairs and  marriages in history; yet the newly emergent miscegenated groups are  fitted into some caste or the other. Sometimes, new castes were created,  new myths/stories woven. While Vishwamitra, a nonbrahmin, upgraded  himself, some castes would have been degraded. After all, Ambedkar, and  before him Iyothee Thass in Tamil Nadu, had argued that today’s  untouchables were former Buddhists. From brahmin to dalit, there cannot  be any ‘pure’ castes. Yet, in the given moment, caste identity operates  strongly and effectively as a social category. Therefore, I could  theoretically have had nonbrahmin origins, but what matters today is my  brahmin identity and the benefits and privileges that have accrued to me  from it. My brahmin identity today is as real as a dalit’s identity is. In  November 2003, my friend Ravikumar, a leading dalit intellectual based  in Pondicherry, and I started a publishing house called Navayana. We  focus on caste as an issue, not just on dalits. One of the forthcoming  titles from Navayana is called ‘Narrating the Brahmin Self’ where I have  invited several brahmins from across the world to talk about their  brahmin selves. Several brahmins are uneasy indulging in such a  reflective exercise. Many pretend that caste does not matter for them.  Some see no point in such an exercise. Some think they have risen beyond  caste. In the contemporary context, dalits and other ‘lower’ castes are  being made to bear the burden of caste; as if caste exists only in  them. It is time brahmins and other privileged castes started reflecting  upon their own caste selves. [S. Anand is the Chennai-based Special Correspondent of Outlook newsmagazine. He is also the cofounder of Navayana Publishing.]

• Answer:

  What makes you assume this my friend ???