Vande Mataram🧡🤍💚

the reservation hatao movement is quoting rashmirathi.

are they actually drunk or sum?

for anyone who hasn't read it, rashmirathi is dinkar's retelling of karna's life. and karna's entire tragedy is caste. he isn't rejected because he's untalented. he isn't denied education because he lacks merit. he isn't humiliated because he isn't capable. he's excluded because society believes his birth determines his place. every major wound in his life flows from that one fact.

that's why karna lashes out at people obsessed with caste. that's where lines like "जाति-जाति रटते जिनकी पूँजी केवल पाखंड"come from. dinkar isn't saying, "stop talking about caste because caste doesn't matter." he's saying that a society obsessed with birth is hypocritical enough to ignore ability, character and achievement in favour of lineage.

that's... literally the moral conflict of the poem.

so watching people wave rashmirathi around while arguing against policies meant to address the consequences of caste discrimination is definitely a sight to behold.

and then they quote ambedkar's "educate, agitate, organise" for good measure. ambedkar spent his life explaining that caste isn't just prejudice, it's a structure that reproduces privilege and exclusion across generations. dinkar wrote one of modern hindi literature's most famous indictments of birth-based hierarchy.

if both of them are ending up on your posters, maybe it's worth asking whether you even have reading comprehension. like how do you miss such glaring messaging in the very literature you flaunt.

जाति-जाति का शोर मचाते, केवल कायर, क्रूर; पाते हैं सम्मान तपोबल से, भूतल पर शूर।

a lot of noise is made about caste, but that's the refuge of the cowardly and the cruel. in the end, respect is earned through character, courage, and what you make of yourself, not by birth.

जाति-जाति रटते जिनकी पूँजी केवल पाखंड, मैं क्या जानूँ जाति? जाति हैं ये मेरे भुजदंड।

the people obsessed with caste have nothing but hypocrisy to offer. don't ask me about my caste, my strength is my only identity.

पूछो मेरी जाति, शक्ति हो तो मेरे भुजबल से; रवि समान दीप्त ललाट से और कवच-कुण्डल से। पढ़ो उसे जो झलक रहा है मुझमें तेज-प्रकाश; मेरे रोम-रोम में अंकित है मेरा इतिहास।

if you want to know who i am, look at my strength. look at the fire in my face, my armour, my scars. everything i've lived through is written into who i am.

ऊँच-नीच का भेद न माने, वही श्रेष्ठ ज्ञानी है। दया-धर्म जिसमें हो, सबसे वही पूज्य प्राणी है॥

are reservations there for poverty alleviation and uplifting those who were disadvantaged, or is it there because someone's ancestor was a boatman while someone else's ancestor was a trader and that is unfair?

If reservations is not a poverty removal scheme, why does Govt. provide

1. Free Education to SC & ST students

2. Zero or reduced fees for entrance exams

3. Age Relaxation

4. Reservations in govt contracts

5. Caste Based Scholarships

6. Caste based interest free or low interest loans

7. Caste based foreign study Scholarships?

Indian reservation system is, by far, the most insane affirmative action system in the world. And it's based on pure dehati retellings of supposed casteism. Karna being the son of Surya, and the adopted son of a charioteer! Fake stories of Ekalavya too are being printed in ungabunga republic, when he was literally Krishna's cousin. On odd days, people call these stories pure mythology, and on even days they twist them to justify a quota system so twisted that one can only wonder.

Had this reservation system been there in USA or Europe, you can bet your ahh that there would, by now, been massive riots and a civil war. Hell, the 2024 Bangladesh student protest was an anti-quota protest because in Bangladesh, government jobs had a 30% reservation to the 1971 freedom fighters' descendants.

no indian citizenship, no indian education, no indian anything. and yet you seem very eager to butt into indian business.

no indian passport, no opinion on indian affairs.

despite your irrelevance, I'm gonna tell you why you are wrong.

i'm genuinely begging anti-reservation people to read literally one book.

this entire reply is just you sprinting from one half-baked point to another, hoping nobody notices none of them actually answer what i said.

first of all, who the fuck was talking about the critical edition of the mahabharata? i was talking about rashmirathi. if you can't distinguish between an ancient epic and a twentieth-century political retelling, maybe don't open with "dehati tv serials" because the irony is terminal.

dinkar made karna a symbol of birth-based exclusion. that's the point. that's why those verses exist. that's why they're remembered. if your movement is waving rashmirathi around while demanding the dismantling of one of the state's responses to caste hierarchy, you've managed to miss the plot so spectacularly it deserves academic study.

and the "umm actually drona rejected karna because of the brahmastra 🤓☝️" routine is so painfully selective. (there's a reason why right wing, anti reservation poets don't exist. you guys are terminally bad at reading.)

cool. now explain kripa demanding karna state his lineage before fighting arjuna. explain bhima repeatedly mocking him as a suta-putra. explain the swayamvars where draupadi refuses him on the basis of birth. you don't get to find one episode you like, pretend the rest of the narrative evaporate, and act like it's some scholarly finding. you are doing some level of revisionism with this bs take.

(no serious tradition of reading the mahabharata has ever treated karna as merely an ambitious warrior who happened to have bad luck. for centuries, commentators, poets, playwrights, and modern scholars alike have understood his tragedy as inseparable from the fact that he is believed to be a suta-putra. whether the epic is describing varna, jati, or a broader birth-based social hierarchy, the point is the same: karna is repeatedly judged by his perceived birth before his ability.

rabindranath tagore's karna-kunti samvad, shivaji sawant's mrityunjaya, ramdhari singh dinkar's rashmirathi, countless regional retellings, stage adaptations, television serials, and modern literary criticism all emphasise this aspect of his character. they differ on many details, but they overwhelmingly converge on one point: karna's life is shaped by the stigma attached to his perceived birth.)

and then there's the ekalavya point, which is honestly just a non sequitur.

"ekalavya was krishna's cousin."

...okay?

and?

how is that supposed to rebut anything?

first, this isn't even some universally accepted fact from the mahabharata itself. the claim comes from later genealogical traditions and puranic lineages that connect the nishada royal family to krishna's extended family. it's not the "gotcha" you seem to think it is.

more importantly, even if you accept that genealogy, it changes absolutely nothing about the famous episode with drona.

drona doesn't refuse ekalavya because he checked his family tree and discovered he wasn't technically related to krishna.

he refuses him because ekalavya is a nishada prince, outside the royal kshatriya pupils drona had agreed to train.

so idk who is more keen on indulging her own mahabharata fanfic, me with my 'debate tv serial' or you with the takes that mahabharata itself doesn't support.

then you launch into the classic "if reservations aren't about poverty then why scholarships? why fee waivers? why age relaxation?" because... they're different policies?

this is genuinely like asking why a hospital has surgeons, nurses, ambulances and pharmacists. did you think you discovered a contradiction because multiple interventions exist for multiple barriers? that's not how public policy works. scholarships reduce financial barriers. age relaxation compensates for unequal educational opportunity. reservations address representation and structural exclusion. congratulations on discovering that governments can, in fact, do more than one thing at once.

then comes bangladesh.

i swear anti-reservation discourse has a magical ability to mention bangladesh at least once regardless of whether it has anything to do with the conversation.

their protests were about hereditary quotas for descendants of 1971 freedom fighters. india's reservation framework is based on constitutionally recognised social and educational backwardness and inadequate representation. these are different histories, different constitutions, different legal rationales and different social structures. the only commonality is that both involve quotas. by this logic, a library card and a driver's licence are basically the same document because they're both laminated.

"india has the most insane affirmative action system in the world."

okay? and? India also had one of the most pervasive and repressive systems of oppression in the world.

and then, somehow, you accidentally dunk on your own position.

"but europe has aristocrats!" yes. bad.

"america has legacy admissions!" yes. also bad.

those are literally examples of inherited privilege reproducing itself. people have spent years campaigning against legacy admissions because they're antithetical to merit. thank you for contributing examples in favour of dismantling birth-based advantage. appreciated.

if entire communities were excluded from land ownership, literacy, public office, education and institutional power across generations, pretending everyone is now competing on a perfectly level playing field isn't meritocracy. meritocracy can't exist in any society, anywhere. the inequal capital distribution makes it impossible.

and finally, after all these paragraphs, you've still managed to avoid my original point.

i never argued "reservations are good because karna."

i said your movement quoting dinkar and ambedkar is intellectually embarrassing.

dinkar's rashmirathi condemns judging people by birth.

ambedkar spent decades explaining that caste reproduces inherited privilege and inherited exclusion. they're the centre of their work.

so either you haven't read them, or you're using these figures' works to put forward a belief system that they themselves never endorsed, in fact opposed vehemently.

for someone so eager to accuse everyone else of getting their knowledge from tv serials, your own argument reads like it was put together by a scrambled egg. cause you have no arguement.

so you instead start playing mental gymnastics.

you never answer my original point.

instead, you go on a world tour of completely unrelated talking points:

"karna wasn't discriminated against."

"reservations are excessive."

"what about scholarships?"

"what about government loans?"

"bangladesh."

"america."

"europe."

Ekalavya was of the same lineage as Satyavati of Hastinapur, who too was a fisherman's adopted daughter. Shri Rama’s friend Guha, and King Nala and Damayanti too. Ekalavya participated in Yudhishthira’s Rajasuya Yajna as an invited guest. Ekalavya’s father was an ally of Jarasandha, which was the only reason why Drona rejected Ekalavya. Not because of muh caaaaste 🤡🤚

Let me teach you the basics of ancient social system - a suta charioteer was a high ranking member of society, doesn't matter they were from a pratiloma union. As for Draupadi rejecting Karna in her swayamvara, that is a dehati Hindi retelling. The "rejection verse" is completely absent from all Southern recensions of Mhb, as well as Kashmiri, Maithili, and Bengali versions.

"europe had hereditary classes too!"

...okay?

who said they didn't?

who are you arguing with?

my point wasn't "india is the only society that ever had hereditary hierarchy." congratulations on defeating an argument literally nobody made.

and the "europe became rich without reservations" line is just ahistorical. europe also industrialised, extracted enormous wealth through colonialism, built welfare states, expanded mass public education, and abolished aristocratic privileges over centuries. history isn't a game of civilisation on easy mode where you compare one policy in isolation and declare you've solved economics.

then we get the ekalavya detour.

"actually he was related to satyavati 🤓"

and?

did drona ask him for a family tree?

does that explain why he refused to teach him?

does it explain why he demanded his thumb?

or is this just another completely unrelated fact being thrown at the wall in the hope that something sticks?

same with the suta point.

yes, the historical role of a suta was more complex than "low caste."

that still doesn't erase the fact that karna himself is repeatedly treated as socially inferior because he is believed to be a suta-putra.

kripa questions his lineage.

bhima insults his birth.

duryodhana literally has to make him king before the assembly accepts him as arjuna's equal.

you don't get to hand-wave away the actual narrative because you read one thread about the etymology of suta.

the draupadi thing, i’m not even gonna address. you are straight up calling a rendition of a myth as ‘dehati’. classist af. sorry, they helped the myth survive through vernacular traditions, how fucking illiterate and uniformed of them. how dare they? they should’ve read sanskrit and only propagated the written myth. oh what? they weren’t allowed to read/write sanskrit? only prakrit?

then you accuse everyone else of "lying about hinduism."

this is my favourite part because apparently disagreeing with your interpretation now counts as lying.

the mahabharata has existed in multiple recensions for centuries. people have debated it for centuries. pretending your reading is the only legitimate one while everyone else is a propagandist is genuinely funny.

because tagore, dinkar, sawant are famous liars and propagandists who absolutely abhor hinduism and aim to only ruin its image. and you, some random lady (?), are definitely the final authority on hindu scripture. like okay, dharam ka thekedaar.

and then comes the inevitable "well i'm from a shudra background and i never played victim."

good for you.

what exactly is that supposed to prove?

your personal biography isn't a counterargument to documented history, social reform movements, constitutional debates, or the existence of caste discrimination.

it's like saying "my grandfather smoked till 90" in a discussion about lung cancer.

and after all of this...

europe.

america.

china.

japan.

korea.

bangladesh.

romania.

jarasandha.

genealogies.

your family history.

you still haven't answered the only thing i actually said.

why is an anti-reservation movement quoting dinkar and ambedkar?

don’t they have some anti reservation scholars? like you, a self proclaimed one but nonetheless.

why appropriate leftist figures?

why appropriate leftist language?

that's it.

And please learn to write normally. You haven't been able to defend your position. I was candid about my background because everything is about caste in India - caste is kept alive one way or another. People riot to keep their caste reservation intact, they blackmail the republic by violence if the reservations are so much as touched. Some people fake their caste to get reservation, and invent a fake atrocity story to get a foreign scholarship. It has nothing to do with social justice tbh, and you know it. It's the thing that actually perpetuates casteism. Instead of studying what Europe or Japan did differently, which is making their countries into manufacturers first, providing all children free schools and population level education campaigns. Anyway, carry on with your reservation system, idc. As long as you guys stop lying about the scriptures, I don't care what you do.

the funniest part is that your first red herring needed another red herring to explain it.

my original post didn't even mention ekalavya. you brought him up. congratulations on correcting an argument nobody made.

what a character.

and you're genuinely so painfully lame. what the fuck is "ungabunga"? are we twelve? get a grip.

you keep sneering at "dehati" retellings and people who didn't have access to classical literature, as though that's somehow a defence of classicism. it isn't.

"there's a reason why classical culture is classical."

yeah. centuries of literacy being restricted, knowledge being gatekept, and elite traditions being privileged over vernacular ones. that's the reason. not because every regional retelling was inherently inferior.

there isn't one singular, immutable "correct" myth that everyone else corrupted. that's not how myths work. epics have always existed through multiple recensions, oral traditions, regional retellings and reinterpretations. that's literally why textual criticism exists in the first place.

you also keep saying i haven't defended my position.

what even is your position anymore?

every reply is a different conversation.

first it's the mahabharata. then it's ekalavya. then europe. then japan. then manufacturing. then fake caste certificates. then tagore. then your family history. then "i don't even care about reservations."

pick. a. lane.

and europe being a manufacturing powerhouse is... supposed to prove what exactly? india already has free government schools. lack of primary schooling isn't the constitutional rationale for reservations. you're just throwing countries into the conversation like you're filling out a geography worksheet.

"stop lying about the scriptures."

scriptures don't belong to you.

and nobody is "lying" about a legend.

that's not how legends work.

they survive because they're retold, expanded, interpreted and reinterpreted across centuries. if there were only one universally accepted version, there wouldn't be multiple recensions of the mahabharata to begin with.

also, the irony of invoking violence over reservations while conveniently forgetting the anti-mandal riots and self-immolations is almost funny.

almost.

and the best part?

this entire exchange started because i pointed out the irony of quoting dinkar in an anti-reservation movement.

you somehow managed to turn it into a debate about the mahabharata, ekalavya, europe, japan and tagore.

that's your superpower, apparently. every conversation becomes twenty different conversations the second the original one gets uncomfortable.

oh, and i noticed you quietly dropped the whole "karna wasn't discriminated against" bit.

interesting.

maybe because pretending one of the most enduring themes associated with karna for generations never existed was a little too unserious, even for you.

the original post was about dinkar's rashmirathi.

somehow you've managed to drag us through drona, bhima, draupadi, "royal military protocol," 750 bce, "dehati ungabunga republic," and now... ambedkar's views on islam.

it's like watching someone lose an argument in real time and desperately click the "related videos" sidebar.

also, the "royal protocol" argument is genuinely hilarious.

kripa doesn't ask whether karna is skilled.

he asks who his father is.

you keep insisting birth has nothing to do with it while citing the scene where birth is literally the criterion being invoked.

"umm actually it's not discrimination, it's protocol 🐷💡"

😭

changing the label doesn't change what happened.

and bhima?

he doesn't call karna a bad archer.

he mocks him for being a suta-putra.

again.

birth.

it's honestly fascinating watching you quote the exact scenes that undermine your own argument.

also, can we retire "dehati" and "ungabunga" already?

if your argument were actually strong, you wouldn't need to lace every second sentence with class-coded sneers because the evidence would speak for itself.

instead it's just "dehati this," "ungabunga that," over and over like you've got one joke and you're determined to run it into the ground.

and then, because apparently we hadn't wandered far enough, you throw in ambedkar's views on islam.

😭😭😭

what the fuck does that have to do with anything?

it's honestly incredible. you don't debate; you just keep spawning side quests until everyone forgets what the main quest was.

which, conveniently, was this:

why is an anti-reservation movement quoting dinkar?

that's it.

that was the post.

you've written multiple essays and still haven't answered it.

you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.

first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.

now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:

in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.

and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.

and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.

it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:

• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.

• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.

• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.

• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.

• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.

• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.

and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.

what i'm asking:

if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.

if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.

india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.

we can still save her. but only loudly.

this year i cannot celebrate it. i am too angry. i am too heartbroken.

the kumaon region has honoured this day for generations, and so have parts of himachal pradesh. this festival was a relationship between the people and their mountains. and our government has taken that relationship and turned it into a performance and a photo op, while the real forests burn and fall around us.

the delhi-dehradun expressway was built to reduce travel time between the two cities—something the citizens never asked for, only the tourists did. this pathetic expressway instead opened the floodgates to the overtourism that has already been severely prominent in uttarakhand for the past few years. thousands of trees have been cut, wildlife has been pushed out of the only homes it has ever known, all of it sacrificed in the name of "development", as if that one word can launder what has been done here.

and now this. locals have already reported fresh tree felling inside the iconic 'saat mod' (7 bends) of the dehradun reserve forest. the government plans to completely straighten this legendary, scenic ecosystem just to facilitate a bit faster tourist movement. i genuinely don't have words for how much this hurts, and i don't have words for how much this enrages me.

so today, on the 15th of july, we are not celebrating harela. we stand and mourn it. today we observe black harela.

black harela is a citizen-led protest and mourning movement rising out of dehradun, born directly out of this contradiction, the state government pushing massive tree felling projects, like the widening of the bhaniyawala-rishikesh highway, while running state-sponsored tree planting pr campaigns on the very same festival meant to honour these forests.

today, instead of the usual festivities, we wear black, we gather peacefully, we mourn openly and publicly for the thousands of mature trees that have been cut down, trees that cannot be replaced by a sapling planted for a press photo. we are angry about the destruction of ecological zones and elephant corridors across the shivalik forests. we refuse to accept that a few saplings can undo the loss of old growth trees that took decades, and in this case, centuries, to grow.

harela was never meant to be a hashtag for the government to hide behind. it has always been a promise from the people to the mountains that we call home. we are done watching that promise get broken just so that some of the most beautiful cities of uttarakhand can be developed enough to be "virtually a part of NCR".

our times have given us more than enough reason to protest, for our right to breathe, our right to live with dignity, our right to protect the environment, the ecosystems, the forests and the mountains upon which our survival depends.

if you are not angry, you are not paying attention.

i ask my friends, wherever you may be, to join this movement and support #blackharela.

This has been happening all month with little to no international media attention. Here are a few organizations you can check out for resources or to support:

ActionAid India

SEEDS India

GlobalGiving