The other India

I've been reading a book about, amongst other things, the incompleteness of our lives how the jumble of unexpected events make up our day and continue to exaggerate the  disconnect between what we plan and what occurs.
The book ( A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry ) is set in the turmoil of Indira Gandhi's India and the Emergency Legislation Period, as she attempted to modernise the mammoth that was the everyday India with its myriad layers of humanity. The heavy hand of bureaucracy, the vicious control measures designed to effect change but which only brought misery to the ordinary people. It's a story of ordinary people. How that phrase is so incomplete when describing India's layered composition of humanity with its religious mix and the iniquitous caste apartheid delivering to people at birth, a preconditioned straightjacketed existence, for some, opportunity for others simple none.

The book captures you by befriending you to the characters who's individual torment, which is accepted by the people in the story as part of life's tapestry, becomes your own as you struggle, looking with Western eyes for a good ending. There is no good ending only the rites of a predetermined subservience, an inevitable mourning from the moment you recognised your position and of having to endure a life of pain and disdain in equal measure. 

One wonders at the complexity of the political dynasty's which have ruled the country and the undiluted rage meted out to the Sikhs after the Sikh bodyguards were accused of assassinating Gandhi.
One wonders at the totalitarian methods used to produce birth control. The mutilation of the beggar  community and the system of bribes used at all levels to get things done.
Sitting in my armchair I am transported into a world of demons, not of their own making but of a need to survive, be it on the pavement or in an alleyway. Structure there is, too much of it, but where is the humanity.
With a 'civilisation' stretching back long before we in the West had cast off our rudimentary lives, with religions like Hinduism which preaches tolerance and understanding, how can it have escaped the intellectually driven establishment that such huge social disparity is morally wrong and in this modern world of internet transparency, is unacceptable !!