They control everything: from sports stadiums to newsrooms, from corporate boardrooms to universities, from what we watch to what we are taught to think. From cricket to cinema, publishing houses to policymaking, corporate hiring to literary awards, the platform you’re reading this article on – the reins are firmly in the same hands. They dominate the screens, the scripts, the syllabi, and the salaries. Whether it’s bureaucracy, big businesses, book fairs, or book awards, the show is run by the same people.
They don’t just run institutions; they, to recall Chomsky, manufacture opinion and consent. Every headline, every history textbook, and every curriculum unit somehow echo their worldview. They are not just in the system; they are the system.
We, the “untouchables”, who have fought to enter universities and learned to use language and critique, even if not as well as those who came first, have one demand: that these inequalities be recognised. We may not be able to dismantle the entire structure, but we will hold up a mirror to it. And we will say it – clearly, openly, and directly – to your face.
And for that, we owe everything to Dr B.R. Ambedkar – Baba Saheb, as we call him with love and respect. It was he who, through his intellect and lifelong struggle, launched the most extraordinary bloodless revolution in Indian history. He made it possible for those once deemed untouchable, unseeable, and less than human – for someone like me, in whose entire family, from the first biological forefather to my own father, not a single person had seen the face of a school or college – to assert their dignity, demand equal rights, and claim a space in the nation’s imagination. Although his dream remains far from being fulfilled in the truest sense,