Weakest Nazis

Other day, a newspaper report on a suicide caught my eye. He was a Telugu and 22 years old. The background was he had incurred a huge debt to get his sister married off. He was unable to pay them back and creditors were on his back. He committed suicide and curiously wrote a letter that person should be born either rich or poor. There was no life for a middle class person like him.

Now, dowry is very rampant among Telugus of all classes. From his letter, I"m guessing, he meant rich can afford to pay the dowry and poor because of the obviousness of their poverty are not severely constrained or he could have shamelessly run away from his duty and nobody would have talked. I thought he was not complaining about the irrationality of the dowry system but as a middle class person he was ruing that he was not able to maintain the certain standard of the society. At the end of the day, it was a typical suicide of a person with a sense of failure.

As a middle class by birth person, I always thought I had the best possible class but not a best possible society. It was a society lot better than what all my ancestors inherited but still a society in transition. Though legally it had made all the constraints (including dowry) underground, many people haven't liberated themselves and thus keeping many others in check. Sometimes it strikes you that many don't break any illegal practices because they are very humble people. They just don't want to make others look morally corrupt.

Coming to the suicide letter, I felt bit uncomfortable about the "poor" part. As far as I know, they too try to maintain the standards set by the rich and the middle class. My former housemaid's eldest daughter was killed by her in-laws for not bringing enough dowry. The mother wanted justice for her daughter but the relatives made her to see the pointlessness of the effort. The husband is supposedly happily married now.