An account of discrimination and oppression

I have always been shocked by the discrimination I have seen around me. Having been brought up in India, I have had ample opportunity to evidence such social crimes and injustice. India’s population is growing at an exponential rate and as the supply demand ratio gets tipped, I find there are more people than jobs, more mouths to feed than food, and more things to be done than resources available.

In a situation like this, which ideally breeds poverty, discrimination is an everyday occurrence. There is this privileged class (who are privileged by natural inheritance of money) and the other who strive to barely survive. This underprivileged class is so deprived, they are not even aware of the fundamental human rights. It is like a vicious cycle where people are too poor to even afford education (not knowing education is one of their basic rights), hence too illiterate to secure jobs and ultimately continuing to languish in poverty.

The question arises “Why does anybody not do anything about this?” well, the answer is pretty simple. There are lot of vested interests for the privileged class, who by the way also represents the Government and the policy makers. They simply don’t want to increase the competition load in an already saturated society. So the end-result is an unfortunate biased distribution of money, extreme oppression and discrimination of a select few and not many people trying to change the situation.

I had been fortunate enough to have gone to a school but was always plagued by this guilt of being privileged. So I decided to do something where I can contribute in someway to the improvement of the society and hence decided to do medicine. While in medical school, I soon realised the same vicious cycle has perpetrated into health care also: the Government does not enforce insurance policies and the private insurance companies that exist charge too high a premium for these poverty stricken people to afford. So unfortunately the same group of people also gets discriminated in Health Care. On top of all these, poor living conditions, insufficient food etc. makes them even more susceptible to disease.

The entire situation has done nothing but made me ponder more and more about how to deal with it. I realised that being in research and entering the world of health care from a different angle will allow me to look at this entire situation from a different light. An analytical research mindedness will ultimately help me to probably tackle the situation in a much constructive way. These will help me in dealing with discrimination. So it is imperative that we take the right steps to change the life of people who are discriminated and oppressed, to change the life of the people who are deprived of their fundamental rights and to make our society an unbiased equal opportunity society where everyone has the right to live life decently. This can be only done by the right policies and the right kind of attitude.