Thread by @akaasi

There is a concept called 'living off the grid'. Off-the-grid life refers to living in a self-sufficient manner without reliance on one or more public utilities like electricity connection, piped water supply, gas connection, underground drainage connection, etc.
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One may be able to live daily life without these hardware infrastructure in India easily. If you are in a village, burning firewood, lighting oil lamps, drawing water from well, and peeing/defecating in open, you may be able to live off-the-grid.
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Indian social life needs an analogous 'grid' of castes. Life events like marriage, death, etc. are carried out through rituals that necessitate the support of people from different castes. Typical traditional TN marriage/death makes use of people from many castes such as...
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... one for cooking, one for announcing messages, one for holding lighted torch (பந்தம்) & spreading out rugs (மாத்து) on the floor, one for sweeping the front yard, etc. besides one as priest/conductor for solemnizing the event. Funerals need these even more than marriages.
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Even progressive families that successfully live a daily life w/o much caste-consciousness find it difficult to avoid such dependence.
Then came electric/gas crematoriums run by civic bodies or voluntary orgs which often provide ambulances too for carrying the dead.
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There are facilities at the crematorium for conducting rituals, but if one doesn't need these, it is perfectly OK too. This is a big leap towards eliminating castes and the associated subservience in a feudalistic social setup and has already happened!
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Similar possibilities to avoid rituals & thereby removing the dependence on castes exist in self-respect marriages, the kind promoted and propagated by liberal social movements. Inter-caste marriages are the perfect answer for eliminating such caste-dependent rituals.
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Once such marriages become norm rather than exception, these along with ritual-free funerals at crematoriums, would make the society shirk away conservative, feudal casteism and be truly progressive.

Thanks for reading.
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