What is remarkable about the mixture of religions is that, contrary to the impression we get through the media, there doesn't seem to be any tension between the members of the different religions, certainly not in the places where we have been and where religions were always mixed. Beside the Hindus and the Muslims, there are Sikhs (offshoot of Hindus) and Buddhists (another offshoot of the Hindus, particularly in the north). In Tamil Nadu, in the south-east, where we went for our latest visit to India, there is also a fair number of Christians and we saw several big churches. In India as a whole, Christians are a small minority however.
One of our guides remarked judiciously that there is no problem between people of the different religions. It's the governments that create the problems. There is certainly a lot of truth to that.
Schools in India
All children are, according to the law, supposed to attend school, but in many poverty-stricken families the parents don't have the money to buy school material and uniforms. For the many charity organizations that particularly aim at getting children to go to school, the first problem is getting the parents who depend on the income of their children from begging or working to accept sending their children to school, even though it is paid for. Charity organizations set up schools where there aren't any and manage against high odds to give a very large number of children an education, literacy first of all, that they wouldn't have received without the organization helping out. Sometimes the children go back to being street children because the family needs the money they make to put food on the table. In cases of such great poverty, solutions are not easy to find.
The caste system
The definite down side of Hinduism is of course the cruel caste system. It was declared illegal in 1949, but nevertheless continues to shape people's lives. The Dalits (or Harijans), the untouchables, the outcastes, are still banned from many temples and their children often don't attend schools, for multiple reasons, the lack of schools in the neighborhood being one major reason. They are also still considered unclean by the people of caste. As an example, there was a hunger strike in one boarding school recently because the food was cooked and served by a Dalit woman. A casteless person must not touch a person of a caste, or vice versa. Therefore the expression the British colonials coined of untouchables. The law says that all people have equal right to education, health care, etc. but the reality says otherwise. [2]
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