His time there had been grueling: an endless succession of arguments, proposals, and counterproposals, with painful testimony from victims of both sides. At last, though, on August 24th, the two sides reached an agreement.
The FARC is my family. It will get an earlier test, though, with a legal battle that will start in Osaka this week. They relied on a year-old regulation originally intended specifically to regulate cosmetic tattooing, such as creating permanent eyebrows, which stipulated that only licensed health-care providers could do such work.
More pertinent economically, and socially, is the division between high-castes the top three groups and low-castes Shudras and, after a further cleavage, untouchable communities. Still, whether via Vedic scripture or Dumont, the varna pyramid is what most people think of when considering caste. Importantly, in independent India, in what seems like an act of collective self-deception, this pyramid hierarchy is also popularly seen as containing the limits of caste.
Flatten the pyramid, and caste will end. Education, republicanism, industrialization, modernization—each has been portrayed as the agent that will bring about this flattening, finally ridding the Indian subcontinent of caste divisions. Yet every Indian knows that there is another aspect to caste: jaat , or jati. Jati is the caste identity that every Indian is born with, the multifarious groupings of clans, tribes, communities and religions that comprise Indian society.
Each jati is typically associated with a traditional job function, and some jatis are defined by religious variation or linguistic groupings.
