Discrimination is not a distant theme or a remote phenomenon for people living in contemporary India provided that the person is socially and culturally wide awake. After fifty years as a sovereign democratic republic with constitutionally-guaranteed human rights, we still have daily front page reports of caste genocide, attacks on minorities, gang rape of women and even murder of innocent children.

We internalise information of such violence with our daily breakfast, whatever else be part of our diet, with such equanimity and poise that we could soon invite comparison with the breakfast ritual of middle-class citizens of Weimar during the Third Reich in Germany while, in the nearby concentration camp at Buchenwald heaps of Jewish bodies were regularly cremated after sub-human treatment and systematic torture.