"Specified cast is not valid"

Being a white collared cheap coolie, I get opportunity to work with some latest products of Microsoft. Of this my latest project demanded me to work on BizTalk Server 2009. Few weeks’ back I got a God-Damn bugging error with the name Specified cast is not valid. After some googling hacked out the solution for this.

But meanwhile I kept wondering had this landed on to some of our popular leaders in India, this error would have created havoc. Not to say the least, caste wars. Dalit heartthrob Mayawati and the Yadav duo surely would have problems with this message. To such an extent that, MS would have had to close their shops in India, for reasons they surely would not have anticipated while writing this error message. Not to say the least there is a difference of 'e' between Microsoft's 'cast' and India’s ‘caste’.

'Caste' has been one of the most intriguing social concepts to me. My tryst with caste was, way back when I was somewhere around 4-5 years of age. In those days we lived in some shanty government quarters in a village called Ozar some 20 kms from the pilgrimage city Nashik. There we lived in a 'salad bowl' society which actually represented India in true sense. You could see a Malayali, Sindhi, Tamil, Maharashtrian have a joint of cigarette together or A Sardar, Moslem, Christian or Hindu being a good friend (as shown in some Manmohan Desai flicks of 70's). The multi-ethnicity of my childhood society is subject matter of another blog post altogether.

So it happened that I was playing cricket with a boy of my age. But (as it usually happens while playing galli cricket) we ended up in a small altercation. This in turn resulted in each one calling his parent. So my dear Mommy came up for me on the ground and my adversary called his father. At that time his father yelled on to my mother " aap ka ladka 'caste' kay baray main bolta hain" Your son has insulted my lad by abusing him on his caste.

It was all Greek-Latin to me. What the heck is Caste? I never knew that until i learned about it in Social Studies much later when I was in eighth standard. My mother duly apologized the gentleman, and pulled me from the ground to home. She was pretty indignant at the happenings. She was all the more pained. How the hell can a 4 year old hurl humiliations and that too on some ones caste?