In autumn 2011, a Dalit first-year student at AIIMS named Pankaj Meena was delivering a PowerPoint presentation in class on the functioning of the human kidneys. When he got to the fifth slide, Pankaj said, the professor interrupted and told him to go back to the very first slide. Then he asked Pankaj, “What is the most interesting thing in this introduction?” Pankaj looked at the slide, puzzled, and found nothing. The professor answered his own question: “The most interesting thing on this page is Meena, his caste.”
“After that I forgot everything,” Pankaj told me. “I just wanted to leave the classroom.”
–Incident at India’s # 1 Medical Institute, AIIMS
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