I was reading about this Indian Doctor in Norway. He goes to India, gets married and brings his wife to Norway. They have two kids, and the wife is having a hard time doing everything by herself and adjusting to Norway culture, which is nothing like what she knows. They get reported to social services because their two-year-old boy is throwing tantrums in school. The social services do video surveillance of the mom and kids. And without any notice, their kids were taken away because the mom raised her hand threateningly at one of the kids. After a prolonged custody battle with intervention from the Indian government, the mom (who is separated from her husband) gets her kids.

What did I want to tell you by sharing this story? Just because the Indian mom’s way of bringing up her kids did not fit into the pattern in Norway does not mean that they were not doing an excellent job of bringing up their kids. This raises another question: just because we have a system that seems to work in most cases, it is ok for it to not work for minorities. Maybe it is time we focused on the minorities and catered the systems towards them.

When you start building something, I understand that you want to get the system up and running, so you cut corners. You tell yourself we will get to it when the time is right. But there comes a time when you are pretty stabilized, and now it’s time to take care of other things – That TIME just never comes.

For the longest time ever, we brushed away things like ‘Police Brutality or Climate Change or Subtle -isms’ because economic development was necessary. It was crucial that the majority of the population had food, water and electricity. Ok – that logic holds for a while, but what has happened is a small minority with power has become the voice of the majority. And that privileged group is getting more and more privileged while the middle class is still doing ok. And the minority is getting screwed over and over and over again.

Hence, maybe it is time to look at everything from a minority perspective, even if it means we do not pander to the whimsical needs of the privileged few. It is about time the scales were reversed.

Now, I am sure some of you think this is common sense – and you are correct. It is common sense, but we are in a weird situation where the people in power have to be willing to give up the power so that we can turn the tables. These people are in power because they like power and do not want to give it up. How can we break this impossible situation that we have let exist for ages?

I do not have a solution, but I know that each of us needs to wake up and care enough to voice our opinion. If the rest of us non-power people stood up and did something maybe, we would have a chance!

How awake are you?