A Good Time to Be Liberal

As I mentioned earlier 'liberal' and 'conservative' are in some ways relative terms. One should push to conserve good institutions and to overthrow bad ones. Here's a good example of an issue where I suspect we are all liberals:

It is an ordinary sight: a teenager cycling her way to college, the bag slung on her shoulder. But when Mamta Nayak, an 18-year-old Dalit girl, pedalled her way through the narrow bylanes of Narsingpur village, just 10 km away from the bustling capital city of Bhubaneswar, there was nothing commonplace about it. The villagers, mostly upper-caste Khandayats, were enraged: Mamta had defied an age-old ban on lower castes not to ride a bicycle through the village. Even her ageing father, Ghanshyam, a landless peasant, pleaded with her not to challenge the village diktat. It was her right of way, the girl quietly insisted. [whole story]