Famous songs, a few of them, were sung over and over to keep the spirit of communism alive and it worked. The whole community including the children thronged when the song was played, or when a communist movie was played in an open air theater. So, was there no discrimination? That would be a question for the on-lookers who saw the system from a distance, a safe distance or for those who were on the verge of disengaging from the cluster, Ravi, for example. So, if they were inside the cluster and they existed in the nascent years of technology and industrial revolution, there were no questions asked. The man who cleaned the garbage was of a lower caste and the priest in the temple would be of the higher caste, and never would they interchange their positions, whatever Marx or Lenin said about egalitarianism. This is where the lack of correspondence between India and China arises. Such things were kept closed and silent, lest they might break the integrity of the system. Well, big brother had nothing to do with all this, but Ravi did have some problems. That was later in his life when he got beaten up for some false allegations of exhibiting caste discrimination, proving that the low caste people were lower in their intelligence levels too, because Ravi belonged to a caste lower than that of the person that he purportedly discriminated. It never made any sense to him till today.
It was again due to big brother that Ravi heard his heartbeats for the first time in his life. He didn�t know where big brother worked, not even today. It might have been in a hospital. It was a sunny morning but Ravi was not feeling so well like the other days. The sun�s rays pierced through the thin metal grills and fell as a pattern over the bed on which Ravi was sitting. A major part of his lifetime was spent so much in the delight of watching the little dust particles floating in the rays, smoothly and rhythmically to the wind and breath around. They would never settle down, however hard one tries. Half covered in a non-superman powerless blue sheet, Ravi sat there staring at the dust particles. There was nothing else to do, the television transmission stops at nine in the morning and then starts only at one in the noon for the University Grants Commission programme and that ends at two. Then, the transmission starts only at five thirty in the evening. And, not all the programmes were interesting. There were no programs those days, only programmes existed. The quiet was roused by the entry of big brother who brought a stethoscope from a hospital. He was in high spirits showing it to everybody, mom, grandma and Ravi. He told that he pinched it from some doctor for a couple of hours. Then he plugged the earpiece into Ravi�s ears and made him hear the tune of his heart and then Ravi�s heart. Both sounded the same. Then he scuttled back to return the instrument. That was perhaps, if memories hold true, the last he heard anything from big brother.