Jeena Shah visits a Gujarat village and realizes the ‘invisible strength of empowerment’ and a few other things:

The Patels got around the minimum wage law and its reporting requirements by keeping registers of false wages and having their Dalit and adivasi laborers, who are illiterate, give them thumb print on them certifying the amount they were getting paid. Such tricks are almost as old as time, but my mother had an interesting comment to make on this fact when I talked to her later that week. When the Patels served mostly as agricultural laborers on the Shahs’ farms a long time ago, they had received the same treatment the Patels are now meting out on Dalits and adivsasis. I guess in this world you either have one of two initial instincts: you can either learn from the pain you suffered and prevent that from happening to someone else, or believe that what you suffered was the natural order of things, and now that you’ve risen above it, it’s time for someone else to have to go through it.