In one of the most moving scenes in filmmaker and scholar Jyoti Nisha’s Dr B.R Ambedkar: Now & Then (2023),a woman in Saharanpur (Uttar Pradesh) confesses she is willing to lay down her life for an Ambedkar statue. Startled at first about the extreme lengths some are willing to go for a statue—especially that of someone who advocated against blind-faith and irrationality—its significance dawned on me much later. Unlike most idols, the Ambedkar statue was an entire community’s reminder for dignity and a last attempt at asserting themselves as a part of civil society. By defacing it, the Thakurs of the village had humiliated the Dalits (which culminated in the 2017 violence). And that’s the thing about caste, is how it can flip one’s worldview – where you start noticing injustice trickling down in the most mundane ways.