As my India trip draws to a close, I now finally had the breathing time to think about everything I’ve witnessed over the past five weeks. I’ve seen so many spectacular sights, from the Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur, to the sun setting over the dunes of Jaisalmer, to the Bara Imambara in Lucknow, to the evening aartis along the River Ganges in Varanasi. I’m so blessed that I got to spend the past five weeks exploring India, the second country that I am lucky enough to call home.

India, while it is home to some of the most beautiful landmarks in the world, is also rife with poverty. It’s visible in every city, in every corner.

Take Mumbai, for example. I’m writing this blog post from the comfort of my Dadi’s spacious apartment. Four floors below me is a slum, where hundreds of people call the narrow street outside their home. Families cluster into small huts, creating roofs out of tin and tarp. The children of these families, unable to go to school because they can’t afford the fees, run through the hard stone streets barefoot, tapping on windows, begging for a few rupees or selling small products, like balloons or perhaps even car chargers. I think about my upbringing, how my parents always pushed me to excel in school, and how all of that pushing has culminated in me currently attending Oxford.

In New Delhi, both of my uncles live in affluent, gated apartment complexes. As I’m driving from one apartment to the other, you’ll see hundreds of people who don’t even have a roof over their heads – they live under the highways and sleep on the dirt.

As we drove through the desert from Jodhpur to Jaisalmer, we saw the occasional little hut, visible solely because of a small burning fire or by a single light bulb. In the desert, temperatures are high and hot during the daylight hours, and can get bitterly cold in the evenings and late nights. We spent two days in Suryagarh, an absolutely stunning hotel that looks like a palace, the thought of the impoverished people in the desert living unprotected from the harsh desert conditions not even existing in our heads.

Varanasi (Benaras) is a holy city that rests on the River Ganges. I loved exploring the ghats, and my mother and I will never forget our boat ride on the Ganges with the musicians serenading us as we floated along. But Varanasi is an overcrowded city, with thousands of men, women, and children lacking the basic necessities, squatting along the river, begging for money.

After spending seven years away from India, it was honestly eye opening to see so much poverty. It can almost make you uncomfortable – but it’s that discomfort that’s important, as it’s an acknowledgement of privilege.

My years in debate, as well as the addition of a sociology minor at Case Western, trained me to be the kind of person where if I don’t truly understand why something is the way it is, even if I know all of the facts I possibly could know, I try to think about the theoretical reasoning behind it.

So, let’s get academic for a second (sorry) and think about the sociological perspectives on poverty. Sociologists analyze poverty through one of two possible approaches. One approach, known as the structural-functionalist approach, would argue that every level of society contributes to the stability of that society overall. To be more specific, theorists who believe in the structural-functionalist approach would argue that inequality and social stratification are actually beneficial to society overall, because it ensures that the “best” people occupy the highest social standing and that those who are deemed “less worthy” occupy the bottom rungs. The people who are at the highest standing thus receive power and rewards because of their “better” abilities and/or skill sets. This logic implies that social inequality makes sure that those who have the best qualifications fill the most functionally important jobs. The second approach is known as conflict theory, which directly criticizes structural-functionalism. Conflict theory argues that it is near impossible to determine the functional importance of any job, because societal interdependence means that every position is arguably necessary for a society to function properly. The theory also argues that the idea of stratification being “fair” and “rational,” and that the “best” people occupy the top level of society because of their superiority, doesn’t make any sense. Conflict theorists instead believe that stratification is inherently harmful to society. According to these theorists, stratification benefits the powerful and wealthy at the expense of the poor and vulnerable, as those people who are at the top of the social hierarchy can continually build on their wealth; which, in turn, allows them to further the power and wage gaps between the groups. Conflict theorists further believe that the competitive, hierarchal system, coupled with barriers that make social mobility difficult or impossible, only perpetuates stratification.****

I personally side with conflict theorists. Inequality is continually perpetuated by elites who want to maintain or increase their own personal status, primarily for selfish reasons. In the case of Indian society, with the caste system still alive and well in the country despite being technically illegal, that perpetuation is clear, simply because it’s all around you.

India is gorgeous – I can’t deny that. But it is such a stratified country, hell-bent on maintaining an abusive hierarchy that punishes millions of people. That, I believe, is a human rights violation, and I hope that some day, years from now, I can be someone who helps to change that.

****This information was gathered from You May Ask Yourself: An Introduction to Thinking like a Sociologist, 4th Edition.