I’ve never really thought much about being a Brahmin. I do not think about caste. I certainly do not think that caste makes me a more important or exalted person.

I have had my sacred thread ceremony. Quite frankly, I didn’t see what the fuss was all about, then. I was about 10 years old, and I sat in front of a fire that smoked enough to make my eyes smart, and all these priests said all these shlokas. I had my grandfather sitting beside me, and it went on and on, interminably until somebody threw a cloth around me, and my grandfather, my guru, came in under it and whispered the gayatri mantra in my ear.

I was hungry, sleepy, my eyes were red and smarting, and I was pretty unhappy about all the curtailments of my diet that were to ensue.

So after it all ended, I was a good little bramhachari for a year, because everyone told me to, and I knew that my mother would be upset if I didn’t do all the things she wrote down in a little copy for me: I did the daily sandhyavandanas in the morning, and in the evening, wearing a little saffron dhoti, and saying the gayatri mantra one hundred and eight times each time; I didn’t have meat, or eggs; I observed ekadashis; I did the rituals prior to every meal; I never went for invitations; basically, everything I was supposed to do. And after one year was up, I firmly told everyone that that was that, and I had had enough.

It has been more than a decade since I stopped doing all this bramhachari stuff. I’ve never missed it; in fact, I never saw any point to it back when I did it. The whole thing always seemed to me to be an exercise in futility.

My 10 year old cousin just had his sacred thread ceremony. Besides my own, it is the only one I have watched from the beginning to the end. I ran around, did errands, talked to millions of relatives, and herded them to the dining hall, but mostly, I watched. There was my cousin, in a dhoti, squirming around, sitting next to my uncle, looking morosely at the fire. I knew his eyes were smarting. He took bits of leaves, and twisted them around his fingers, mouthed “I’m bored!” to me a few thousand times, and asked for, and drank gallons of lemonade.

I watched. When the time came for the Bramhopdesa, and they threw the cloth over my cousin, and his guru, I had the biggest smile on my face. It was a beautiful moment. It always is. This is at the centre of being Brahmin, whatever that is. This symbolic moment, when a boy is reborn, and he becomes Dvija, twice-born, reaffirmed. After a moment, when they reappeared from under the cloth, I could tell my cousin was rather surprised at all the fuss. I was nearest, and he looked at me, puzzled. I was still smiling.

Perhaps that is how it is designed. You feel nothing at your own ceremony, and you suddenly get it, standing in a crowd watching someone else go through it, just as bored and skeptical as you had been, when it happened to you.

What hits you is the continuity of it. The way it has been, for hundreds of years, these words, in this order, said aloud, by you, and by generations of ancestors. That is where you come from, and this is the substance of which your culture is made, and this is what ties you to them and them to you, and you are blindingly aware of your moment in the slipstream of time. I have forgotten almost all the rituals and shlokas; it has been more than ten years. But I have this strange desire to start it all over again; as a gesture, if you will, of thanks to a thousand shades.

“Brahmin” is such a loaded word nowadays. But being a Brahmin is much more than a circlet of thread round your middle. It is more than a tarpan every year, or being able to perform pujas. It is more than an accident of birth.

Being a Brahmin has nothing to do with your name.

Being a Brahmin is a mystic awakening, a sense of things bigger than you are. It is a desire to live not only for yourself, but for things grander: for knowledge, and its perpetuation.

My mother used to make my sister and me recite a particular shloka when we went to bed, when we were children. I think she hoped to condition us into falling asleep as soon as it was said. That never worked, but I remember that it ended with saying, “May the whole world be in peace and harmony.” That, to me, is what sums up everything that goes with being a Brahmin.