Despite this tentativeness, they knew that getting an Aadhaar card was important. For them, the importance of an Aadhaar card, as I inferred from their conversation, was largely pragmatic in nature: banks and property purchases needed Aadhaar. These exercises in new ways of self-description — including via an Aadhaar card — then resemble rituals whereby one is formally inducted into the comity of peers. But less appreciated about this adoption is that there is an intuitive understanding at an individual level that one’s Aadhaar number is one’s own — belonging neither to husband nor to family, caste or religion. In a country where few things are personal, far less anything private, it is one of those few things that is as inviolable as one’s own fingerprint.

Source: The Hindu December 02, 2017 18:45 UTC