151–160 of 633 posts
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Please don't take HN threads further into religious flamewar. If you have corrective information, that's great, but provide it neutrally. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
So now anecdotes spilling vitriol are allowed?
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I was told by a colleague that most Indian folks you meet in tech in the Bay Area are the 1 percenters of India. Is that kind of what you're saying here as well?
Nah, more like middle to upper-middle class, with good access to education. 1 percenters are the ones with old family money and successful businesses (which they will inherit). They have no reason to leave the country for a tech job.
I live and work in India and I would like to throw more light on this. Me and my friends like to joke around that you will never get your dues, either pay raise or promotions unless you have the last names jain, gupta, sharma, verma. I had a guy on my team who was very capable but did not have the right last name, he was being harassed for promotions for 4-5 years. On the other hand the manager class was entirely "ja…
Couldn't people just change their last name? I imagine if suddenly everyone's last name was Gupta, that kind of discrimination would become difficult.
> lawsuit found that 67% of Dalits surveyed felt treated unfairly at their U.S. workplaces. I'm more surprised 67% of Dalits would have coworkers knowing their caste. Can someone give context on how this happens?
If you're raised in India, it is relatively easy to determine someone's general (varna) caste and specific (jati) caste from their familial name(s) and/or physical appearance. You can pick these things up by osmosis from adults (my case), through being taught, or simply through caste-influenced culture. It's quite complicated, and I'm not an expert. You don't even have to be Hindu to be a part of the caste system - M…
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I just wanted to mention few things because they need be said. I hope it helps. Caste system and Varna system in India are 2 different things. Many people including Indians fail to understand this. Caste system and what was written in Manusmruti (some guidelines book for Hindus) was debated even in ancient times but some high-caste-people did take advantage of it and it went screwed up in-between years. Caste system…
Historically speaking, most ancient societies had something similar, one way or the other. What is really interesting, is that India is the only country I know of, that codified that system religiously and carried it into the 21st century. Not to say that there is an society without discrimination and social disparity. But only a few take it to the level the Indian caste system does. That shows how tricky racism is,…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edo_society
Virtually nothing of it remains today though, although there are some traces of discrimination against the burakumin (Japan's untouchables) and some (rare) names are associated with the nobility. Generally speaking, though, you can't tell somebody's former caste from the name: a Maeda could be a direct descendent of the samurai clan, a retainer or peasant in the Maeda lands who adopted the name, or some random person anywhere in Japan who happened to live near the front (mae) rice paddy (-da) since Japanese names tend to reflect places, not occupations. Those few who care about "pure blood" have to hire a private investigator to ferret out burakumin traces.
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Easy for me to say, but if I were you, assuming you’re in the USA, I’d own the hell out of it. To be ashamed of it here is to give power needlessly to whole populations who do not own you. And the States love an underdog. This is the country where “Yankee Doodle” started out as an anti-American insult by the Brits and ended up being one of the nation’s favorite songs. The nation that used the N-word seriously until a…
This is one of those replies that rekindles my faith in the always double-edged HN spirit for another few months :) "Dalit and proud" could literally be the baseball cap powered cultural revolution India needs to be swept up by, assuming it didn't lead to more civil unrest along the lines of cow vigilantism
> lawsuit found that 67% of Dalits surveyed felt treated unfairly at their U.S. workplaces. I'm more surprised 67% of Dalits would have coworkers knowing their caste. Can someone give context on how this happens?
How long do you think it would take, as an American, to figure out of someone is from New York, Boston, or Alabama? You'd know practically the moment they opened their mouth. Yeah, it might take you longer to figure out if someone was from Florida or California, but that would probably come out relatively quickly in how they talk about beaches. Humans group and identify others (often wrongly) really quickly.
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It's not 1:1, but there's a clear correlation. To caricature a bit, the Brahmins at the top of the hierarchy can afford to have an elaborate "pure" vegetarian diet with lots of ghee etc (the Jains, mentioned earlier, even exclude root vegetables that would kill the plant), somewhere around the middle of the pile you start eating animals because you need to get your protein where you can, and at the very bottom are th…
Yes well if we want to go all Veblen, we can see that throughout the world, not just India. But let us be real here, there are a lot of people in poverty following vegetarian diets, especially because meat doesn't always come cheap in India, and dal/milk relatively are. Some follow it because they were raised in a vegetarian culture. Some do it because they dislike the thought of eating animals. Brahmins aren't alway…
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In the south, it means looking fairer. There is inherent racism basis skin tone. It is not just how you look though, it is your name which can have case based surname or a first name variant common to a caste. Eating habits, how you speak the language - dialect and kind of words you use and so on.
Would it be similar to how a British person might recognize a posh individual?
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I have experienced caste-based "weirdness" of a slightly different flavor - I look like a brahmin (the highest caste), but am not one. Every once in a while I'll meet some indian-origin guy who's brahmin who will come ask me if I am okay with eating that tortilla since it contains lard. Once I let it deliberately slip that I'm not in-fact brahmin, they will be like, "oh" and change topics. The oh always sounds to me…
Interesting, I never knew the different caste had any distinguishing physical characteristics. What does a “brahmin look” entail?