California sues Cisco alleging discrimination based on India’s caste system

Yeah well sounds about right, entirely possible.

This will be an interesting case because it will need to test how a construct like caste maps on to the protected classes of US anti discrimination law. There's plenty of overlap between caste and many US protected classes, including race, class, and religion, but there is not a tight fit to any of them.

Perhaps countries like the UK have more experience with this, because they have proportionally much larger and older Indian populations, and also the UK has its own historical hereditary caste like system.

Interesting because this is not the first time I've heard that Indians in Cisco are extremely cliquey. Definitely remember hearing story of a workplace discrimination settlement from there. In that case it was argued in the gender angle, but the person involved said it's actually a group of Indians who were allegedly pulling all stops to promote each other while trying to exclude other Asians.

I'm from India, and can totally believe it. Have also heard of stories in Texas where they will keep a trusted Indian guy in interview panels to make sure that it's not a cousin or friend (who only barely looks like the interviewee) actually coming for the interview. And then there are these "consulting firms" who specialise in helping you fake a resume and get a job (most of the time these are people who won the H1 lottery and have come to the US via Infosys/TCS and are trying to switch to a real job instead of the half-pay serfdom they are in). These shenanigans are of course not common nowadays, but what this means is there's a big population of disingenuous Indian origin people in the second-grade tech jobs in the US, which does not bode well for the general image of Indian tech workers unfortunately.

shocking but still confused. When they practiced the indian caste system in the US, how would they interact with people not from india, e.g. people with US, EU, Vietnam, Korea etc background? Do they get treated as "high caste" or "low caste" people?