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Dating in Delhi when you're poor

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Re: Dating in Delhi when you're poor

#131

Post by valarauko »

jessaustin wrote: post #5

Twelve years after they started dating, they married. The family disapproved. Surender’s grandmother and Preeti’s mother were from the same “gotra,” or clan. Hindu clans prohibit marriage within the descendants of an unbroken male line. The Wiki page on "gotra" suggests they "only" have to go back seven generations (I don't know any of my ancestors beyond five generations and the father of one of my great-grandfather…

In practice, there really are several dozen gotras (at least among the Brahmins), if not hundreds.

The traditional practice was for Brahmins to declare their exact line of descent alongside the gotra, by naming five noteworthy ancestors (pravara rishis), starting from the top level saptarishi ancestor gotra(one of seven). Some of the saptarishis famously didn't get along, and their descendants are considered incompatible matches for marriage. When considering a marriage alliance from a family with the same top level saptarishi gotra, it was considered acceptable if at least three of the five pravara rishis were different, ie, a distant branch of the family. As families lost their traditions, people identified their nodal pravara rishi as the gotra, which is how most people today know them. In addition, in ancient times the custom was for non-brahmins to state the gotra & lineage of their family priest when performing religious rituals, and ended up adopting them.

Re: Dating in Delhi when you're poor

#132

Post by Talanes »

sombremesa wrote: post #98
hilbertseries wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there’s a little more nuance to what happened in echo park. Echo Park lake has always had some homeless people living there, but it was nowhere close to 200 prepandemic. There was also some attempt to relocate everyone, it’s the city of LA so obviously no one really trusted them. But it’s weird to me see a public park that’s meant to be used by everyone taken over and then when it’s taken back. LA is destroyi…

> it’s weird to me see a public park that’s meant to be used by everyone taken over That's what a majority of urban poor in India live on - public/unclaimed land (i.e. informal housing). They're not counted as homeless as a result, unlike in LA. That's how LA can appear to have a comparatively larger homeless population, even if it's a lot smaller in reality. In India this type of housing is illegal and can be destro…

>but that rarely happens because the situation can be leveraged for votes (there's a lot of poor people)

There's a massive difference hidden in that statement alone. Here the politicians just assume those people aren't voting.

Re: Dating in Delhi when you're poor

#133

Post by [deleted] »

lapsed_pacifist wrote: post #122
DoreenMichele wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, some people took it and some did not. Yet you are trying to suggest we judge all homeless based on those who did not without knowing any further details. Damn them all to hell because some were offered housing and said "no." A lot of services offered to the homeless are really terrible. I never stayed in a shelter while homeless. They have rules that make it just shy of being a form of prison, they tend to not…

I'm interested in reading more of your writing. I worked with TANF recipients, many of whom were homeless (although few of them were unsheltered) and would like to hear more of your perspective because I have some exposure personally, and also because there is a serious problem with providing services to a large number of homeless people in my local area.

[deleted]

Re: Dating in Delhi when you're poor

#134

Post by fragmede »

sombremesa wrote: post #123
_y5hn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

India has lots of villages, slums and people in between having very poor material standards compared to Western countries. But people are also much more interconnected, rely on each other and find ways to get by. So to get that culture, you have to spend at least 6 months and really get to know what family values are, and how things tend to work out. It's very different than the lonely individualist countries. Many I…

That's very true, but I think it's possible to a) have a fact-based approach without being superficial, and b) communicate cultural context without having to plumb the depths of the human condition. Were it necessary to cover the subtle nuances of Eastern and Western culture, it would be hard to get anywhere with prose. I think it's sufficient to convey enough information to demonstrate that the value systems and liv…

But it takes the plumbing the depths of the human condition to realize that we're not actually a that different, and that the fundamentals are the SAME. Airy eloquent prose may not have the same effect on the data driven as hard metrics, but comparing $20,000 (US) a year to the equivalent of $1 US a day, without capturing, in prose, that person in the US below the poverty line may be going hungry more days a week, and is more exposed to the elements, and more likely to be harrassed by police/others and more likely to die, is superficial.

Prose is what's needed to communicate effectively. Tables and charts simply can't do that by themselves. Even they need a legend and labels to be useful.

Re: Dating in Delhi when you're poor

#135

Post by bserge »

prox wrote: post #118
jp42 wrote: post #50

Whenever there is comparison between something in India and west, almost always its not apples to apples. There are 1.3 billion people, and very wide range of social & economic spectrum, which inherently makes comparison very difficult. for the sake of example - for "X", you will find many many Indians spending vastly more than western people, at the same time you will find millions of Indians who could not even drea…

An Indian man once told me religion is the only unifying part of India. That if that didn’t exist, India would fall apart. Can’t tell of course if that is true.

That's more likely the government + military.

Re: Dating in Delhi when you're poor

#136

Post by lsiebert »

sombremesa wrote: post #7

My first thought when reading this was hoping that these types of articles will reduce the comments I see on the internet that try and compare Delhi/Mumbai squalor to LA. Then I read the first comment on this HN thread, which is directly comparing this to Toronto. So either Westerners don't realize that people in these places are making less money in a month than the middle class person can expect to spend in an aver…

Generally my sense is that people are not good at measuring their expertise about topics. We infer a lot of data into our world views based on paltry facts and analogy to our own experiences. We think we understand because our minds paper over the lacuna of our knowledge. The more I learn, the more I realize how little I know, and how quick people are to believe that other people's experience is much like their own.

That's why I ask people to cite sources often, or listen to their personal stories, so I can learn more.

Re: Dating in Delhi when you're poor

#137

Post by bserge »

sombremesa wrote: post #80
derefr wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two distinct experiences being discussed here: the experience of living in absolute poverty; and the experience of being down-and-out in a city you can't afford the cost-of-living of (i.e. "relative" poverty — the kind you could in theory get away from by "moving somewhere cheaper", but where for various reasons people don't tend to do that.) Both the poor person in Toronto and the poor person in Delhi are…

> But the homeless person in Delhi will still commisserate with the homeless person in Toronto Perhaps, but it's worth pointing out that these experiences are qualitatively different. In India, being poor (especially if you're a certain caste) is tantamount to being non-human. You can be jailed, raped, mistreated, killed without consequence. Even the middle class is afforded little human dignity, the underclass have…

Why are these people seemingly just accepting their fate? What would it take for them to riot?

Re: Dating in Delhi when you're poor

#138

Post by wil421 »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #117
wil421 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s someone on YouTube I sorta watched from time to time when the pandemic hit. He’s located in Venice beach, German in Venice. He was exposing the homeless issue and lack of government response. Fast forward to now. The city offered everyone a free place to go and many took it. There were still a lot of people who refused. Now the garbage trucks and police evicted them. The garbage people packed a lot of stuff a…

First, some people took it and some did not. Yet you are trying to suggest we judge all homeless based on those who did not without knowing any further details. Damn them all to hell because some were offered housing and said "no." A lot of services offered to the homeless are really terrible. I never stayed in a shelter while homeless. They have rules that make it just shy of being a form of prison, they tend to not…

I’ve done outreach and volunteer work before. Not sure how you interpreted my reply but it was not a negative question.

These topics are of interest to me.

Re: Dating in Delhi when you're poor

#139

Post by sombremesa »

derefr wrote: post #97
sombremesa wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the homeless person in Delhi will still commisserate with the homeless person in Toronto Perhaps, but it's worth pointing out that these experiences are qualitatively different. In India, being poor (especially if you're a certain caste) is tantamount to being non-human. You can be jailed, raped, mistreated, killed without consequence. Even the middle class is afforded little human dignity, the underclass have…

I feel like that's conflating yet a third kind of poverty: having no societal respectability. Having no social "credit." No https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/Whuffie . Being in poverty but of a high caste in India, is pretty-standard "absolute poverty." Meanwhile, being well-off but of a low caste in India, is more like being a recently-freed black slave in the ante-bellum southern US. That experience is really nothing…

I agree that the caste issues are orthogonal to the others and that these three kinds of poverty come close to encompassing the problem being discussed.

And if this were to be the complete picture, why can't it express the sheer inhumanity of being of a low caste in India?

Take the case of a "drug-addicted homeless person working as a prostitute to feed their addiction" in Toronto - this person arrived here by their own choices (some amount of agency), but you can be born into that situation (with the awareness that your children will follow the same path) in India. [0]

You can't worry about societal respectability when you have no basic human dignity. Perhaps that is a fourth kind of poverty.

[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2016/11/28/the-indian-cas...

Re: Dating in Delhi when you're poor

#140

Post by random314 »

factorialboy wrote: post #4
gopalv wrote: post #2

Some of this stuff looks very poorly sourced or misunderstood. > Marrying within the “gotra” is one of the primary reasons for recurring “honour killing” of lovers in India I hope not, because it is such a weird upper-caste nit-pick. > they talk about their lives and walk around the park, or eat aloo-chaat or golgappas at a roadside stall That is such a still frame of the middle class life in Delhi from the 90s. My p…

Unfortunately Indian media is full of "secular" authors pretending to be liberal but regularly dishing hate against native faiths. But to be fair, it's not just the news media that's afflicted by this disease, bollywood is no better.

Standard right wing talking point. Liberal authors criticizing the current regime, a Hindu nationalist party, are anti nationals. Here criticism of the BJP or social ills is equated to hatred of Hinduism. The authors might themselves be Hindus, but it doesn't matter.
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