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My Caste

cs.toronto.edu

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Re: My Caste

#311

Post by naravara »

rhaway84773 wrote: post #127
WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it’s like playing a fake victim card?

And yet 1 out of 180 CS professors are OBCs despite the population being over 40%. It’s probably closer to the welfare queen trope. Yeah, there are a few people who cheat the system, like any other system in the world. Thaw existence of cheaters does not negate the very real problems and challenges faced by the actual “victims”.

There was functionally no public education system available to most Indians until a decent bit after Independence, and even now most rural communities have atrocious schooling standards with chronically absentee teachers.

India has been an extremely poor country for a long time. It’s not a situation like the US where there were plenty of opportunities available and some segment of society is gated out of them. Almost all Indians save for a narrow clade of people who worked directly under the imperial administration of the British Empire had access to anything, and even those were the cream of the crop from the pre-British days who could translate their prior privileges to getting ahead of their peers in the rat race.

It’s basically tautological to say OBCs are underrepresented in the upper echelons of society. That’s literally how the category is defined. The system was set up from colonialism on down to leave very few positions with contemporary standards of dignity for “natives” to occupy.

Re: My Caste

#312

Post by raincom »

yedava wrote: post #309
raincom wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corruption is NOT confined to one class, one caste, one set (random vs. non-random), one alumni association, one group (competent vs. incompetent). This issue is orthogonal to competence: one can be corrupt irrespective of competence. People recruited in state services (just like UPSC) are promoted to IAS/IPS. When these promoted IAS/IPS officers want postings as district magistrates (collectors) or superintendents o…

My point is why the enormous amount of energy directed at reservations when there are mountains of evidence that corruption is several orders of magnitude more destructive? It's an elephant vs an ant in the room thing. You ignore the elephant and think the ant is causing systemic malaise. Why is that? Is it because Hindu dharma dictates that certain classes are meant to do certain jobs? Like a person availing reserva…

Both incompetence and corruption need to be fixed. Incompetence from the rationality perspective [1], corruption from the systems perspective. Just because some book says "people from X varna should do certain job", who is enforcing it? Now you can say that Brahmins haven't taught Vedas to non-brahmins. Come on, who wants to recite Vedas today? History showed us that many Sudra kings ruled; what does it show? That one's favorite text is not binding; or, no one is enforcing what the text says; or, human actions are not instantiations of beliefs, which are textual; etc.

[1] https://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/2015/sep/11/Indian...

Re: My Caste

#313

Post by cryptonector »

flangola7 wrote: post #295
quadrifoliate wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, I think your mother's attitude is shared by the vast majority of Indian-Americans, and even first-generation Indian immigrants like me. In India, there are egregious things reminding you about it, i.e. literally every government form ever -- but in the US it's reasonably easy to ignore and forget about completely unless you go out initiating conversations about it, or are unlucky enough to run in…

It's on government forms?

That's how it goes. It was thus -and probably still is?- in Europe. It's thus in the U.S. It's thus everywhere that governments care about the racial/ethnic/religious make-up of their populations. For me there's always a fear of another Holocaust like that of the Tutsis in Rwanda or the Jews in Europe.

Re: My Caste

#315

Post by rajup »

araes wrote: post #307
moralestapia wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're trying to hint at some "it happens all the time, it's just hidden from public view", it doesn't. Non-Indians literally don't care, and very (very) few Indians actually do (at least in Canada).

The issue is not with the non-Indians, at least not directly. And with the Indians, it's that a few do, have moved to positions of responsibility, and can influence opinion enough to make life difficult (at least that is my external view). Google and Cisco's issues last year [1] [2] made a lot of folks aware that something was inside a lot of big tech because of all the H1B's, foreign hiring, outsourcing, ect... The…

Curious what issues you are referring to with those 2 companies (be specific please)? I'm not sure if you know but the Cisco case was thrown out recently because there was zero evidence, in fact the alleged perpetrator of the discrimination had hired another Dalit (so called "lower" caste) into the same position. I'm not making this up, it's all public information.

As for Google, all I see is that they (rightfully) withdrew an invitation to a speaker who has made a bunch of troubling bigoted statements bashing Hindus as a whole. Again all this is public information you can look it up.

Can you please cite just one genuinely valid case of caste discrimination in the USA that has stood up to even cursory scrutiny?

Re: My Caste

#316

Post by wobbly_bush »

ghotli wrote: post #272

I hope this comes across as me being merely ignorant of the situation on the ground in India but I do have a question. I've seen caste based discrimination here in America first hand. It's gross and I have absolutely no patience with those participating in it. If I were to go to India with this attitude, would I be met with compatriots that also have zero interest in putting up with it? Is there a reason that such a…

> Why don't people just change their names to the caste they want to be

For an over-simplified explanation, substitute caste with race/nationality and rephrase the question in a setting you might be more familiar with. For example "if people face racism/discrimination due to their nationality, why don't they just do X", where X is to obfuscate their race/nationality. It might work sometime, it might not work most of the times and the real answer is complicated and depends on the details. If you consider everyone in India to be culturally homogeneous, then it's just a matter of saying someone isn't caste X but Y. But if you consider every caste/subcaste to be distinct culturally and linguistically (almost like they are their own countries), it's not trivial to replace surname X with Y as other factors give you away.

> Is there a reason that such a backwards obviously oppressive system persists to this day in 2023?

Similar mental analogy helps understand a tad bit better - why do oppressive practices like racism/discrimination based on nationality exist today? At that, exist in some of the more developed countries. FYI - caste based discrimination is illegal in India, kinda similar to how racism is illegal but that alone isn't sufficient to remove it from the culture.

Re: My Caste

#317

Post by mavelikara »

testfoobar wrote: post #261

How do hookup/dating/wedding apps work in India? What sort of granularity about caste is disclosed? What is expected? What precision of caste classification can be inferred from name/occupation/hobbies/location/appearance? Has someone built a NN classifier for caste? Could such a thing be built?

The popular site matrimony.com has sub-sites for each caste. See the listing at: https://www.communitymatrimony.com/homepages/community/morel.... Many of these are based on caste.

Re: My Caste

#318

Post by wobbly_bush »

dakial1 wrote: post #279
ghotli wrote: post #272

I hope this comes across as me being merely ignorant of the situation on the ground in India but I do have a question. I've seen caste based discrimination here in America first hand. It's gross and I have absolutely no patience with those participating in it. If I were to go to India with this attitude, would I be met with compatriots that also have zero interest in putting up with it? Is there a reason that such a…

That's a good question. But as this is a way of maintaining social privilege and the people in power are the privileged ones, I imagine there is little effort in actually changing the system. They will say it's terrible etc, but no real actions will be taken. Can someone from India confirm/refute my hypothesis?

Two points - legally, caste based discrimination is illegal. From a cultural aspect - cultural changes are much slower in non-western countries. For example, compare how quickly the culture around marijuana & same sex marriage changed in US, and the laws kept up. But similar change probably takes 10x longer in "older" cultures. As an analogy, the left wing party of India which is supposed to be liberal, opposed legalizing same-sex marriage[1]. This attitude extends to all issues of reform in the entire political class.

[1] https://www.opindia.com/2021/09/377-decriminalisation-congre...

Re: My Caste

#319

Post by mavelikara »

haltingproblem wrote: post #283

The Prime Minister of India is an OBC and he got there through lifelong membership in the RSS a supposedly brahminical org. His competence as a politician and leader is unquestioned. The President of India is a Tribal, which can roughly equate to the status of indigenous people the world over. Her speeches are legendary, especially the one where she presented the inequities of the Indian judicial system to the judges…

> What does one make of this?

From what you have written, honestly, your political biases.

Re: My Caste

#320

Post by howinteresting »

lucb1e wrote: post #300
howinteresting wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly is your point then? It's just another word for "disadvantaged", "underprivileged" or "oppressed".

And it just happens to have a more commonly known negative meaning? They could have picked disadvantaged or oppressed, instead, for that acronym. I had little-to-no idea about this system until today and I'm not even a native english speaker, but all the same it seems curious to me that this word choice is just a coincidence...

Who could have picked those terms? OBC is a term of art used in Indian politics [1]. The author didn't exactly choose that term.

And OBC is Indian English, which is one of the most common varieties of English spoken worldwide. I think it's really weird when people say "carpetbagger" in American politics, definitely more weird than OBC. And don't get me started on the racist origins of "grandfathered in" or "eenie meenie miney moe".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Backward_Class

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