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My Caste

cs.toronto.edu

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Re: My Caste

#111

Post by isanjay »

petesergeant wrote: post #97
isanjay wrote: post #33

I worked in 3 different companies (Hyderabad, Bangalore) in South India and did not see any evidence of caste discrimination. Or even people talking about discrimination in office. While I did see discrimination in college, which was in a rural town in South India.

> I worked in 3 different companies (Hyderabad, Bangalore) in South India and did not see any evidence of caste discrimination Are you of a member of a discriminated-against caste? If not, it may simply be it wasn't visible to you.

See the other comment. I agree with him.

Re: My Caste

#112

Post by kaycey2022 »

hef19898 wrote: post #91
crop_rotation wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caste based reservations in the private sector will be the end of any chance of India becoming a more prosperous nation. In public sector, the reservations are not limited to getting a job, but the promotions as well. In some public sectors, the promotion schedule gets accelerated basis caste. Sure, a lot needs to be done for a more equal society where everyone has the same opportunities, but private sector reservati…

Yes, because history showed us that equal societies, compared to centemporary pears, fare muchuch worse than those discriminating. Or rather not.

Equality is the prerogative of the government. Why do you want equal share in someone's private property? This is what reservations in the private sector mean. Someone takes all the risk, and works their ass off to establish a business and you come in with demands of equality in what someone else has made.

Re: My Caste

#113

Post by PixelForg »

banshiram123 wrote: post #59

[flagged]

No, we don't need caste-based reservations in the private sector. (And I'm saying this as someone that's ST). That would further increase the divide between castes, and I've never heard of anyone being denied a job in private sector based on their caste. It's definitely not the norm.

Reservation should be meant to uplift 1-2 generations, I don't see the point in giving reservation beyond that. I've seen so many rich people from lower castes getting into institutions easily and also availing scholarships by faking their parents yearly income. The whole system is rigged to be honest.

Re: My Caste

#115

Post by raincom »

Even though RTI queries to major IITs reveal that almost all faculty comes from un-reserved category, one needs more evidence (than this RTI data) to show that caste discrimination occurred. If there is an opening for two faculty positions in the IITM CS department esp in machine learning and AI, if 20 people are applied, two are selected, and two happened to be from un-reserved category. Does it prove caste-discrimination? Well, look at the profiles of twenty candidates and see their research record and also academic pedigree, see whether one can pick up two candidates from reserved category (that is, SC, ST and OBC). If one can show that, yes, indeed caste-discrimination is occurred: both candidates A (reserved category) and B (un-reserved category) are excellent both academically and research-wise, only B is chosen, yes, one can say that the committee should have picked A.

Btw, I am not a product of IITs or any elite institution in the West/East. So, I am of opinion that best candidates should be picked up irrespective of one's caste. Sometimes, what is 'best' can be under dispute: for instance, a UCLA Ph.D with many publications in STOC/FOCS is picked up over a CMU Ph.D with many publications in tier-2 conferences. Again, what is tier-1, what is tier-2, etc are driven by the CS community, not by the so-called upper-castes from India. Same goes for pedigree: why Ph.D students from top-tier CS departments have better shot at getting faculty jobs than those from tier-2 institutions? Why CS people from American universities have better shot than those who got Ph.D from IIT Ropar/Tirupati? Again, it is community-driven, not by upper castes.

Re: My Caste

#116

Post by madcaptenor »

unmole wrote: post #52
madcaptenor wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd imagine you can get some amount of information from a first name as well.

Why would you imagine that?

There's definitely some correlation between name and socioeconomic status in a lot of cultures. I'm surprised to hear that's not so in India.

Re: My Caste

#117

Post by rhaway84773 »

flownoon2 wrote: post #68
soligern wrote: post #53

Honestly I think this is majorly overblown. Having lived in both India and the US and being in my late 30s, I’ve never seen caste come up in any conversation even once. That’s tens of thousands of Indian people at the very least. Feels like this person is hyper aware of his caste and seems to take steps bordering on paranoia.

The author says that: 1. OBCs are estimated to comprise 40-45% of India's population and 2. Exactly one out of 180 CS faculty members across five IITs belongs to OBC category Those two facts alone make it sound like a pretty big deal to me, even if it hasn't been a part of your experience in India. Or do you think he is wrong about those numbers?

Caste is absolutely a huge problem in India as these numbers show. It’s a different question whether it’s a problem in Western companies, especially outside India, and I’m not sure about the data for that.

That being said, even this statistic shows that we should be wary of mapping our understanding of other kinds of discrimination onto caste without being very careful.

In an idealized version of the caste system (which you will see some bigots use to defend it but in the real world the idealized version is nowhere to be seen), it’s literally impossible for those lower caste numbers to be anything other than 0%, because in the idealized version your caste is defined by your profession, so being a professor means you’re not any of those castes.

Re: My Caste

#118

Post by thriftwy »

skavi wrote: post #75
thriftwy wrote: post #34

So my wife is from a shipyard town in Russia which refitted that air carrier ship for Indian navy. So at times they had a lot of Indian citizens in town. I remember some of her acquaintances, working at child care, discovered that some of Indian kids shun other ones based on Caste, and promptly made them all do kids' dances holding hands with each other.

Just curious; why were there children at all? Surely they weren’t on the carrier?

Accepting a huge warship, learning to use and service it is a multi-year affair involving a lot of people, who in turn have families. So they had to acclimatize to the near polar circle White sea experience.

Re: My Caste

#119

Post by soligern »

isanjay wrote: post #110
petesergeant wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is in contrast to the article, which says: > Typically, one's surname (last name) is a giveaway and most Indians can reasonably identify someone's caste based on the last name

That only applies to Northern part of the country. In south each state has it's own language and there is no way an outside state person can know your caste without asking

Even in the north, someone from Himachal Pradesh is not going to be able to identify someone’s caste in Bihar or West Bengal

Re: My Caste

#120

Post by alephnerd »

grad_ml wrote: post #107
alephnerd wrote: post #29

Depends on the region too. Part of my family is from a landowning/feudal caste (Chaudhary/Jatt and Pahari) that is traditionally Upper Caste but successfully lobbied to become counted as OBC/Lower Caste in order to avail affirmative action benefits. The Jatts side got reservation thanks to Congress [0] and the Pahari side got reservation thanks to the BJP [1] Edit: Lmfao this professor (Kuldeep Meel) is Jatt from His…

[flagged]

Eh Sri Ganganagar Meel biradari de siga? Those guys are an elite Feudal Family (they're related to the Jakkhars in neighboring Fazilka Punjab, who have been MPs and MLAs for that area since the 1970s).
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