Anecdotes like yours really bother me because they sound so outlandish that their veracity cannot be taken on faith. Having spent a considerable part of my working life in the US, i can state that never once has the subject of Caste ever been a topic of relevance with my Indian colleagues i.e. it has never ever come up in any discussions, implicit or otherwise. None of my American colleagues knew much about it; and i have worked across a bunch of companies so the sample space is quite spread out.
>their veracity cannot be taken on faith
If you think what he "claims" is evidence, i have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
I will place my decade and a half of working experience across half a dozen companies in the US over any anonymous person's "evidence".
Those two anecdotes can both truthfully coexist, but the first one proves the statement while the second doesn't disprove it. The evidence needed to disprove such a statement is pretty large; an individual's work history is not enough to say confidently that discrimination isn't happening.
How many companies have you worked at, 6? How many companies are there with significant indian representation? At Google alone there are far more than six TEAMS with majority indian representation. How could you claim that your experience invalidates someone else's?
Meanwhile, if there are a handful of anecdotes that folks have experienced or witnessed caste-based discrimination, we should be pretty confident that it's a problem.
1) You have one anecdata from a person who IS NOT hiding behind anonymity. You have another anecdata from a person who IS hiding behind anonymity. Therefore Person 2's claims cannot be taken on faith.
2) The topic under discussion is part of Person 1's culture and hence he is familiar with all its nuances. Person 2 has no knowledge of the subject or at best a cursory knowledge from tabloids and not from any authentic sources. Therefore Person 2 cannot claim equal relevance with Person 1's knowledge.
3) Person 1 has lived and worked across both his and Person 2's cultures for a significant period of time. Thus he is familiar with thought processes of both sides w.r.t. the topic under discussion. Person 2 does not have any such experience. Thus Person 2's "claims" do not have the same weight as Person 1's.
QED.
Also writing qed at the end of your comment doesn't make it a rigorous proof, lol. Like, you've already failed to understand the basic concept of sampling bias.
The interesting thing here is the isomoprhism between your reaction and those of other privileged groups forced to examine their ill-gotten gains, but on the other hand maybe it's not surprising, we're just chimpanzees with tools after all
I find this POV extremely fascinating outside India. Here's the thing in case you are unaware: in India, roughly 50-60% of jobs in the government sector, seats in government funded colleges and private colleges (and soon probably even in private companies) are set aside for the "lower" castes and tribes[1]. I use scare quotes here, because there is a whole other discussion of how many "lower" castes actually need this kind of affirmative action since they are extremely well off that I won't get into here. I come from an "upper" caste family (scare quotes here because I find the terminology stupid and divisive, I definitely don't consider myself "upper" in any way) where my grandfather was a dirt-poor farmer who moved from the village to the city, died dirt poor as well (think Slumdog Millionaire level poverty). My father worked hard, educated himself and got himself a job in the government sector despite having nothing "reserved" for him. I did the same too with nobody handing me anything. This is the same story across millions of families across India. So tell me, what unfair advantage or privilege did this system really afford me? And then I see this enlightened person on the Internet who has probably heard/read about caste in the last couple of days have a fully formed opinion on all things caste, with no real intention of really understanding the issue. A superficial understanding is only going to get you so far without descending into all out stereotypes and bigotry, like another commenter on here who equated wearing the sacred thread with a Klan hood. But then I guess you are right in a way: we're all just different groups of chimpanzees with tools.
Agreed.
And this ironically is the crux of the problem: most Indians find it dumb, don’t care for it and hope it dies out soon. But some groups would like to keep using it as yet another way to divide for myriad reasons: vote bank politics being the biggest if you follow any Indian politics at all. Preventing base bigoted discrimination is a reason too, but a very small reason.
This group equality labs is less of the latter and more of the former.
This thread is about "Caste based Discrimination" amongst the Indian IT Community in the USA. My contention is that it is not all the issue that it is made out to be by some vested interests who may have their own agenda in raking this up. Hence American companies need to be cautious before giving them a megaphone and a platform.
As such USA does much better job of telling about racism, then India does about casteism.
However India did a superb job of asking Dr.Ambedkar to write the constitution, by which the upper caste will abide. I am not aware of any other society which has said, "we believe in equality and will allow someone who was discriminated to make the rules by which we all will live".
You pejoratively dismiss those who seek to bring attention to discrimination they experience as “rabble-rousers”. You then proceed to acknowledge that this is discrimination is very real (“we can’t change their hearts and minds!”).
You then mention caste with nudism in the same sentence as nudism, like that’s appropriate.
You then blame the victims of the aforementioned discrimination for ‘bringing their real selves to work,’ as if it’s somehow their fault they are being discriminated against.
I’ve heard horror stories from Indian friends in tech. When they start at a new company, upper-caste Indian managers and coworkers will persistently ask them seemingly innocuous questions like where they are from, where they went to school, what Neighbourhood of which city did you grow up in, are you vegetarian, are you vegetarian by choice or birth, what do your parents do, etc. There was an even an episode of planet money where a person who had been discriminated against describes a coworker patting them on the back in the area where Brahmins sometimes where a white thread.
Being born into a caste isn’t some “personality quirk,” and it’s exceedingly offensive to imply it is. Dalit peoples who face discrimination don’t have a choice in the matter, some will always see them as “untouchables” regardless of whether or not they disclose their caste openly.
I seriously suggest you reevaluate your thinking.
> [...]
> Hence i think Google did the right thing in cancelling this talk.
It seems to me that this talk could have been an opportunity for Americans to learn about caste discrimination and what it looks like.
Google is a technology company, not a liberal or conservative think tank. Let us get back to tech talks!
How exactly?
Americans have no idea of what caste-based discrimination looks like and hence merely use it to foist their own prejudices (i.e. "they terk err jerbs") onto the Indian community. Indians have such diversity amongst themselves (North vs. South, State vs. State, Linguistic, Religious etc.) that anything can be used as a bone of contention (real or imagined).
The first thing to realize is that people with grievances whether factual or not, often use the American platform to push their agenda. While it makes some sense to raise Caste-based discrimination etc. within the Indian Workplace, it absolutely does not make any sense to raise it in the American Workplace simply because the repercussions would be vastly detrimental to the entire Indian Community. It is also the case that Caste-based discrimination has declined greatly in Urban India (since Independence) and more specifically in the IT sector where everybody is only after the almighty USD/INR and nothing else matters.
Hence i think Google did the right thing in cancelling this talk.