During an interview, my team lead was asking the interviewee strange questions. I thought they were benign... Afterwards, she plainly stated she was trying to find out what caste he was from. I was ignorant, thinking this is like, are you from the east coast, west coast, etc. My biggest mistake was not going to HR. I later suspected if this was going on, I was probably going to receive the same treatment sooner or later. Then it happened, and I left the company.

You don't have to be from Southeast Asia to get caught up in this stuff.

> I assume this is how all the caste stuff surfaces.

Stop making assumptions about things that you have no clue about.

Govt of India did a caste census in 2011, they came up with 4,673,034 categories of caste, sub-caste, synonyms, different surnames, gotras in the caste and clan names [1]

At that scale, no one can tell someone's caste by asking such generic questions about hometown and family.

[1] - https://www.deccanherald.com/content/489752/socio-economic-c...