aicaffeinelife

Is it? I must have read the history of serfdom and slavery wrong then.

And yet currently in India there are active movements that are trying to get “lower caste” tag just to get the benefits of reservation even though they are comfortably well off.

So don’t try to potray things as black and white and reduce a particular religion to one concept and unidimensional like other Abrahamic faiths. Which btw are pretty much black and white and have more stringent concept of what’s human and what’s not (for instance branding women witches and burning them alive).

Funny how your mind went to asking questions on caste and not on asking about several other interesting philosophical questions that arise from say Vedanta or Advaita school.

I simply don’t get the urge to sound “cool” by deliberately trying to reduce the entire corpus of Hindu philosophy to caste.

That sounds fair. I also agree about keeping HN for hackers and not politics.

I think you’re missing the point here. It’s a flame war if and only if there are two perspectives and it comes down to a matter of choice (e.g Vim vs EMacs). The majority of the commenters here are pointing out to the fact that some Western academics either deliberately or ignorantly mistranslate Sanskrit and to a person who has no background in this stuff often form an incorrect or incomplete picture which then leads to a positive/negative bias in their minds.