Names possibly? I'm purely speculating here, but since India has such a huge population anyone with a indianesque name is probably Indian. Especially if it's the case that muslims from pakistan have distinct names. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Name is not a reliable indicator of caste for all Indians. A large portion of South Indians don't have a surname - they just use their dad's first name or the name of their hometown. Even among North Indians who do have a caste-based surname, many ditch that in favor of something like "Kumar".
DNA tests before interviews. You think I'm joking, but that is where all this is headed - the Oscars thing opened the door further, got to make sure you meet the quota - people don't always know what their true ancestry is, how can the employer be sure they are hiring enough people with enough of the "right" race without hard evidence?
It's funny how this is NEVER mentioned in the media.
I guess BLM is "so hot" right now (but to be honest this caste issue was never mention even before BLM also).
Perhaps this is because in the West this concepts of casts within society is completely foreign to us.
So for a Westerner this does not create any acute psychological response if someone says "I'm a Dalit".
A westerner would be like "huh, yeah ok man, I have no idea what that is."
So in the mind of a westerner this "he's a Dalit" doesn't create any associations by which he would judge this person because the concept of "casts" is so foreign to us.
This is also why we ignore it + westerners are not affected by this system as it applies only to Indians.
I did hear stories though that the upper cast Indians in a managerial position onyl hire other upper cast Indiands and keep whites because "they know they perform".
But upper cast indians still severely favourite their own vs whites for example.
I guess you could say that their "you're a Dalit gtfo" is the same as someone in the west says "you're black gtfo".
Bear in mind that "African American activists helped created South Asian America as we know it." - https://blackdesisecrethistory.org/ , and high-social status of Asian-Americans who immigrated after the racist National Origins Formula was replaced in 1965 with a policy which emphasized professionals and other individuals with specialized skills is used as a wedge to attempt to break that solidarity. So if it's taken so long for BLM to be "so hot", perhaps it's not so surprising that an awareness of caste discrimination in the US lags?
Most people in the US really don't see caste, because they don't have the training or experience, and therefore also don't really see caste discrimination.
I think this shows a downside of "not seeing" bigotry.
They are very easy to change because people are hude conformists. See how our behaviour changed in recent timed due to corona. Or example of nazi germany.
Problem is that those who benefit from social structure does not want the change, and are working on keeping status quo.
> It may seem bizarre that the caste system, a centuries-old system that organises and stratifies human society, continues to play a heavy role in deciding which Indians prosper and which don't within a space many consider to be an uber-meritocracy -- the US tech landscape.
Well for I'm not surprised, and further I doubt anybody in it considers it an "uber-meritocracy", it really is much more perverse.
Yeah, that the tech industry is a meritocracy is a myth that's popular with the white educated middle-class men who like to believe they have more merit than other groups.
(I'm a white educated middle-class man myself, and a career in the tech world has been easy and natural for me. I'd love to believe it's because I'm really that good, but I try to be aware of my privilege.)
Don't be too hard on yourself! I am Indian and from what I can tell the proverbial glass ceiling has been lifted for brown people like me in the US. And I think the same can be said for people of other ethnicities as well. So credit where credit is due. IMHO the US is a meritocratic workplace.
> Yeah, that the tech industry is a meritocracy is a myth that's popular with the white educated middle-class men who like to believe they have more merit than other groups.
Dunno about all of that ... I myself am not sufficently race obsessed I guess. What I meant was that in most cases people get ahead for reasons that have little to nothing to do with merit, and in my experience also that have little to nothing to do with race.
Maybe if you find yourself constantly surrounded by racists you should evaluate how your choices contribute to this. I don't have this experience.
And I'm pretty sure there would be some legal implications for what you claim, so if you are aware of this and not reporting it I'm pretty sure you face potential legal liabilities.
I think it is pretty disgusting that people just look the other way while they witness racism. If I ever saw anything at my place of work that would suggest any racism in hiring choices the person would not make it to the end of the day.
Cisco HR said "caste discrimination was not unlawful".
Doesn't California's Unruh Civil Rights Act prohibit employment discrimination in a businesses based on ancestry, especially given the CA Supreme Court's repeated determination that the list of protected classes should be interpreted broadly? So why wouldn't caste discrimination be illegal under that law?
This article is almost a caricature of articles like itself. What makes this interesting to people? Is it because it's so over the top with bad tropes it becomes funny?
I guess it is because people often forget that there are downsides to diversity: You are importing foreign cultures that you do not understand and are legally/organisationally unprepared for.
The article is interesting because it provides a contrast to the common refrain of "diversity good" and "other cultures provide benefits". There is often a lack of balance and nuance in reporting imho, and this kind of article provides at least a little of the opposing view.
I think as a society we are plenty prepared to say "it is not right to discriminate based on who your parents were or where you were born". Not doing so is a choice (to wit, the wrong choice).
I don't like diversity/inclusion pushed down my throat either and I think people are actually two steps in front of institutions promoting it the strongest, but the intersecting economic problems are similar all over the world.
Hinduism and its caste system seem alien to most western people, but the "you should know your place, peasant" - argument is pretty similar in some interpretations in Abrahamic religions. But sure, some cultures have their own peculiarities and I think not being apart of religious communities is still very rare in India.
The title does not claim, but heavily implies this happens basically everywhere in US tech. Then it gives a few anecdotes and goes on to give some very bad Indian examples. I'll be the first to agree that this looks bad, just like the advertisements of starving african children look very bad. At least those advertisements don't imply that all african children live in such conditions.
It boils my blood reading something like this. A man who worked has worked for 20 yrs, paid taxes, provided for his family (in US and back home) has to suffer this much humiliation.
Compound this with the fact the person must be (most likely) on his H1B so can't leave his job and prepare for another one in peace because 2 month window is a short one to find a job.
If there is some karma in this world I hope Iyer/other guy gets it.
As a former H1-B myself, I thought the "2 month window" was a very unofficial grace-period and actually, de-jure, you're ostensibly meant to leave the US immediately (literally, the same day) and only return when a new sponsor agrees to take you on.
> A man who worked has worked for 20 yrs, paid taxes, provided for his family (in US and back home) ...
You don't understand what you have taken for granted. In the name of hindu religion, citing the vedas education has been denied to all non-brahmins(other than priestly caste) until Britishers arrived. This is the reason majority of the indians are first college goers in their family. For us what you described is the definition of heaven.
I totally understand this. I am not saying we (as Indians of xyz caste) haven't done anything wrong in the past.
It's like all the education was only for earning $$ not expanding the mindset (realising your privilege, giving back and at the very least be nice to people agnostic of their race/gender/nationality etc).
The core issue in market heavy economies is that people with money make money and everyone else doesn't. Being smart and hard working and having poor parents means you will be poor. Being dumb and lazy with rich parents means you will be rich. Maybe with 3 or 4 full generations of nothing but hard work and luck you might make it up from working to middle class. Maybe.
This is never really discussed directly. Only using a proxy like race or caste.
Well, most of the rich people I know had rich parents.
If you can live with your parents while building your company or they gift you a few thousand dollars, that's often the make or break factor that saves your ass when pivoting a few times.
I've always thought it's that last point you touch on, that's most important.
There are mechanisms (and we can discuss their effectiveness) that try to balance the playing field in provision of opportunity - but there's a huge gap in "provision to cope with failure"
e.g. Two people graduate with equal abilities and are offered an opportunity to found a start-up.
One of those people knows his parents can cover rent/food if things don't go to plan, and the other will be homeless (or maybe more likely would have accumulate personal debt, or leave the city and move back to parents).
One of those people is more likely to be able to take that risk and therefore more likely to reap a reward.
I'm not even sure I can think of a fair way to level this.
That's not necessarily the only way. Another way would be if the market was in a state where the EV of starting a company was roughly the same as the EV of working for someone else. People living cheque to cheque would still have less options, but they wouldn't be inherently worse, and over time inequality would stabilize instead of compounding (which I suspect is what is happening currently).
I don't actually think this is a better solution than progressive taxation and decent welfare though (and I'd also have no idea how you'd coax the market in that direction anyway), because it doesn't also solve the problem of the economy losing out on potential successful businesses because their owners weren't wealthy enough to start them.
> over time inequality would stabilize instead of compounding (which I suspect is what is happening currently).
You really think inequality is stablizing instead of compounding at the moment? Wealth ratios between highest and lowest have gone through the roof over the last 50 years.
>"Oh look at those poor backward indians!!" Well, most of the rich people I know had rich parents.
Yes. But those indians in favor of the caste system remain "backward" - it's not just something like poverty keeping the lower castes back and the rich getting an extra advantage over others to have their kids be rich.
It adds a further layer of pure discrimination akin to very heavy racism.
Imagine the poor considered not only poor, but inferior human beings -- and not allowed (or accepted by "civilized" upper caste people, when legal) to do many things even if they have the money to do them.
It's equally probable to say that the driving factor is caste discrimination, which is the underlying cause of economic inequalities. They are two highly correlated variables, and disaggregation is difficult, but there's no (a priori) reason to assume the drive is economics and the "proxy" is race.
The caste system is worse than just being rich or poor. Poor people rarely accept that they have to be poor and it's the natural order of things.
I remember when I saw this for the first time and it left me speechless. I'd work with a team of Indians, all officially with the same job title and qualifications. But while most of the guys (this was a long time ago, it was all guys) would really work hard, there would always be one who knew nothing about the job and didn't even bother to pretend he's working. He would literally just walk around acting like the CEO on inspection, or even like a slave owner, wearing a suit that cost as much as the yearly salary of the other guys. He was of course paid a lot more then the rest of the team even if he couldn't find his way out of a wet paper bag.
But what shocked me the most was that the rest of the guys, even when they knew I'm (very publicly) on their side, still talked as if this is the natural order of things. It was not only normal, it was expected. I realized that it's not like a prisoner obeying the guards because they have guns, it's like someone obeying a priest because "he talks to God".
Those colleagues accepted that their position is immutable, that those things were happening exactly the way they were supposed to happen. The "natural order of things". Maybe things changed in recent times, I certainly hope nobody accepts their position just because someone wants an easier time discriminating them.
> Being dumb and lazy with rich parents means you will be rich.
What I've noticed from observing people in all classes is that money is an amplifier. Lazy rich people who are dumb are more likely to lose their wealth than smart rich people that are hardworking.
I do agree that the game is still heavily skewed in their favor, but that doesn't mean they can get away as easily as their more virtuous counterparts.
He also has the name, connections and status that help him get more money. Despite his bankruptcies, there are still people willing to do business with him, invest in his projects, etc. At the moment he's probably mostly propped up by Russian money, but those Russians would not do that for just any bum on the streets.
Not so. Most people lose money on it. He has a knack for sticking other people with the bill for his bankruptcies while he gets his money out in time. The only bank that still wants to do business with him is the Deutsche Bank, and a lot of people suspect there might be some sort of money laundering or other questionable transactions going on.
One of the main human drives in life is to provide for their children. Why shouldn't you be able to spend all the resources you can to give your kids advantage?
What I find curious about this discussion, which often occurs when people discuss what advantages are fair and unfair, estate tax and the like, is that they perceive each human being as a completely independent actor. Whereas for me, at least, it's more natural to think in terms of families. If the first generation achieved success, should it be reset in the next one? Why? The example you're talking about, with people reaching incredibly high success from nothing, are exceptions; usually it takes two or three generations at least.
And it's never only about money. Family culture, outlook toward education, work ethic, etc, these things survive when the family loses all of it's fortune or goes through even more dramatic events — though it's easier to notice when you live in a country that lived through a couple of revolutions, bloody wars and a couple of genocides in the last century than in US.
In these countries, what survives more than anything else is political connections. If your family has the right friends you can do well, even after big setbacks.
Or just your family knows how to teach you how move in the upper culture. I always come back to how much of life is a confidence game. You can often get pretty far if all you have is knowing how to play the game.
I often think people that grow up in disadvantaged circumstances have a major problem a) Learning the wrong game. Sometimes one that ultimately gets you in trouble. b) not knowing how to play the other game. The one that unlocks all the opportunities.
I'm not sure why you interpreted the comment you are replying to as an attack on the actions of rich people instead of a complaint about societies failure to provide opportunities to poor people.
Perhaps because you know those two things are linked?
I saw a remark by Miltom Friedman, basically he think beiing able to inherit your wealth to the next generaltion is one of the biggest drivers of the economy.
> Why shouldn't you be able to spend all the resources you can to give your kids advantage?
Because it's absolutely toxic for society as a whole if inequality gets amplified over generations.
Estate tax should ideally be 100% above a reasonable cap. And by "reasonable" I mean a sum definitely below "never needs to work to support a middle class lifestyle".
> If the first generation achieved success, should it be reset in the next one?
Yes, absolutely.
> Why?
Because many opportunities are essentially zero-sum.
I think it's bad if runs rampantly forever as eventually someone nefarious (which is more people than you might think) accumulates too much power and turns large swathes of society into a machine that benefits only them to everyone's detriment.
But at the same time it seems the pursuit of wealth engenders risk taking that brings about benefits for large swathes of society and turns society into a machine that constantly improves itself.
I like the game as it is, but perhaps a healthy modification would be to add a reset button where every couple of hundred years the slate is wiped clean and it all just starts again.
Tbh, I think that happens naturally though usually after a society has destroyed itself due to the first problem.
It'll happen to this one too eventually, so I don't see the need specifically to try to structure things in a way that will never go wrong or end badly. I don't think you can actually accomplish that with any one structure. It seems to be a game where some people win until it's game over and everyone loses.
>I think it's bad if runs rampantly forever as eventually someone nefarious (which is more people than you might think) accumulates too much power and turns large swathes of society into a machine that benefits only them to everyone's detriment.
It's bad longe before it gets to that point, just less obvious.
> But at the same time it seems the pursuit of wealth engenders risk taking that brings about benefits for large swathes of society and turns society into a machine that constantly improves itself.
Putting a cap on inheritance would not impede that in the least. Quite the opposite: inequality prevents a lot of risk taking and improvement from happening.
> I like the game as it is, but perhaps a healthy modification would be to add a reset button where every couple of hundred years the slate is wiped clean and it all just starts again.
That doesn't sound healthy at all because it represents an unneccessarily huge disruption.
>That doesn't sound healthy at all because it represents an unneccessarily huge disruption
It's no different than you or I dying, just on a much bigger scale. It's a huge disruption,
sure, but that's sort of the point. Civilizations come and go, as do the people in them. There are just too many variables for things to be able to persist in a stable state in perpetuity.
Well, that almost looks a classic conflict of interests of a society versus interests of an individual, but only at the first glance. Because when you dig in, you realise that it's the most successful and capable individuals that are most interested in building something for their children and next generations of their family — and that's the most marginalised and useless ones that have to get the most by redistribution. And the more you enact redistribution policies in one country or another, the more those types of individuals self-select. The ones who're most able to build and create something will always be able to leave. Ones who complain about disadvantages, on the other hand — those you're stuck with, I'm afraid.
And if you dig in a little deeper, you realize that that's a bunch of social Darwinist bullshit perpetrated by those already rich who stand to gain the most from inequality - No different from the concept of nobility in centuries past.
Very telling are those "ands" and what's left out: "successful and capable (implied: rich)". "marginalised and useless (implied: poor)". Those traits don't go together automatically at all unless you use circular logic to define them in the first place.
I post this not really as a rebuttal to your post, or the grandparent, but more of a "here's what success a couple of generations later" actually looks like and what some of its characteristics may be.
No, 3-4 generations is about right. The first generation needs to work hard just to ensure there is enough food for the next. Without enough food everything else is done: intelligence is greatly harmed by not enough food. That Food then lets the next generation work a little smarter, and send their kids to school instead of the kids having to work as well just to ensure there is enough. The kids now have some education to work with, but unless they get scholarships it isn't enough to get ahead, but it is enough to save for their kids scholarships. There you go, 3-4 generations to get out of the hole - assuming everyone all works hard to get out, anyone can drop back (either from laziness or bad luck).
Luck is important too. I read an article about a widow in India being giving a loan for a tractor. 2 months payments on the loan have to amount to about a year of her previous income (note that the other 10 months need to be repaid - this is a loan not a gift). A tractor is such a force multiplier that she is able to make the payments all year and save up enough to dream of sending her son to a good school. This whole thing depends on someone being willing to risk giving someone a loan who clearly doesn't make enough to pay it off.
100% agree but you should acknowledge the survivorship bias that skews perception away from what you’re asserting. Some people get lucky with everything falling in place while being poor or middle class and get rocketed to upper class. In any case the game is so rigged in a deterministic fashion.
It's frequently brought up in radical leftist discourse* (marxism, anarchism, etc…) or even center-left discourse (social democracy, social liberalism, etc…).
AFAICT it seems to be taboo outside these circles.
* I should mention that many people make big point that you shouldn't use economic points like this to ignore things like racism, i.e.: while racism intersects with economics you can't treat it like it's the same problem.
That's exactly how I feel. It's taboo to discuss that our economic system is just as rigged as (say) China's.
I also should have been clearer: racism is definately also a factor. Poor minorities fare so badly because they get both racism AND classism (or whatever the appropriate term is for the natural increase of both wealth and poverty).
I think one of the major upsides of the cold war was that western countries were very eager to show we could do better than those dirty commies. That birthed all sorts of programs to give people a chance of improving their lots. Most of those are dead now.
If you mean the stickiness of the upper-middle-class, then it's a fairly well-known phenomenon, and I don't think it's _taboo_ anywhere. Maybe some upper-middle-class people with upper-middle-class parents might take vague offense (on the basis that they believe they got where they are purely through hard work or whatever) but I can't imagine anyone thinking of it as taboo.
I see it discussed constantly all over the internet. Also it's not entirely true; there's a bunch of examples where people did make it big.
All too often this position boils down to "Capitalism bad" which then just attracts the "Communism bad" opposition and ends in a pointless shitshow buzzword exchange.
>Also it's not entirely true; there's a bunch of examples where people did make it big.
That's totally irrelevant though. People are not saying it's impossible for poor to start a company and make it big (in which case those would be counter-examples), they say it's many times harder.
The discrimination lies in the extra difficulty. As someone said, the rich kids starting a startup get to play startup in "easy mode" (which also doesn't mean they'll succeed easily in the market -- just that devoting time to and trying to succeed is far more easy and less rick prone for them).
Having more money allows you to make mistakes. Having rich parents allow you to make mistakes that are normally unrecoverable for normal people (e.g. going to college and getting kicked out), because money buys you opportunities.
Inheritance is just like caste, you are born with an advantage over others.
There are educational systems that mitigate that problem. Not perfectly, but to a large degree.
Many people studying today had poor parents that never had any form of higher education. I don't think the US systems is good at this. It concentrates on excellence or at least the appearance of it, although there are probably exceptions if you parents are rich or influential. Bad thing is that it works to a degree because the smartest heads get concentrated while others need to be content with lower quality education. A system that should be obsolete with modern logistics of information. Tech is currently leveraging that weakness by building an even worse alternative with their own campuses. While integrating the industry in universities can be quite the advantage, I doubt this will be a helpful basis. There will be people that like to live in infrastructure belonging to their employer, it is just the modern version of a cult.
I don't know about the issues in India, but perhaps lower caste members just don't have access to education. Financing education in the US is difficult because economic imbalance and ridiculous prices on education. Of course that works as a selector if you don't get a scholarship.
I think it is fairly possible to have a broad education system that doesn't determine your future if you fuck up elementary school. Instead there need to transient systems that allow to build upon your educational career, because pupils learn at different speed and had different advantages like private tutors.
>I don't know about the issues in India, but perhaps lower caste members just don't have access to education.
The caste system is about natural born status not tied to economics, but ancestral in nature. You're born into your caste and there isn't mobility within the system. So, try as you might, if you're in the lower caste you're in the lower caste and people higher up are going to treat you that way regardless.
I'm not overly familiar with it myself, but I understand it's a deeply ingrained cultural thing that sounds damaging beyond belief and incredibly bad idea, yet somehow inescapable.
No, because in the west debt is not inherited. Wealth is, which is an advantage to the right, but even then the majority of people - even rich don't get that advantage right away.
The big help the not-poor get is parents help their education. Not monetary help (that exists, but the poor get scholarships which in theory makes up the difference), but help as in a background that values education. If your peers and family expect you to get pregnant and drop out at 14 - it isn't really possible to get ahead in modern society the way most of us take for granted.
It is sometimes (often even) discussed directly, but being cross-correlated to these proxies means that there are different perspectives on what the operative or underlying essence is.
Part of the definition of class that is often overlooked in discussions is that it's not just about money. This is why the socio qualifier gets added into the "socio-economic" designation... even though people sometimes use the dash and then ignore it.
A class implies a hereditary, cultural and quasi-ethnic aspect. So does caste, obviously.
While I agree with the general point you make, I think it is a mistake to say race or caste is a proxy because it gives the impression that there's a "genuine" order of things behind the curtain of illusions. This is not a good model for a better understanding of the world around us imo. Hierarchies whether based on material resources or status seems to exist everywhere but are instantiated differently in each place for historical reasons. Race or cast is not a proxy for real hierarchies hidden behind them, it is how some of those hierarchies have taken form at some point in history (and will hopefully disappear at some other point).
As the anthropologist Maurice Godelier puts it in the L'idéel et le matériel, it is not about seeing another reality behind reality but about seeing the same reality with a different look.
In countries with good and available education, competent people from poor families can get good careers. It makes a lot of sense to run companies there as well, as recruiting works well - people are sorted by ability rather than money.
This is definitely a problem, but not just the mobility is the problem.
If the economy is organized so that a small minority is rich, and the vast majority is poor, then even if the fraction of people of different castes, races, genders, whatever at each echelon of wealth is similar. And even if you have a good chance = uniform-distribution draw - of ending up as "one of the rich" - that chance can never be anything but lousy for the vast majority of people.
(Also, social inequality skews the focus of production and consumption so that things masses of people need and want just aren't available.)
Middle class not rich. Getting out of being poor is hard on its own. Getting from middle class is "easy" in that random children from middle class raise to rich all the time. However poor have other disadvantages that they need to deal with, and that is hard to do in one generation.
> Except, this time, it is happening in the US tech industry, a place that people normally associate with egalitarianism and a thirst for talent regardless of colour, race, religion, or any other creed.
This article appears to be about a current lawsuit. The claims that are being made are outrageous, but that is what is expected of a plaintiffs claims in this sort of lawsuit.
I doubt I'll make many friends adding this in, but an uncomfortable statistical artefact of an affirmative action program is the candidates in that program are very likely going to have lower average competence than the rest of the cohort. That observation in particular was (1) probably not acceptable in the workplace and (2) possibly justifiable depending on how serious the affirmative action policies were.
The statistical results around an affective action program are all actually pretty brutal, both to the people in the program and the people who aren't. I forget where to find a good link, but it is related to my favourite stats paradox, Simpson's paradox. They are not a tool people should want to use.
> The lawsuit alleges that the upper-caste Iyer recognised John Doe and instantly began ridiculing him in front of all the other higher-caste Indian employees at Cisco, saying that John Doe was a Dalit and only got into the engineering school because of affirmative action, which India implemented in 1980 under the then-Prime Minister VP Singh.
If they believed that, it would also explain the other things like lack of opportunities and low wages too.
Majority of them are privileged right wing bigots who despise Muslims and lower-caste to the core. No wonder Modi and Trump is so popular among Indian expats in US.
If this is real, it's purely brown-on-brown crime because non-indians have no idea wtf a caste system is. You all look the same to me.
Which leads me to believe that this can't be happening on any systemic level (I did read the article, so yea it does happen but I can't believe that it happens a lot).
"Caste-ist" indians simply don't hold enough sway in hiring decisions in the US to make any significant dent. If lower castes are being oppressed, it's only by their own cultural attitudes. Just start making more non-indian friends and assimilate.
I think the last years should have taught us that just because we do not see it, does not mean we are not responsible for changing it.
And recruiting is something where engineers are also involved a lot. They recommend, they rate, they have networks, they may even be part of HR. Just to name some ways. If you get fired (e.g. of your visa protecting job) a well networked person has a lot more chances than someone not.
Could the core problem be related to how majority of Indian couple I know who went through arranged marriage gets married to the same caste?
Which is... essentially even though one might say caste is abolished, you know having a higher (or equal) caste still has advantage and favoritism towards alike caste is cultivated (possibly unconsciously, but the story implies deliberately)
While being wealthier may be a reason, quotas in India are also a reason. I bet for at least 80% of these upper caste Indians have grown up hearing "we upper castes don't get any quota here, we have to study hard [and get high paying tech job and preferably settle abroad]".
It is not just the consequence of being wealthier, although that and politics play a role. Among Indians from similar income levels, that makes it unreserved castes people more likely to take up tech / medical sector.
Is this meant to be a news article or an editorial? The claims in the suit are horrifying and important to report and investigate. The tone is more suited to an opinion piece - and a badly-written one at that. Surely there's better reporting on this topic out there.
The article's title has "Commentary:" in it. It is an opinion piece, which I failed to spot earlier. I still stand by my assertion that it's not well-written.
The difference between a news report and an editorial piece is easy to see once you know the difference.
A news report sticks to the facts - who, what, when, where - with little or no commentary. It usually has a summary with all the important points in the first paragraph. A sentence such as "Then, in a tragic double-whammy," or "...you can be assured..." is not appropriate in a news story. See for example https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cisco-lawsuit/california-..., a news article about the same case.
The quality of the writing in the article being discussed is also quite poor, with mixed metaphors ("cradle of caste people are disgorged from."), awkward turns of phrase ("serial scale") and even grammatical errors "Their woman and children are".
Why do you seem to be finding fault here, its a write up of a legal case by a civilian.
Pretty normal for non specialist press when writing up a court case note the author is an Indian and may well be using Indian style English, which does diverge from standard English.
It's a piece of writing by a purported "professional" writer and it's pretty bad. Indian-style English still adheres to the rules of regular English grammar.
It is problem of those casteist employees of Cisco , Cisco , it's management and it's rules. They are simply not proper.
There are many casteists too in many companies who must be terminated from Employment if casteist behavior is found.
Note that not all upper-caste People are casteist and harmful.
I also see many Rich People whose ancestors were Dalits, who no longer need any financial grant/food/shelter from the Government claiming it from Government. It only harms very poor Dalits in need.
This Casteism at companies is bad and Casteism is crime. Also, the title of this post is Peculiar. Title must not be "90% of Techies are upper caste" as upper caste is not synonymous with casteist.
Also,there are many poor,hard working non-casteist people who by birth(not changeable) were upper-caste people who worked hard to get into good job in US,so they deserve that job.
> I also see many Rich People whose ancestors were Dalits, who no longer need any financial grant/food/shelter from the Government claiming it from Government. It only harms very poor Dalits in need.
This is something I have been thinking quite a lot about.
The Govt. really struggles to cap affirmative action to only those who need it.
I knew people who were from lower castes, used reservation to get in and had Macbooks, iPhones and spent summers abroad touring.
How hard is it to disqualify them due to financial means ? There are too many poor Dalits who would rather use those seats.
It's a common line of thinking that a system is broken if there's a single instance of failure when the right measure is if it does more good than harm. I've heard that excuse in the US with regards to giving to the poor, "they might waste it on booze and drugs." Well sure, but they might also use it to keep from starving.
In this case, are there some people that "don't deserve it"? Certainly, but there's probably many more that do who are making use of the program. Adding overhead and bureaucracy to try to weed out the undeserving may very well make it so fewer people who need the assistance get it. It's human nature to overweight small negative outcomes while underweighting the larger good. You need to objectively study the problem to fully understand where the tipping point is which rarely happens because these types of things quickly become political.
I don't personally know enough about this particular topic to speak to it, but the general answer to the question
> How hard is it to disqualify them due to financial means?
Is it's harder than you think without undermining the original goals of the of the program.
But it is broken if there are too many instances of failure.
It is not like there are no better ways to do it, like adding an economic constraint, or not giving reservation if parents have gotten reservation for job. That would benefit everyone except affluent lower caste families.
What's shocking is that this caste system is being continued in the US. US is oblivious to this system, very few people have any understanding of this, yet it affects success in the corporate world. Obviously, there's enough Indian presence in the business to influence it, but it's flying under the US corporate culture.
I've worked with many Indian coworkers in the tech industry, and now I'm rethinking some of the connections I've observed.
> What's shocking is that this caste system is being continued in the US.
There are no overseas communities of majority Indian subcontinental origin that maintain rigid caste distinctions. Not even Mauritius which is majority ethnic Indian or Fiji or Guyana where they’re about half the population. Caste will not be maintained in America for the same reason no ethnic group maintains itself without religious endogamy or continuing immigration; People socialize and mate with those they spend time with unless there are powerful reasons not to. All will be assimilated in time.
I believe you. It just doesn’t matter. Once immigration stops these people will all dissolve into the general population like the Huegenots, Flemings or other old ethnic groups. When mass immigration from the subcontinent stops caste based discrimination will go from a lot less than in India/Pakistan/Bangladesh to non-existent in short order.
Look at northern inland there are places in Ireland and parts of Scotland and even the USA where I would have to be careful as I am a product of a mixed marriage and I also was a a "crown servant for 15 years" and have a southern ie catholic last Name.
Parts of the UK that have so much immigration from India that the local population are majority desi are few and far between. There’s nothing like historical Irish immigration to Britain. Scottish Catholics before 1970 or so were all descendants of the Irish and that’s what ~40% of the Scots? There were so many Irish in Liverpool they elected Irish Parliamentary Party MPs before the Irish Civil War. And still assimilation proceeds rapidly. Wayne Rooney Player for England, not Ireland. Out marriage is the death of ethnic identity. Look at the US. There are actually people identify as White, or as Asian American. How far does a Chinese, Vietnamese or Japanese person have to be divorced from their culture to think the most important thing about their ethnic identity is their skin color? Similar dynamic earlier in US history when the ethnic marriage markets collapsed into religion bounded marriage markets, when Herberger wrote Catholic Protestant Jew. Once people are willing to marry out assimilation is a matter of time absent continued immigration. Irish immigration to the US dropped off a cliff in the 1990s. One day South Boston will be known for some other group, not the Irish, just like Little Italy turns into Chinatown.
I've seen it explicitly at work in the US, e.g. in choosing which partners to marry.
Ironically, it is breaking down in India because of female infanticide creating a skewed gender distribution (around 1.14:1, when the natural distribution is 1.05:1), and men having no choice but to look outside their caste if they want to marry.
I was told US Indian diaspora has disproportionate high caste due to historic migration patterns which lets the system self-perpetuate more readily. At least that's the experience repeated by Canadian Indians who works in the US. All will be assimilated in time, but some issues needs to be addressed actively.
I think a counterpoint to this view is that Englishmen with Norman last names still make more money than average.[1] Despite the fact that the British regime hasn't discriminated along the Norman-Saxon divide since the 1300s.
I doubt if the average English person today is really even consciously aware of the Anglo-Normans being higher class. Certainly there's no easily visible divide or overt discrimination in modern times. Yet the legacy of the caste system left by William the Conqueror continues to shape society a thousand years later.
> What's shocking is that this caste system is being continued in the US.
Is it so shocking though? The US has its own sordid history of caste-like discrimination in work, civic, and personal life, as the African American community can attest to. Huge portions of the US had anti-miscegenation laws on the books up until 50 ago [1]
If anything, many of the patterns of discrimination in the US line up quite nicely with those that arrived with some (though not all) Indian immigrants.
This has frequently resulted in a stark schism between the older generation of Indian immigrants, many of whom readily adopted the US' racist attitudes toward African Americans, Mexicans, etc, and their American children, who often have nearly the opposite perspective.
>> What's shocking is that this caste system is being continued in the US.
As a low caste Hindu who grew up in India, it is not at all shocking to me. In-fact Dr.Ambedkar, the lead author of Indian Constitution, wrote "If Hindus migrate to other regions on earth, Indian caste would become a world problem."[1] and he is proven right.
The reason Indians continue the caste system wherever they go is because, it is ingrained in the Hindu religion. Caste system and the religion are inseparable. Ambedkar realized that it is impossible to get out of the clutches of the caste system as long as one is Hindu. Hence he said “I had the misfortune of being born with the stigma of an Untouchable. However, it is not my fault; but I will not die a Hindu, for this is in my power.”[2] and he converted to Buddhism.
The world is filled with injustice however you look at it.
Here is one hard quote by Buffet: The ovarian lottery is the most important event in which you'll ever participate. It's going to determine way more than what school you go to, how hard you work, all kinds of things. The nation of birth changes your life much more than your effort or intelligence.
Nobody disputes that, including the ones who practice it (well, may be except the most uneducated). The real problem is denialism. The comments to this post itself has numerous examples of that, including anecdotal evidences to downplay the incredible damage it has caused. The practitioners just find other reasons, like job-performance to enforce casteism without directly referring to it.
I wanted to offer another perspective for this trend: Many states in India, especially in the South, have affirmative action policies that make it really hard for these people to find good jobs or colleges in India. So they head out and prosper in the US.
The attitude is "We don't get any benefit from government here, unlike other castes, we have to study well and settle abroad". That is also expectation from families.
The above comment is downvoted, maybe for sounding pro-upper-caste? But the statement is true.
So... They nicely fit in with the upper-caste Americans. As long as you have a system where you make some "upper-caste" universities so expensive that only upper-caste people can attend them, you will keep the caste system alive. This is why education should not be privatized, there are no equal opportunities within the US as well as in India. It's all about what family you are born into.
The whole caste system is also very much alive in the US. Things like good education, crime-free neighborhoods and good healthcare are all for the rich(er).
Edit:
This: "Except, this time, it is happening in the US tech industry, a place that people normally associate with egalitarianism and a thirst for talent regardless of colour, race, religion, or any other creed." is not really what I associate the tech industry with either. I feel it is is still very white male (like me) dominated.
The Indian caste system is a specific, fairly regimented thing. Not really the same as the informal structuring of society that we might colloquially refer to as a caste system.
Class isn’t caste though they overlap. Caste is unique to the Indian subcontinent as far as I’m aware. It is utterly unremarkable for there to be people of different castes living in the same village whose ancestors have lived in the same area for generations who are as genetically distinct as Swedes and Sardinians. The only thing remotely similar I’m aware of was the Manchu in China. Caste is about maintaining endogamy for over 1,000 years with an average generation having zero out of caste inflow of genes.
If you try to understand caste by analogy to class you will fail completely. It is its own thing.
655 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 347 ms ] threadIf there were a source for the 90% figure, that would be a totally separate issue with different causes and different considerations.
I guess BLM is "so hot" right now (but to be honest this caste issue was never mention even before BLM also).
Perhaps this is because in the West this concepts of casts within society is completely foreign to us.
So for a Westerner this does not create any acute psychological response if someone says "I'm a Dalit". A westerner would be like "huh, yeah ok man, I have no idea what that is."
So in the mind of a westerner this "he's a Dalit" doesn't create any associations by which he would judge this person because the concept of "casts" is so foreign to us.
This is also why we ignore it + westerners are not affected by this system as it applies only to Indians.
I did hear stories though that the upper cast Indians in a managerial position onyl hire other upper cast Indiands and keep whites because "they know they perform". But upper cast indians still severely favourite their own vs whites for example.
I guess you could say that their "you're a Dalit gtfo" is the same as someone in the west says "you're black gtfo".
Some people say "I don't see race" as of it's a good thing. (See https://www.oprahmag.com/life/relationships-love/a32824297/c... and https://theconversation.com/i-dont-see-race-and-other-white-... for two of a myriad of articles on the topic.)
Most people in the US really don't see caste, because they don't have the training or experience, and therefore also don't really see caste discrimination.
I think this shows a downside of "not seeing" bigotry.
Problem is that those who benefit from social structure does not want the change, and are working on keeping status quo.
Well for I'm not surprised, and further I doubt anybody in it considers it an "uber-meritocracy", it really is much more perverse.
(I'm a white educated middle-class man myself, and a career in the tech world has been easy and natural for me. I'd love to believe it's because I'm really that good, but I try to be aware of my privilege.)
Dunno about all of that ... I myself am not sufficently race obsessed I guess. What I meant was that in most cases people get ahead for reasons that have little to nothing to do with merit, and in my experience also that have little to nothing to do with race.
Maybe if you find yourself constantly surrounded by racists you should evaluate how your choices contribute to this. I don't have this experience.
And I'm pretty sure there would be some legal implications for what you claim, so if you are aware of this and not reporting it I'm pretty sure you face potential legal liabilities.
I think it is pretty disgusting that people just look the other way while they witness racism. If I ever saw anything at my place of work that would suggest any racism in hiring choices the person would not make it to the end of the day.
Doesn't California's Unruh Civil Rights Act prohibit employment discrimination in a businesses based on ancestry, especially given the CA Supreme Court's repeated determination that the list of protected classes should be interpreted broadly? So why wouldn't caste discrimination be illegal under that law?
The article is interesting because it provides a contrast to the common refrain of "diversity good" and "other cultures provide benefits". There is often a lack of balance and nuance in reporting imho, and this kind of article provides at least a little of the opposing view.
Hinduism and its caste system seem alien to most western people, but the "you should know your place, peasant" - argument is pretty similar in some interpretations in Abrahamic religions. But sure, some cultures have their own peculiarities and I think not being apart of religious communities is still very rare in India.
Compound this with the fact the person must be (most likely) on his H1B so can't leave his job and prepare for another one in peace because 2 month window is a short one to find a job.
If there is some karma in this world I hope Iyer/other guy gets it.
As a former H1-B myself, I thought the "2 month window" was a very unofficial grace-period and actually, de-jure, you're ostensibly meant to leave the US immediately (literally, the same day) and only return when a new sponsor agrees to take you on.
You don't understand what you have taken for granted. In the name of hindu religion, citing the vedas education has been denied to all non-brahmins(other than priestly caste) until Britishers arrived. This is the reason majority of the indians are first college goers in their family. For us what you described is the definition of heaven.
It's like all the education was only for earning $$ not expanding the mindset (realising your privilege, giving back and at the very least be nice to people agnostic of their race/gender/nationality etc).
This is never really discussed directly. Only using a proxy like race or caste.
"Oh look at those poor backward indians!!"
Well, most of the rich people I know had rich parents.
If you can live with your parents while building your company or they gift you a few thousand dollars, that's often the make or break factor that saves your ass when pivoting a few times.
There are mechanisms (and we can discuss their effectiveness) that try to balance the playing field in provision of opportunity - but there's a huge gap in "provision to cope with failure"
e.g. Two people graduate with equal abilities and are offered an opportunity to found a start-up. One of those people knows his parents can cover rent/food if things don't go to plan, and the other will be homeless (or maybe more likely would have accumulate personal debt, or leave the city and move back to parents). One of those people is more likely to be able to take that risk and therefore more likely to reap a reward.
I'm not even sure I can think of a fair way to level this.
The only way is to reduce the pre-existing wealth inequality. Which is why a lot of people are in favour of strongly progressive taxation.
I don't actually think this is a better solution than progressive taxation and decent welfare though (and I'd also have no idea how you'd coax the market in that direction anyway), because it doesn't also solve the problem of the economy losing out on potential successful businesses because their owners weren't wealthy enough to start them.
You really think inequality is stablizing instead of compounding at the moment? Wealth ratios between highest and lowest have gone through the roof over the last 50 years.
Yes. But those indians in favor of the caste system remain "backward" - it's not just something like poverty keeping the lower castes back and the rich getting an extra advantage over others to have their kids be rich.
It adds a further layer of pure discrimination akin to very heavy racism.
Imagine the poor considered not only poor, but inferior human beings -- and not allowed (or accepted by "civilized" upper caste people, when legal) to do many things even if they have the money to do them.
https://www.businessinsider.com/countries-where-intergenerat...
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-social-mobility-...
And on Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility
India unfortunately fairs quite poorly on these metrics
The idea of "it takes a few generations" is also widely critiqued with respect to racial progress in the US: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/the-myt...
I remember when I saw this for the first time and it left me speechless. I'd work with a team of Indians, all officially with the same job title and qualifications. But while most of the guys (this was a long time ago, it was all guys) would really work hard, there would always be one who knew nothing about the job and didn't even bother to pretend he's working. He would literally just walk around acting like the CEO on inspection, or even like a slave owner, wearing a suit that cost as much as the yearly salary of the other guys. He was of course paid a lot more then the rest of the team even if he couldn't find his way out of a wet paper bag.
But what shocked me the most was that the rest of the guys, even when they knew I'm (very publicly) on their side, still talked as if this is the natural order of things. It was not only normal, it was expected. I realized that it's not like a prisoner obeying the guards because they have guns, it's like someone obeying a priest because "he talks to God".
Those colleagues accepted that their position is immutable, that those things were happening exactly the way they were supposed to happen. The "natural order of things". Maybe things changed in recent times, I certainly hope nobody accepts their position just because someone wants an easier time discriminating them.
What I've noticed from observing people in all classes is that money is an amplifier. Lazy rich people who are dumb are more likely to lose their wealth than smart rich people that are hardworking.
I do agree that the game is still heavily skewed in their favor, but that doesn't mean they can get away as easily as their more virtuous counterparts.
What I find curious about this discussion, which often occurs when people discuss what advantages are fair and unfair, estate tax and the like, is that they perceive each human being as a completely independent actor. Whereas for me, at least, it's more natural to think in terms of families. If the first generation achieved success, should it be reset in the next one? Why? The example you're talking about, with people reaching incredibly high success from nothing, are exceptions; usually it takes two or three generations at least.
And it's never only about money. Family culture, outlook toward education, work ethic, etc, these things survive when the family loses all of it's fortune or goes through even more dramatic events — though it's easier to notice when you live in a country that lived through a couple of revolutions, bloody wars and a couple of genocides in the last century than in US.
I often think people that grow up in disadvantaged circumstances have a major problem a) Learning the wrong game. Sometimes one that ultimately gets you in trouble. b) not knowing how to play the other game. The one that unlocks all the opportunities.
Perhaps because you know those two things are linked?
Because it's absolutely toxic for society as a whole if inequality gets amplified over generations.
Estate tax should ideally be 100% above a reasonable cap. And by "reasonable" I mean a sum definitely below "never needs to work to support a middle class lifestyle".
> If the first generation achieved success, should it be reset in the next one?
Yes, absolutely.
> Why?
Because many opportunities are essentially zero-sum.
But at the same time it seems the pursuit of wealth engenders risk taking that brings about benefits for large swathes of society and turns society into a machine that constantly improves itself.
I like the game as it is, but perhaps a healthy modification would be to add a reset button where every couple of hundred years the slate is wiped clean and it all just starts again.
Tbh, I think that happens naturally though usually after a society has destroyed itself due to the first problem.
It'll happen to this one too eventually, so I don't see the need specifically to try to structure things in a way that will never go wrong or end badly. I don't think you can actually accomplish that with any one structure. It seems to be a game where some people win until it's game over and everyone loses.
Just my 2c.
It's bad longe before it gets to that point, just less obvious.
> But at the same time it seems the pursuit of wealth engenders risk taking that brings about benefits for large swathes of society and turns society into a machine that constantly improves itself.
Putting a cap on inheritance would not impede that in the least. Quite the opposite: inequality prevents a lot of risk taking and improvement from happening.
> I like the game as it is, but perhaps a healthy modification would be to add a reset button where every couple of hundred years the slate is wiped clean and it all just starts again.
That doesn't sound healthy at all because it represents an unneccessarily huge disruption.
It's no different than you or I dying, just on a much bigger scale. It's a huge disruption, sure, but that's sort of the point. Civilizations come and go, as do the people in them. There are just too many variables for things to be able to persist in a stable state in perpetuity.
Very telling are those "ands" and what's left out: "successful and capable (implied: rich)". "marginalised and useless (implied: poor)". Those traits don't go together automatically at all unless you use circular logic to define them in the first place.
I perfectly understand why this stance makes people angry, but you haven't provided a single argument on why is it false.
This is a ridiculous over-exaggeration in the age of internet.
I post this not really as a rebuttal to your post, or the grandparent, but more of a "here's what success a couple of generations later" actually looks like and what some of its characteristics may be.
Luck is important too. I read an article about a widow in India being giving a loan for a tractor. 2 months payments on the loan have to amount to about a year of her previous income (note that the other 10 months need to be repaid - this is a loan not a gift). A tractor is such a force multiplier that she is able to make the payments all year and save up enough to dream of sending her son to a good school. This whole thing depends on someone being willing to risk giving someone a loan who clearly doesn't make enough to pay it off.
AFAICT it seems to be taboo outside these circles.
* I should mention that many people make big point that you shouldn't use economic points like this to ignore things like racism, i.e.: while racism intersects with economics you can't treat it like it's the same problem.
I also should have been clearer: racism is definately also a factor. Poor minorities fare so badly because they get both racism AND classism (or whatever the appropriate term is for the natural increase of both wealth and poverty).
I think one of the major upsides of the cold war was that western countries were very eager to show we could do better than those dirty commies. That birthed all sorts of programs to give people a chance of improving their lots. Most of those are dead now.
I see it discussed constantly all over the internet. Also it's not entirely true; there's a bunch of examples where people did make it big.
All too often this position boils down to "Capitalism bad" which then just attracts the "Communism bad" opposition and ends in a pointless shitshow buzzword exchange.
That's totally irrelevant though. People are not saying it's impossible for poor to start a company and make it big (in which case those would be counter-examples), they say it's many times harder.
The discrimination lies in the extra difficulty. As someone said, the rich kids starting a startup get to play startup in "easy mode" (which also doesn't mean they'll succeed easily in the market -- just that devoting time to and trying to succeed is far more easy and less rick prone for them).
Inheritance is just like caste, you are born with an advantage over others.
Many people studying today had poor parents that never had any form of higher education. I don't think the US systems is good at this. It concentrates on excellence or at least the appearance of it, although there are probably exceptions if you parents are rich or influential. Bad thing is that it works to a degree because the smartest heads get concentrated while others need to be content with lower quality education. A system that should be obsolete with modern logistics of information. Tech is currently leveraging that weakness by building an even worse alternative with their own campuses. While integrating the industry in universities can be quite the advantage, I doubt this will be a helpful basis. There will be people that like to live in infrastructure belonging to their employer, it is just the modern version of a cult.
I don't know about the issues in India, but perhaps lower caste members just don't have access to education. Financing education in the US is difficult because economic imbalance and ridiculous prices on education. Of course that works as a selector if you don't get a scholarship.
I think it is fairly possible to have a broad education system that doesn't determine your future if you fuck up elementary school. Instead there need to transient systems that allow to build upon your educational career, because pupils learn at different speed and had different advantages like private tutors.
The caste system is about natural born status not tied to economics, but ancestral in nature. You're born into your caste and there isn't mobility within the system. So, try as you might, if you're in the lower caste you're in the lower caste and people higher up are going to treat you that way regardless.
I'm not overly familiar with it myself, but I understand it's a deeply ingrained cultural thing that sounds damaging beyond belief and incredibly bad idea, yet somehow inescapable.
The current inequality increasing systems in the west will lead to all kinds of equivalent effects. Multi-generational debt etc.
The big help the not-poor get is parents help their education. Not monetary help (that exists, but the poor get scholarships which in theory makes up the difference), but help as in a background that values education. If your peers and family expect you to get pregnant and drop out at 14 - it isn't really possible to get ahead in modern society the way most of us take for granted.
Part of the definition of class that is often overlooked in discussions is that it's not just about money. This is why the socio qualifier gets added into the "socio-economic" designation... even though people sometimes use the dash and then ignore it.
A class implies a hereditary, cultural and quasi-ethnic aspect. So does caste, obviously.
As the anthropologist Maurice Godelier puts it in the L'idéel et le matériel, it is not about seeing another reality behind reality but about seeing the same reality with a different look.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
In countries with good and available education, competent people from poor families can get good careers. It makes a lot of sense to run companies there as well, as recruiting works well - people are sorted by ability rather than money.
If the economy is organized so that a small minority is rich, and the vast majority is poor, then even if the fraction of people of different castes, races, genders, whatever at each echelon of wealth is similar. And even if you have a good chance = uniform-distribution draw - of ending up as "one of the rich" - that chance can never be anything but lousy for the vast majority of people.
(Also, social inequality skews the focus of production and consumption so that things masses of people need and want just aren't available.)
And most billionaries are first-generation: https://www.cnbc.com/2014/07/16/how-to-stay-rich-for-three-g...
In what universe?
I doubt I'll make many friends adding this in, but an uncomfortable statistical artefact of an affirmative action program is the candidates in that program are very likely going to have lower average competence than the rest of the cohort. That observation in particular was (1) probably not acceptable in the workplace and (2) possibly justifiable depending on how serious the affirmative action policies were.
The statistical results around an affective action program are all actually pretty brutal, both to the people in the program and the people who aren't. I forget where to find a good link, but it is related to my favourite stats paradox, Simpson's paradox. They are not a tool people should want to use.
Nobody had any problem with his performance until the discriminatory boss was hired.
If they believed that, it would also explain the other things like lack of opportunities and low wages too.
Good reading in this context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unequal_Childhoods
That's amazing that you've met the majority of them. Did you write it up?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Which leads me to believe that this can't be happening on any systemic level (I did read the article, so yea it does happen but I can't believe that it happens a lot).
"Caste-ist" indians simply don't hold enough sway in hiring decisions in the US to make any significant dent. If lower castes are being oppressed, it's only by their own cultural attitudes. Just start making more non-indian friends and assimilate.
And recruiting is something where engineers are also involved a lot. They recommend, they rate, they have networks, they may even be part of HR. Just to name some ways. If you get fired (e.g. of your visa protecting job) a well networked person has a lot more chances than someone not.
Castes or races in the US are very similar in their effects.
But I need to take a step back. I am not an expert on it, just rambling my thoughts.
Which is... essentially even though one might say caste is abolished, you know having a higher (or equal) caste still has advantage and favoritism towards alike caste is cultivated (possibly unconsciously, but the story implies deliberately)
It is not just the consequence of being wealthier, although that and politics play a role. Among Indians from similar income levels, that makes it unreserved castes people more likely to take up tech / medical sector.
The difference between a news report and an editorial piece is easy to see once you know the difference.
A news report sticks to the facts - who, what, when, where - with little or no commentary. It usually has a summary with all the important points in the first paragraph. A sentence such as "Then, in a tragic double-whammy," or "...you can be assured..." is not appropriate in a news story. See for example https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cisco-lawsuit/california-..., a news article about the same case.
The quality of the writing in the article being discussed is also quite poor, with mixed metaphors ("cradle of caste people are disgorged from."), awkward turns of phrase ("serial scale") and even grammatical errors "Their woman and children are".
Pretty normal for non specialist press when writing up a court case note the author is an Indian and may well be using Indian style English, which does diverge from standard English.
It's a piece of writing by a purported "professional" writer and it's pretty bad. Indian-style English still adheres to the rules of regular English grammar.
Note that not all upper-caste People are casteist and harmful. I also see many Rich People whose ancestors were Dalits, who no longer need any financial grant/food/shelter from the Government claiming it from Government. It only harms very poor Dalits in need.
This Casteism at companies is bad and Casteism is crime. Also, the title of this post is Peculiar. Title must not be "90% of Techies are upper caste" as upper caste is not synonymous with casteist.
Also,there are many poor,hard working non-casteist people who by birth(not changeable) were upper-caste people who worked hard to get into good job in US,so they deserve that job.
This is something I have been thinking quite a lot about.
The Govt. really struggles to cap affirmative action to only those who need it.
I knew people who were from lower castes, used reservation to get in and had Macbooks, iPhones and spent summers abroad touring.
How hard is it to disqualify them due to financial means ? There are too many poor Dalits who would rather use those seats.
In this case, are there some people that "don't deserve it"? Certainly, but there's probably many more that do who are making use of the program. Adding overhead and bureaucracy to try to weed out the undeserving may very well make it so fewer people who need the assistance get it. It's human nature to overweight small negative outcomes while underweighting the larger good. You need to objectively study the problem to fully understand where the tipping point is which rarely happens because these types of things quickly become political.
I don't personally know enough about this particular topic to speak to it, but the general answer to the question
Is it's harder than you think without undermining the original goals of the of the program.It is not like there are no better ways to do it, like adding an economic constraint, or not giving reservation if parents have gotten reservation for job. That would benefit everyone except affluent lower caste families.
There are no overseas communities of majority Indian subcontinental origin that maintain rigid caste distinctions. Not even Mauritius which is majority ethnic Indian or Fiji or Guyana where they’re about half the population. Caste will not be maintained in America for the same reason no ethnic group maintains itself without religious endogamy or continuing immigration; People socialize and mate with those they spend time with unless there are powerful reasons not to. All will be assimilated in time.
Look at northern inland there are places in Ireland and parts of Scotland and even the USA where I would have to be careful as I am a product of a mixed marriage and I also was a a "crown servant for 15 years" and have a southern ie catholic last Name.
Ironically, it is breaking down in India because of female infanticide creating a skewed gender distribution (around 1.14:1, when the natural distribution is 1.05:1), and men having no choice but to look outside their caste if they want to marry.
I doubt if the average English person today is really even consciously aware of the Anglo-Normans being higher class. Certainly there's no easily visible divide or overt discrimination in modern times. Yet the legacy of the caste system left by William the Conqueror continues to shape society a thousand years later.
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/842...
Is it so shocking though? The US has its own sordid history of caste-like discrimination in work, civic, and personal life, as the African American community can attest to. Huge portions of the US had anti-miscegenation laws on the books up until 50 ago [1]
If anything, many of the patterns of discrimination in the US line up quite nicely with those that arrived with some (though not all) Indian immigrants.
This has frequently resulted in a stark schism between the older generation of Indian immigrants, many of whom readily adopted the US' racist attitudes toward African Americans, Mexicans, etc, and their American children, who often have nearly the opposite perspective.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-miscegenation_laws_in_the...
As a low caste Hindu who grew up in India, it is not at all shocking to me. In-fact Dr.Ambedkar, the lead author of Indian Constitution, wrote "If Hindus migrate to other regions on earth, Indian caste would become a world problem."[1] and he is proven right.
The reason Indians continue the caste system wherever they go is because, it is ingrained in the Hindu religion. Caste system and the religion are inseparable. Ambedkar realized that it is impossible to get out of the clutches of the caste system as long as one is Hindu. Hence he said “I had the misfortune of being born with the stigma of an Untouchable. However, it is not my fault; but I will not die a Hindu, for this is in my power.”[2] and he converted to Buddhism.
1. http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00ambedkar/txt_...
2. https://time.com/5770511/india-protests-br-ambedkar/
Here is one hard quote by Buffet: The ovarian lottery is the most important event in which you'll ever participate. It's going to determine way more than what school you go to, how hard you work, all kinds of things. The nation of birth changes your life much more than your effort or intelligence.
The above comment is downvoted, maybe for sounding pro-upper-caste? But the statement is true.
The whole caste system is also very much alive in the US. Things like good education, crime-free neighborhoods and good healthcare are all for the rich(er).
Edit: This: "Except, this time, it is happening in the US tech industry, a place that people normally associate with egalitarianism and a thirst for talent regardless of colour, race, religion, or any other creed." is not really what I associate the tech industry with either. I feel it is is still very white male (like me) dominated.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India)
If you try to understand caste by analogy to class you will fail completely. It is its own thing.
The Cagots are particularly weird, as nobody knows why they were treated like that.