Comment by blinkingled | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blinkingled | Hacker News Reader

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> People are weighed down by the poverty, caste and religion of the families they are born into

These are just noisy words that people throw around without giving any concrete examples or offering any ideas on how it should be done. Like what does weighed down by caste mean actually in 2020 India? I see plenty of inter-caste marriages - I never did in the past. That's progress to me.

I lived there 30 years - 70s through early 2000s - and each time I visit I find that circumstances have improved quite a bit for the poor. I even saw my doodhwallah's daughter enroll in MBBS last time and the maid only had 2 kids (as opposed to when I was a kid the maid would have 5 or 6 because of lack of knowledge about birth control!)

It isn't exactly a do this and that and then suddenly billions will be "free" and prosperous thing. It's not a problem that has been solved - not at this scale certainly. Given the history and the odds I would say the progress has been nothing to sneeze at.

What does weighed down by caste mean? Go to google news for India and search for ‘Dalit’. Count the number of people beaten up and killed for being lower caste and trying to drink from an upper caste well or marrying an upper caste person. In the last month.

Individual anecdotes don’t mean very much. My parents had an inter-caste marriage 42 years ago. Does that mean there was no casteism then?

Individual anecdotes are not meaningful but cherry picked stories from specific google searches is a-ok? (Try searching for "stories about dalit success" and see if you are willing to change/rebase your viewpoint based on that - just like you originally did with a different search.) Nobody said it's a solved problem - but denying that things are much better than they used to be is just biased nonsense.

My anecdotes are biased nonsense while yours are not. This is uncomfortably ad hominem and I don’t know how to respond civilly but let me ask you why you think I would be biased? I live in India. India is home; I don’t enjoy portraying it in a bad light.

Also no cherry picking is needed to make my point. I asked you to search for ‘Dalit’, not ‘Dalit killings’.

I don’t like to get in shouting matches. I won’t be responding further.

> asked you to search for ‘Dalit’

That's what I did btw - eye opener if you are a simpleton basing your opinions on what the media chooses to highlight and what google tries to show you :)

Also I don't remember using any ALL CAPS words so not sure where you got "shouting match" from :) - probably a gut feel based pre-determination I am guessing?

No need to lower yourself to personal attacks, whatever message or opinion you are trying to express is severely derailed by this.

India is one of the worst places (if not the worst) when it comes to inequality. Caste system is a proper evil that should be gone in 21st century if the country wants to call itself civilized. Millions of us have seen it first hand when travelling through it. It can't be expressed by mere words to a westerner, one has to see it. How deeply it is ingrained in whole society.

I did backpacking 6 months in the past all over it, and in some ways this shows you more of a country than any other way of travelling and integrating. One ex-girlfriend did spent few years living in Mumbai with her ex. She had no clue about real India, especially when I compared the backpacking with her. Like literally no clue. What I want to say - just staying there as a westerner doesn't make you automatically see all good and bad. Depends how dirty you want to get, how much off trodden path you want to go. How far from rich well educated people you want to steer.

Its perfectly normal experience to talk to young couple of brahmins with very westernish look on life and desires, even well traveled ones, who without bating an eye would say its perfectly fine to send poor 5 year old kids to fireworks factory or coal mine instead of school. Of course not their kids, just kids of the poor, so they can help their families. By losing their future, health and often even lives. This is quite recent experience and far from only one.

Is it getting better? I am sure it is and it makes me very happy. Is it still a very very long path to a fair society? Absolutely. I don't expect current western level of society in my life, maybe my grandkids.

At the very least, caste doesn’t mean a whole lot in Indian cities.

Not true at all.

A more accurate statement would be "caste is slightly less of a problem these days in Indian cities among 1) the more liberal educated classes 2) very low and poor folks living in chawls"

For the vast middle class folks and rigid rich folks, it is just as painful

I don’t know if I agree with that. I’ve seen it come up very infrequently within the middle class.

Your accusations need proper, large scale statistical backing. As pointed out in another comment, with quotas in education and employment, and laws protecting the historically oppressed, social equality has seen a massive increase in India.

That doesn't mean casteism is dead, just that statistically things are much much better for the historically oppressed.

I have hope for the new, educated Indian.

The GP seems to say that that "statistically things are much much better for the historically oppressed" has not caused people NOT to be "weighed down by the poverty, caste and religion of the families they are born into".

The GP is free to suggest anything, but without statistical backing, it's merely that: a suggestion.

India has had the world's largest middle class emerge from poverty in the last three decades, and to somehow claim that economic (& social) upliftment has only benefitted the upper strata is mathematically false. If people were truly weighted down by caste,etc. this uplifted wouldn't be possible

Again, India still reels from literacy problems, and one's likely to see more inequity among the uneducated with regard to social strata.

Why can't both statements be objectively[1] true? That progress has been made does not preclude the observation that large sections of the society are weighed down by caste.

[1]: I assume that this is the word you seek when you mention statistically

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