The popularity of the Indian version is a gift of spite from the British colonial rulers before they quit the subcontinent after successfully splitting into many nations with their only strategy ‘divide and rule’.

I literally don’t know even one culture or country that doesn’t follow its own version of caste system. To understand it and get rid of it, we have to ask why it is able to survive.

I am from the sub continent. We are a billion plus people beating the same name. We have hundreds of languages. I am certainly going to ask anyone who calls themselves an Indian to figure out if they are my kin. Why? Because as an immigrant in a foreign land, I want to be friends with someone like me. I can’t be friendly to the millions of Indian immigrants.

I want to hang around with someone with whom I share more things Indian because I miss home sometimes. I miss the language, the food, the smells of a Hindu Brahmin kitchen and all the things that reminds me of my community. That’s not castesim. To equate this to casteism makes a mockery of the horrors and injustices of caste system.

No. There is no caste system amongst Indians in the Bay Area. We should ALL be grateful to be living during these times. It’s infinitely better than how our ancestors were living. It can get even better.

Mockery. This lawsuit makes a mockery of the ancestors of CA Dalits who have had the opportunity to step outside of the system and still engaging in this sort of manufactured divisiveness.

Dalits were not part of the varna system in India. The texts say that there were four castes and everyone else was considered an ‘outsider’. The word ‘Mleccha’ means outsider and that included anyone who didn’t follow the structure of society with the four castes. People with unfamiliar behaviour and different food habits. The Greeks for example were Mlecchas. The Dalits and possibly the local tribes were Mleccha too. They were excluded and when the people who formed the Hindu society became dominant, the local population were at the fringes of society but now dependent on a domainant society that rejects them.

India has thousands and thousands of years of history and so many migrations and invasions. It is insane to look at caste system from that framework.

1. Is the social structure in India problematic? Yes. 2. Is something being done to rectify it in India? Yes. 3. Does it have anything to do with indian immigrants in Silicon Valley? No.

The very term ‘tam-bram’ pat is offensive. Not all non Dalits are Brahmins and not all Brahmins are tamilian.

The state of CA is suing Cisco. That by itself goes to show that this lawsuit is politically energized and has no legs to stand on. For shame!