Hacker News Reader

Comment by petilon | Hacker News Reader

There may be pockets in India where caste still impacts your life (mostly poor, uneducated and backward villages), but in major cities where people are educated and modern, caste is not significant. More on that here: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/opinion/sunday/caste-is-n...

View on HN

You got it backwards. There may be small pockets where caste won’t matter, but it mostly does in insidious and invisible ways all the time.

Wait - if that's the case, why is caste an issue at Oracle, up to the point where there's federal lawsuits? Are the Indian employees at that firm all from backwards villages?

If someone finds a way to make a buck through a lawsuit they will do it. Just because someone filed a lawsuit doesn't make it true.

And just because you are being dismissive doesn't make it false.

That's an interesting editorial - it doesn't match what I've heard from multiple people and especially seems hard to reconcile with things like the more recent discussions and lawsuits regarding caste in Silicon Valley:

https://qz.com/apple-meta-and-google-must-fight-caste-discri...

Look, if someone files a racial discrimination lawsuit against your company then does that prove that everyone in your company is racist?

No, but it suggests that management/HR _may_ be.

Exactly, so take the lawsuits with a grain of salt.

A single lawsuit isn't proof — that would come out as the case is evaluated — but they're being brought on a regular basis it suggests that there is some kind of problem.

I appreciate that this is a subject you care deeply about but I think you might need to start looking for some supporting evidence for your claims. There are a number of people who say discrimination is a problem and it seems unlikely that they're all making it up.

Accounting firms know that tone is set at the top - look at FTX if you don't believe. Leadership sets the company climate, no one else has the power.

When it reaches the stage when actual lawsuits are filed it means that the situation is grave. Most labour disputes are settled informally. The ones that end in front of a judge are usually the ones with merit, the filing party will have consulted with an attorney who will have advised against proceeding if the case isn't watertight.

If one can’t code and gets fired as it was in Adobe case, you can’t blame caste system for it. That lawsuit for meritless and pushed by a CA EOC officer of Pakistan descent and a hinduphobe to his core.

The point being this is politics and lack of competence. Nobody even in India cares about caste unless it is election time. Further the biggest casteism I have seen is in USA between the ivy leaguers vs non ivy leaguers, particularly in finance and vc industry.

The globalists hate Modi’s India so there is this consistent pattern of hammering India on caste, religion and Hinduism irrespective of the forum. Historically India has a Varna or class system based on temperament(Guna)and actions(karma). The caste system in India was a British creation modelled after Spanish Casta system - blood purity etc,

This just isn't correct. Not only is it still pervasive in India it actively impacts US Indian immigrants as well.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/big-techs-big-pro...

Untrue. You can get people to complain about anything, that doesn't make it true.

Just want to point out that the unnatural vigor with which HN and other forums reject the idea of Caste Discrimination is telling. If this were White on Minority racism for instance people defending it in this way would be ostracized and most would say that it this type of discrimination is beyond the pale and call for vigorous investigation into the claims.

Instead all we see about Caste discrimination is "it doesn't exist", "it's manufactured", "it's not a problem". It's frankly glaring.

Your intuition is on point. It is very much alive in India.

That is exactly the point I was going to make. Thank you.

That's because people on HN are vastly more familiar with things in their own country, and see and hear abject racism among their own folks. For example, the classic uncle at the Thanksgiving table, or a grandparent.

They have no context of Indian caste system, and only go by some online articles that have their own agenda to make a bigger deal of the caste system in modern day, than it is.

Thank you for reinforcing my point like nothing I say could.

It's funny how folks like you have zero clue or context about the caste system in India yet read a couple of agenda based biased articles and come to nonsense conclusions.

Instead of standing up and saying "I believe all caste discrimination is wrong and any alleged instance of it should be quickly investigated," you instead decided to go into multiple comment chains and simply deny it's existence int he face of numerous firsthand experiences from posters. Good job.

>int he face of numerous firsthand experiences from posters

Like which ones?

People from India need to speak up about this if that's true, because Western readers love articles like this to broadly discriminate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com