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Comment by rvn1045 | Hacker News Reader

The lack of self awareness amongst upper caste Indians in India and abroad is interesting to witness.

They often think of themselves as having come from humble backgrounds and 'made it' in society all on their own. Not realizing that the vast majority of Indians in India live in abject poverty without any meaningful access to basic education and other amenities. Upper caste Indians are more likely to have access to better education, have family from previous generations who were also college educated or worked well paid government jobs. These multi generational advantages have helped the current generation of the upper caste succeed in India and beyond.

The Upper caste live in their own bubble not even realizing the privilege they are born with.

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It has another side that validates their opinion. ( I am neither upper caste, nor come from a historically wealthy family)

In many cases parents will live incredibly frugally their whole lives to save up enough money for their child's education. Growing up on $3-8k annually is a humble background for a family when look at from the American lens. Qualifying for Indian universities is a nightmare exam that takes 2+ years of 10+ hrs a day of study. The kids compromise on any hobbies and a life just to MAKE IT.

Everything in India IS far harder than the developed world. A family that can't afford a personal vehicle, air conditioning or a single vacation over their lifetime is a humble family. Being successful enough to make it to the >95th percentile in the western world from such beginning is commendable and something a person should be able to take pride in.

Now, is it still an order of magnitude less hard to do this than it is for a dalit ? Ofc it is. But, should a person born in the western world feel ashamed to get a phd because kids in Africa are dying of hunger ? NO.

> Come from humble backgrounds and 'made it' in society all on their own

> Upper caste Indians are more likely to have access to better education

Both these statements can be true. One should not need to throw away pride in their accomplishments to empathize with someone less fortunate.

Are Dalits in different nation now?

> They often think of themselves as having come from humble backgrounds and 'made it' in society all on their own.

The number of people I've run into that claim this, but their parents paid their rent, or bought them a house, or they work for their family's company, is staggering. It's a common blind spot for upper middle class and rich people.

Reminds me of a U.S. politician whose advice to students struggling with finding jobs in a recession was to borrow money from their parents to start a business.

That was Mitt Romney in 2012. "We’ve always encouraged young people: Take a shot, go for it, take a risk, get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business."

Romney's father was CEO of American Motors and the governor of Michigan.

Yep. All them liberal arts grads who have "made it" in their respective industries who then turn around and defend unpaid internships because they had parents willing to support them as young adults for the first half decade out of college.

This is true for most countries, how many developers do you know that come from real poor families? In my experience most had it pretty good, that's why they had a computer and maybe internet growing up, and time to play with it, and time to study instead of working to support yourself and the family.

We exist. I was lucky enough to have a parent who bought a second-hand computer after years of asking for one, and not being able to afford it. They were relatively expensive then, so it was a real sacrifice that I'm still grateful for to this day.

One of the things I've learned is that if you don't use euphemisms to minimize the poverty that you came from, some people treat you differently when they understand what poverty actually means and what it meant for you. For that reason, I tend not to share, or be completely honest about it.

Yes I'm sure there's some like you, I remember reading that social mobility from the lower income third to the higher third is around 6% in the US.

No computer, no internet growing up, but then again, I was born in '74. If I were to guess, probably grew up in the bottom 30% or so. Never had a "new" car growing up, always rented (though my parents did finally 'buy' when I was around 25 or so). Didn't put down on a house of my own until about 2 years ago (43yo at the time).

That said, I've had a tendency to spoil myself since I started making good money over a decade ago (top ~10% or so). I'm not rich, I don't have generational wealth, and I have a modest amount of debt. My daughter just turned 18yo, and is graduating HS in the spring. I'm doing what I can to help her make the best decisions for what she wants to do.

In the end, I kind of lucked out. I got into programming around the right time... managed to recover from a very hard year when the .com bubble burst in early 00's. Despite my parents being together my entire life, I haven't managed to do the same. I'm twice divorced, and currently engaged, and hesitant.

I've effectively had to start from roughly nothing three times in my life. I was kicked out as a young adult. After the .com bust, I had only what could fit in the back of my pickup, repo'd 3 months after 9/11. And after my second divorce, I didn't have much to speak of.

All told, I've been relatively fortunate, and determined through my life to keep pushing forward. I've managed to push through my personality disorder (similar to add/adhd). I've fought with pretty severe depression several times. I push through regular anxiety. Though I tend to push full burn until I burn out (getting close now).

I'm not so much complaining as stating that not everyone doing relatively well started off that well, or had the advantages that many will assume. And even then, you can walk out of a situation with pretty much nothing and still climb back out again. Right now, my heart goes out to everyone who is losing everything they have, watching it all fall apart. A lot of the top 10-50% will wind up in the bottom 50% when it's all said and done.

I will say that of the people from other cultures that I've worked with in my life, those from India tend to have more interesting interactions based on the caste they grew up in. The variance is far broader than most Americans, Russians or Chinese I've worked with. Though most of the Chinese I've worked with are also from a wealthy background typically. Russians who have come up pre vs post communism vary a lot though, mostly from their experience. But those are just my observations.

Okay, going to stop rambling now.

Interesting ramble and thank you for sharing. I would be curious to hear more about the interesting interactions based on the caste they grew up in!

  I will say that of the people from other cultures that I've worked with in my life, those from India tend to have more interesting interactions based on the caste they grew up in. The variance is far broader than most...

Just a tendency to either be very timid, or very outgoing and really no in between. It just feels obviously it's a cultural difference that frankly I don't understand.

I've always appreciated competence and rejected unsubstantiated arrogance. So to me it's kind of alien.

I haven't seen the interactions as described in the article, but have noticed things like lunch group clustering that seemed to go beyond a typical US High School. And it wasn't really a grouping by type of work. I was working in a position that was a very large company group that was around 75% Indian H1Bs.

I never really knew how the caste system worked, but in retrospect it makes a lot of sense. At the time I just chalked it up to a culture thing.

To be fair, it requires a lot self awareness and external education to learn about your own privilege and how difficult (relatively) other people have it. It's not easy.

It really does not in a place like India where differences between the rich and the ultra poor are everywhere to witness. You cannot miss it. 90% of the country is living in poverty.

Caste is not necessarily associated with wealth. My dad's old teacher in Hyderabad was a Brahmin and he lived in very modest circumstances.

Yes but caste is associated with education. And the current generation of the upper caste is succeeding because they are more educated than the rest and come from more educated families. Which I would say is a huge privilege given that a large majority of the country can't even read and write.

They are succeeding because the historical cultural norms keep the "competition" down, and because they have money. Everything else is a consequence, not a cause. Take 2 equally educated people from high and low castes and see how they behave next to each other and how they're treated doing the same jobs. One will be treated like a "natural born leader", the other like a "born to be a slave". That's because as much education as those in the lowest caste may have, the system is rigged against them by people who aren't inherently any better but can "invent" such an advantage.

Caste, like race or gender, is the kind of bottom of the barrel discrimination. When the other person is just as educated, or smart, or capable, or sometimes they may be even better, you pull out this card which is by definition impossible to fight. You can't reasonably change them. So some people will keep working to make these still "a thing", something they can always use to get an edge they don't deserve.

> When the other person is just as educated, or smart, or capable, or sometimes they may be even better, you pull out this card which is by definition impossible to fight. You can't reasonably change them. So some people will keep working to make these still "a thing", something they can always use to get an edge they don't deserve.

This could also be a 100% accurate description of affirmative action.

Of course at first sight "affirmative action" has a similar effect and taken to the extreme it can have just as many negative consequences. But it also depends on how narrow your view of what's happening is, how far you "zoom in". The intention of reasonable affirmative action is vastly different and yes, that matters.

If you take a narrow enough view, a criminal being locked up is no different from a person being kidnapped. Someone is deprived of liberty. A criminal taking money from the victim is no different from a victim taking back money from the criminal. Someone is taking money from someone else. If you take a step back you see a different story.

To the point, if you got a job purely based on such advantages as gender or skin color, then the fact that it's taken away via affirmative action is not as much discrimination as it is fixing an error. The devil's in the details.

> To the point, if you got a job purely based on such advantages as gender or skin color,

But even if someone did get a job based solely on their skin color or gender (increasingly rare in the US), there's no guarantee or even likelihood that the next random person who loses a job because of affirmative action ever got one because of his/her skin color.

To take the most obvious example, what if the losing party is just entering the workforce? How are they guilty, other than by their skin color?

No, you can't solve racism with racism. It only causes more ill will. It's not a popular opinion these days, but I'm quite sure it won't help us attain a more just, harmonious society. Only firmly rejecting all forms of racism will get us there.

In any case, it's increasingly clear these days that attaining a racially harmonious society is no longer an objective for many folks. It's all a power play, for themselves and their political or identity group.

The past 5-10 years have been utterly discouraging for someone who hoped we could move past racial thinking as a society. I was wrong to be hopeful, for a variety of reasons now clear to me.

Yes, but its not hard to convince yourself that you live in a meritocracy, and that your society is the natural outcome of sorting people by merit.

It's hard for a man to understand something, when his self-esteem depends on him not understanding it.

Buddha may have been able to tell things were a bit weird for him as an aristocrat, but not everyone has that level of introspection.

It’s very easy to look at all one’s own struggles and think them similar to someone else’s struggles, even if that other person has struggled far more.

If it’s 1% possible to achieve something and you did achieve it, you may think you and the person for whom it is 0.01% possible are similar, but they’ve had experiences and struggles you can’t fathom. I use the general ‘you’, maybe not you-you.

> The lack of self awareness... They often think of themselves as having come from humble backgrounds and 'made it' in society all on their own... live in their own bubble not even realizing the privilege they are born with.

So... pretty much like most Americans in similar situation, then?

> So... pretty much like most Americans in similar situation, then?

Does that include almost all Americans, regardless of race? Because compared to most of the rest of the world, we're obviously and measurably privileged wrt materials assets, regardless of race[1].

1. With respect to material assets. With respect to other assets (spiritual, social, etc), I would argue that we Americans are often in the lower tiers.

I would say yes, although in varying degrees and different qualities depending, some definitely have it worse than others, and that's not regardless of social position (for which race is a quite good correlation in the US because of our history of white supremacy, but is not the same thing).

But I guess we're talking about a couple things. The original topic was like "thinking you 'made it' all on your own." Then there's "feeling you are struggling hard and haven't 'made it' at all, when it could be a lot lot worse for many people on the planet." Seldom does "it's even worse for others" make someone struggling feel better though.

People compare their lot to their neighbors who they can see and come into contact with (even if via media), which is also human nature.

Mainly though, for this whole discussion on the OP, my thinking is -- people are sometimes talking as if Indians are so different than Americans with regard to prejudice about caste or in this case those who have 'made it' not realizing they pretty much just stayed in the social position they were born into -- when seems to me pretty similar. It's maybe easier to see when looking from the outside in than when looking at your own culture.

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