Is this something that comes up in conversation among Indians? Do names tend to correlate to you caste? And if so, do people change them as a way of hiding their family caste?
Edit: I must add that while I’ve seen discussions around caste privileges, but I’ve never been discriminated against based on my caste. The only discrimination I’ve faced is the standard discrimination against non-white peoples.
You can have all the money, power, and authority, but it doesn’t change the contents of your character. This type of judgement is indicative of low-class at a soul level — if such an impoverished soul makes judgement, it means absolutely nothing in the cosmic scheme of things.
Taking food down to a homeless man on the side of a street and filming it, is noble and worthy of praise but has limited practical impact on your ability to judge the person accurately. He could be doing it for the wrong reasons. He could be doing it for reasons that do not reflect his character.
Someone who is willing to change for his/her colleagues and practically improve the work enviroment is easy to judge favourably. Superficially and cosmically valid or not, a well oiled ship runs on aligning a lot of little 'superficial' parts.
A well oiled ship has not a thing to do with superficial parts. People need to lose this ego & trying to control every little thing about those around them. It is a job, not a church or a dictatorship.
Do the job, be accepting and friendly. And eat your bologna sandwich if you damn well feel like it.
Also, filming yourself doing a good deed like taking food to a homeless person is embarrassing, and completely invalidates the “good deed.” You can easily judge that person. They are exploiting an under-classed human as a tool to further their social status, which anyone with a brain can easily recognize as low-class behavior.
'Anyone with a brain' is not the compliment you think it is.
I can tell you that a lot of coastal techies have stereotypically unrefined tastes in food and wine and they're still successful.
Ours is also a trade in which many are stereotyped as lacking various social skills.
But I’m also from the Midwest and don’t know how to order sushi.
So was I, and everyone thought I was a barbarian.
Spam.
Iceberg lettuce.
It’s not always the case though. The Bengali Brahmins or the Sarasvat Brahmins of Konkan are predominately meat eaters. It’s all mixed up.
A barrier to casteism in the diaspora (and in higher class circles in cosmopolitan cities in India) is that an Indian from one region of India is unlikely to know the last names of Indians from other regions of India. Likewise with diet, many Brahmins from a vegetarian background adopt a non-vegetarian diet so it's really not a useful distinguisher.
FWIW, I haven't perceived any casteism in tech companies, or anyone trying to ask my caste, and I have an ambiguous last name and eat a meat-heavy diet. There's a decent chance my experiences would be different if I worked in less elite tech companies (e.g. Cisco) rather than top startups / FAANGs.
That's not true afaik. It's usually to cover up cousin marriages.
> Is this something that comes up in conversation among Indians?
It starts casually with "where are you from?" and the questions get more invasive.
> Do names tend to correlate to you caste?
In India, yes it does family name is derived from caste. I had some friends adopt English names to get from under their caste names. So quite a few Johnsons, Smiths, Matthews, Pauls out there.
There is an interesting history behind this. When Christian missionaries first arrived in India to spread their religion (in the late 1700s/1800s) they were initially unable to make much progress, but then found success among lower caste Indians by promising them a life of equality. So the vast majority of Christian converts in India are from these castes.
Mangalorean Catholics for instance are mostly Saraswat Brahmins who converted around 1700s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangalorean_Catholics
It's also a question that's very easy to ask in good faith while making small talk, which makes it noticeably dangerous.
I am in tech management (also a recovering attorney) who routinely conducts interviews, and it is perfectly acceptable to ask where someone is from in a professional setting.
The unacceptable part, as OP at least hints at, is using the response as a proxy for some other verboten criteria or perhaps to kickoff an overly intrusive line of questioning.
These behaviors are odious on their own and why HR should be explicit in training against antipatterns, not spreading meaningless FUD which miss the point and permit bad habits to foster elsewhere.
It’s really inane that modern software recruiting claims to focus on getting a proper picture of the whole candidate , yet untrained interviewers counterfeit the whole endeavor thinking they’re politically correct because they’re afraid to ask anything but the same broken whiteboard questions.
Whenever I mention to a team member that I was interviewing somebody for a position on our team, they always ask: "are they in India?" I had never really wondered why before.
That is not always correct (but is true in most cases). There are caste-neutral names in India - especially Tamil Nadu. But that itself is a hint about the person's caste, since it is adopted mostly by people of the unprivileged caste.
I had always assumed the caste system was a thing of the past but looking at how it's still present even at companies in other countries, I imagine I just grew up in a bubble.
Inter-caste marriages are also extremely rare.
It's sad behavior. If it helps, here's a comment I wrote about my travels in India that might shed some light on the phenomena;
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My travels in India have been revealing.
Caste and class are inextricably linked, and a part of their daily vernacular. They're used as descriptors, "s/he's an X" (as if that means something to me!) And there's a huge coded language with inferences going on. It's a bit like saying, "s/he's jewish". Something that just doesn't happen in the US anymore (unless you're around rather unsavory folks)
It's such a deep part of the milieu that I'm not surprised when I hear stories about it being exported.
True story. I met this Indian woman while working out of the local hipster cafe. We had mutual friends. And ended up going out for lunch.
On the way back, she started asking questions about my background. They grew intensely personal. Until she was interrogating me on the sidewalk.
Unsatisfied with my responses, she just gave up & cut to the chase, "What's your mother's caste?"
Last I checked, she moved to the States and is a contractor for a FAANG.
She's hardly unique though. Indian people cannot stop asking questions. Where are you from? Where were you born? Why's your skin so pale? Where are your parents? What do they do? Where did you go to school? Why aren't you married?
What's worse is that the society is insular. Even in a big city, few people socialize outside of, in descending order of proximity, family > friends of the family > classmates from elementary school > people from their high school > college > (perhaps, sometimes) work.
I have met people who have gone through their entire life without ever meeting someone from a lower social class/caste. Casual greetings with people who clean their homes don't count.
There's a lack of je ne sais quoi. A certain lack of creative energy. A kind of absence of the meeting of free radicals that sparks interesting ideas and art. Culturally, it's as if, the society has submerged itself in halon, determined to not let the sparks of creativity and genius spark.
This problem is so acute that every free radical I've met has done their very best to move away as soon as humanly possible.
Upper caste
> However, the title Deshmukh should not be associated to a particular religion or caste