I simply don’t get the urge to sound “cool” by deliberately trying to reduce the entire corpus of Hindu philosophy to caste.
I once went to get a sandwich with an Indian colleague. The sandwich server was from the same region as my friend and they began speaking together.
After we left my friend was quite upset. The sandwich server had apparently been very rude to him and looked down on him because of their caste differences.
My first thought was How can the Subway server feel superior to someone earning incredibly well at a startup?
But I caught myself, realiding that I had myself put them in hierarchical categories based on their income.
When taken in consideration with the difficulties that people from lower income families have in getting themselves out of poverty, I don't think we're so far from categorising people's worth by their birth situation.
So don’t try to potray things as black and white and reduce a particular religion to one concept and unidimensional like other Abrahamic faiths. Which btw are pretty much black and white and have more stringent concept of what’s human and what’s not (for instance branding women witches and burning them alive).
But the point is that the Subway worker and the data engineer are actually equal in their humanity. The one shouldn't have to rely on social mobility for me to see them as equal to the other.
These are institutions that we've decided were violations of people's humanity.