Hacker News Reader

Comment by eklavya | Hacker News Reader

I am sorry you have had such a bad luck with your company. All the education in the world can't teach basic human decency. You can probably take some solace in the fact that I have not seen any such behaviour in the Indian tech scene so far. Maybe give it a shot and come here (trade a different set of problems). It must be an absolutely horrible of a mix in the US for this to be 8:10.

View on HN

> It must be an absolutely horrible of a mix in the US for this to be 8:10.

The US is quite large so this is a YMMV thing. I solve this issue by just not associating very much with my ex-countrymen. I get enough of them when I go to visit my parents, I don't need to constantly mingle with more Indians. I have a solid set of diverse friends (one or two are Indian).

It helps that in my workplace I tend not to think of anyone as a 'friend' and just keep my interactions professional.

I don't understand how educated people behave this way. I have seen this in illiterates but modern educated people behaving this way is absolutely mind boggling.

What do you mean by “behave this way”? I have no idea what in particular you’re referring to. It could be parent. Or something in grand parent and you’re supporting parent.

Pretty sure they're referring to the act of caste discrimination.

If you think the comment was made in good faith with good intentions ;) and you read my reply above, it should be pretty obvious that I am talking about educated people discriminating on the basis of caste.

You now the bit about Nazis, you can be two of either a) a nice person b) an intelligent person c) a Nazi.

I guess the works for all kinds of cases of discrimination.

Half of it came during my academic phase though!

Do you mean in India? If you don't mind can you tell me what years those were? I just want to see if I happen to live in a bubble or it was a different time (as in, sufficiently long ago for me to not see it).

The academic phase was during my PhD between 2009 and 2017 in Texas. Upper Caste Hindu professors (2) and fellow grad students and postdocs (2). The professors thankfully weren’t my advisors, but made it their business to pester every Indian student during poster presentations if they found they were not upper caste or weren’t behaving as one (by eating or dating habits).

You can absolutely still report them, if you’re no longer in the university they don’t have much power to influence your career anymore.

I think you might have too much faith in the HR departments of Texas universities :)

UT Southwestern is quite famous for protecting its image at all costs.

Yeah a professor’s blog post was shared recently that he only felt safe to disclose his caste once he had achieved tenure, and that basically every CS professor of South Asian descent in North America is from the higher castes (as in, the number who aren’t is in the single digits).

People take their culture with them.

When I was a child there were a lot of scandals about girls disappearing from school because they were married off to a cousin back in Morocco.

It's not like "these people" haven't heard of that idea of basic human decency, more like they think whatever the books they carry has a priority over someone else's ethics and laws. But teaching them what's correct to a free man is a bit weird and it's also a rather steep slippery slope towards Chinese Uighur camp situation, so these problems are starting to grow and compound everywhere in developed worlds.

> But teaching them what's correct to a free man is a bit weird and it's also a rather steep slippery slope towards Chinese Uighur camp situation

You think teaching them that it's wrong to discriminate based on caste is a step on "a rather steep slippery slope towards" genocide??

Stop downvoting this person, you will make their comment disappear and it's not warranted. They are simply sharing their personal experience and are looking to understand the person they are replying to.

And because I know people will wonder: no, I am not Indian and know very little about caste so you can rest assured this isn't a biased response.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com