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Comment by huytersd | Hacker News Reader

Indians can’t even tell castes unless they are from essentially the same county/local cluster. This is only really a problem because you have a lot of people from the same part of Andra pradesh coming and working in the tech sector.

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You can always ask about someone's background, or look it up.

Google suffered a backlash in Japan when they made ancient maps easy to find, as people feared it'd make it easy to connect them to frowned upon ancestry: https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=7514420&page=1

You can’t look up this stuff, it’s too local and none of it is written down or relevant even if it was. Just families classifying families in their towns. Geography means nothing, families of most castes live right next to each other.

> You can always ask about someone's background, or look it up.

Seems easy enough. There are only 4.6 Million possibilities to choose from.

based on the number of subcastes Govt of India identified for a caste census in 2011. https://www.deccanherald.com/content/489752/socio-economic-c...

I thought they can also sometimes identify via last name?

not really, many of the states does not use last name and many take up their fathers name as last name. It also varies from state to state, so the probability of you identifying another person caste from their last name is very small.

With many people taking different names that are modern from parents ,its really hard to know .

My wife has her father's name as her last, so what you say definitely tracks.

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