Thread by @asuph

#Caste a thread.

Long back, when I had just passed my 10th exam with decent marks, a distant relative who was an office bearer for "karhade brahmin sanghatana", or some such organization representing my born caste, visited our house to hand me a "prize"

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Incidentally, we were invited to attend a program to felicitate "bright" students from the community but hadn't turned up, so he had come home to deliver my cash prize. "I don't accept prizes that are caste-based", I said. He tried to convince me, but I was adamant.

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Give that money away to some deserving candidate from the (so-called) lower castes, I told him. Given my background, this isn't even an achievement, I told him.

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He went away, fuming that a mere teen had "insulted" him. Plus he was the "jamai" (son-in-law) of the family, so there was that -- his prerogative to be offended. He stopped speaking to our family. Not that that was a big loss.

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The point of this is not to brag about it. There is really nothing to brag about there -- I believe every single UC member needs to do that. That's really the bare minimum. Why I'm bringing this up is that, while my heart may have been in the right place, I was so ignorant.

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It was easy to return those hundred-odd rupees. But what about the accrued privilege of my caste that I've immensely benefited from. Cut to 2019. A savarna colleague and I were travelling back from IIT Mumbai after campus interviews.

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The night before another colleague (savarna, like us, again) and us had had a long discussion on politics, and among other things #casteism. I had talked about how my extremely orthodox (read bigoted) grandmother, had made an atheist out of me.

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This colleague wanted to know more about that statement. So I told him about an incident that happened when I was about 8-9 yo, that started my questioning of religion and caste. My dad had inherited a small scale carpentry business from my grandfather.

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The carpentry workshop was just a small shade opposite where we lived, and we had 5-6 carpenters (karagir - as my father would call them) working for us. Most of them, at any time, were Muslims. If Hindu, they were definitely never upper-caste.

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They weren't allowed to enter the house. They had a different water container that they had to fill from a tap outside the house. If they needed water during times when there was no running water, one of us will have to pour it into their container -- from a height ...

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to avoid getting "polluted". On one occasion, I was pouring water into their container with a heavy container and lost balance. Gudubhai, a Muslim karagir, who was there with *their* pot, caught hold of me, so that I wouldn't hurt myself.

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My grandmother saw that and castigated Gudubhai. How dare you touch him, was the essence of the argument. That got me thinking -- how could a person who spends eight hours a day with God treat a human being like this?

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That was the start of my questioning my elders, the society around me, religion, God, and so on. After I narrated this, my savarna colleague felt a need to defend my own grandmother to me -- a person I loved deeply but saw objectively.

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For her, it was her faith, and you can't judge her by that, he said. I was aghast. If her faith cannot make her a better person, what use it is, I asked. Anyways, that conversation got us talking about caste. And my savarna colleague was obviously anti-reservation.

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"I was poor, and I had to fight as hard as any Dalit," he claimed. I tried to tell him about all the indirect privileges he enjoys as an upper-caste in the highly upper-caste-dominated world of the software industry. He was unconvinced.

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#Privilege is the easiest thing to deny because it's invisible till you make an effort to see it. And the effort is just going to show you what you *don't* want to see. So most people don't even try. It's so much easier to believe in their own "merit".

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A perfect time for a segue into "in-network" hiring, aka, "referrals". I work in the data-storage domain. It needs a specific domain knowledge and it's the least "diverse" field even within the software industry -- gender/caste/religion, you name any axis.

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Much of the hiring is through "employee referrals", so basically, in-network. That means only those who have access to the network even get a chance at an interview. This has been bugging me for a while, and I want to get more ideas on how this vicious cycle can be broken.

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But back to our savarna colleague, to deny the very existence of his privilege (and mine) in this field is so dishonest -- but only if one has ever thought objectively about it. And he wasn't even that bright --if I were defending "merit", I'd not use him as an example.

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But I've seen so many "not so bright" engineers make it to various levels of this industry, and surprise surprise, they are almost exclusively savarna, Hindu, male.

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And the logic of merit is such that, they believe they "won in open marketplace" and hence it proves not just their own merit, but the superiority of their caste/religion/gender, in these domains. Circular logic if ever there was.

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So where did I even start? Yes -- the question of rejecting caste-based rewards. The easy part was that -- explicit caste-based rewards. What about the harder part -- the implicit rewards that I have reaped for decades? And continue reaping thanks to my caste?

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Cut back to 2005/6. We were looking to buy a house. We zeroed in on one. We visited the builder's office and the (savarna) salesperson there told us : "ithe sagale aaplech lok aahet". This apartment complex has "our kind" of people. Read savarna, Hindu.

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We had combed the area for six months, before really really liking something that was just barely within our budget. So did we walk off? No. We bought the house. And yeah, it was mostly savarana people. This is the "in network".

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How does one reject caste? What does it even mean? Only the privileged caste members have the option to reject caste. Because even explicit rejection of caste is not a rejection of caste benefits. A white non-racist still enjoys all the benefits of a white man.

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Ditto with the "upper-caste". It's almost impossible to "reject" caste that way. So what should a upper-caste person do?

Bare minimum:
1. Acknowledge your privilege
2. Question ALL (upper)caste pride
3. Ask those from disadvantaged castes how you can help

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I'm doing 3 now. Especially in the corporate world, how can I help? How can I help to level the playing field a bit (I know my limitations). How do I get someone from the disadvantaged caste access to my in-network?

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How can I help?

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