So the Indian American CTO of Twitter got promoted to the CEO slot and there has been a metric ton of garbage related to what his caste affiliation might be on Twitter by both Indian American wokes and other American wokes.
Even the Indian American woke could not identify Parag Agrawal's caste correctly and called him a "Cis Brahmin". Another woke handle misidentified him twice "Tamil Brahmin" and "Tamil Bania"
This is not surprising to me as a first generation Indian American immigrant at all. Caste identity plays very little role in the day to day life of even a first generation immigrant and in any case India being a massive, diverse country ...
... it is not always possible even for first generation immigrants to accurately identify the caste affiliation of another Indian American. That is way an Indian American made such an embarrassing whiff (Agrawals are a fairly well known mercantile caste group in India)
... and the odds of a non-Indian American accurately identifying caste affiliations are basically zero. However this episode is quite instructive and here are some of my observations which might even be useful for my non-Indian followers who don't know what to make ...
... of the massive amount of garbage news coverage that is being disseminated (poisoned?) into mainstream American news.
First regarding the Dalit Activists in America, it is a free country but the reality is there is no real issue of caste discrimination in America worth talking about (especially when compared to racial discrimination, which isn't high to begin with as well) ...
... there are two factors driving Dalit Activist angst in America. Especially for the second generation it is more about the angst and anger of learning your ancestors were from a historically discriminated against caste in India. They are just settling scores ...
... for social and political conflicts best left for litigation in the public square in the Old Country and not relevant to life in America as an Indian immigrant.
The second factor is a careerist element. In America Indian immigrants despite their dark skin color (well for most of us, some of us can be quite light skinned) are viewed as a successful group and aren't eligible for affirmative action. So the ignominy of being a
"Person of Color" but not being eligible for any medals in the Oppression Olympics like other PoCs are grates. One easy solution is to LARP as an oppressed minority and seek a niche as such in contrast to "privileged" Indian Americans.
So Dalit Indian Americans get to say "Hey I am really more like BiPOC than successful White-adjacent POC" line me right up next to the Native Americans and African Americans.
That careerism is all this is about not about justice or righting a wrong or anything like that. Like I said you are living your life in America today , not some rural village in India in 1950 ...
... Nobody is stopping you from entering a local village Temple, or drinking from a public water tap or preventing you from enrolling in school. That stuff by and large doesn't even happen in the India of today ...
... and in the rare cases that it would happen there are several laws that make it easy for a Dalit to lodge a complaint of caste discrimination and almost certainly win. Dalits wield a lot of political power in India as well as a fourth of the constituencies are set aside ...
... as districts from which only Dalit political candidates can contest an election. So let us get real about the state of play in India today let alone that ion America, where it is comical to claim that caste discrimination is a real issue.
Now getting to the woke Americans who are not Indian let me tell you that your fixation on identarian nonsense in a super diverse country is not "progressive" it is just primitive. You guys remind me of ...
... an episode I had in India as a student where I got in a conversation with some elderly guy in a carriage car kept for last minute travelers seeking cheap tickets ("unreserved general class" aka the bottom barrel of comfort with overcrowding taking to the extreme)
... basically it makes a Greyhound bus seem like the experience on an airline with a First Class ticket. Naturally these kind of carriages are patronized by the poor, often from a rural background.
This guy had a nice conversation with me and then was kind of dismayed he couldn't figure out my caste so he blurted out "Kauno Jaat hain aap?" ("What caste are you"). It felt like a jarring question for me even in India.
So to come to America and nearly 30 years later have to answer "what caste are you" from a woke here is just a really backward and primitive move. You are not a progressive hipster know-it-all, you are the equivalent of a country bumpkin from India with no education, congrats!
Normally I would not care at all what some idiot woke hipster thinks but this thing has been snowballing since last year and it is a very dangerous trend in a country which is very diverse and every group can name some grudge against another group.
When I was in India, our country had been at war with Pakistan and China. In America when I work with Pakistani or Chinese colleagues I don't get to bring those animosities to bear here. It is understood that those are ...
... conflicts from the Old Country and now we are in the process of becoming American. I mean where will all this nonsense stop?
We can pit Shias against Sunnis, Irish Catholics against Irish Protestants, Rwandan Hutu against Tutsi, Nigerian Yoruba against Igbo, Ghanian Ashanti againt Fantes.
So no I reject the attempt of woke hipsters of any tribal affiliation trying to make me answer about my caste or privilege or lack thereof. I refuse to be put into your identarian prison and will live as a free man. You can't peg me by asking me my caste.
You are all politically motivated nasty characters accumulating Bad Karma and you will lose in the end (as we Hindus say "Satyamev Jayate" or "The Truth Will Triumph) because America is an exceptional country and you won't be able to drag it down to your primitive level. THE END.

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More from @BurntOutCase

30 Nov
My friend Mahesh actually informs me that the @dalitdiva handle below is an actual co-founder of that anti-Hindu hate group that goes by the name of @EqualityLabs .
So the co-founder of this well-known American Dalit Activist grifter group can't even get basics of caste affiliation right for what is a fairly well known mercantile caste in India and just goes around saying "Brahmin this Brahmin that" like a learned Pavlovian reflex.
Thenmozhi Soundararajan is Dalit Diva:
racialequity.atlanticfellows.org/fellow/thenmoz…
Read 19 tweets
19 Nov
Hey @sfchronicle you say you deliver "the Bay Area’s best journalism every day". Well your article on the UC-Davis anti-caste discrimination policy by @Shwanika fell short of that standard.
It is like the Rolling Stone UVa Rape or Duke Lacrosse Rape case of reporting except much more shoddily written and less professional than those articles were believe it or not.
In this thread I outline numerous reasons why you have spread sensationalistic blood libel type anti-Hindu accusations.
Read 4 tweets
19 Nov
Just managed to read this incredibly hard to believe article in the SF Chronicle (it was behind a paywall but I used the Wayback Machine archive) by @Shwanika
Dear Shwanika Narayan all I can say is that you really need to learn how to be a seasoned reporter and not just be so gullible that you repeat incredible claims without doing any legwork to verify them.
Your article quotes "J. Kaur" a UC Davis senior of Indian descent as making the absolutely 100% take it to the bank fabricated quote that students are seeking same-caste room-mates.
Read 28 tweets
17 Nov
LOL all this reflects is comical California woke-max hothouse farce. Any Indian American knows that discrimination on the basis of caste is basically like reason # one billion gazillion on their list of worries.
For a supposed scholar of medieval India to cheer on policies that encourage stereotyping and bias against Indian American immigrants is well kind of stunning but par for the course for people who know this mediocre scholar of a third rate campus at Rutgers.
Truschke seems to have been smarting since served with a defamation lawsuit by HAF and since Rutgers backed away from its name being affiliated with the poisonous DGH conference. She has been kind of unhinged and incendiary since then.
Read 4 tweets
17 Nov
Open letter by HAF to Melinda Byerley @MJB_SF. While I have mixed feelings about the outreach to Melinda as I view her apologies as incomplete, she did actually address her second apology to Indian Americans. If she goes on the HAF Podcast and invites Indian Americans ...
... from the Tech Industry on her Podcast and has a genuine conversation about why we are concerned about attacks from the woke liberal wing of the Democratic Party and why her incendiary rhetoric was so dangerous and othering then it might be the best possible outcome.
Like HAF I too have an intense dislike for cancel culture and in fact even after her clearly frivolous first apology had invited Melinda to introspect and offered redemption. I am not in a position to offer her redemption personally because while her second apology is a positive
Read 6 tweets
16 Nov
Rep Scalise falsely claims in the beginning of his tweet that there are unlimited GCs for "migrants". First these GCs are not for migrants in these sense of those who jumped our Southern Border ...
These are GCs for skilled legal immigrants sponsored by their employer and their spouses and kids. These GCs will be awarded mostly to Indian American workers *already working here* in most cases for over a decade and whose GC petitions were approved long ago ...
... their GCs are just held up due to country of origin quotas. I thought Conservatives were supposed to be against quotas? The Rep might want to get a primer on the subject he is tweeting about from Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) since the Congressman from LA doesn't seem to understand ..
Read 5 tweets

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