[mama123]

Historically peoples names included their village name, son of x and their caste/jaati - which indicated their profession or specialization. That meant getting new business when introducing themselves in the neighboring village.

This is true with European names too (masson, taylor, carpenter, miller ....), and has the exact same origin.

However, today due to the politicization first by the colonialists and the church, and now mostly by a leftist-church nexus it has become politically incorrect if it feels like they have an agenda behind it.

Strangely at least among the current generation, I have experienced probing questions about my diet as well as probing hands (pretending to be a friendly shove or pat) not from Hindus but from Christians.

In my understanding it is a way for them to ensure that I am not an "evil Brahmin" and can be trusted enough to part take in what every gossip they have and an assumption I would have to submissively accept their "righteousness".

[random314]

This has to the most contrived and ridiculous comment I have seen. Virtually all Brahmins proudly advertise their caste and their caste is also obvious from their last name. There is literally no need to pat their backs.

[mama123]

Not everyone has to be a David or John or a Mohamed or Abdulla.

India is a diverse country with many subcultures, each with their own unique traditions dating back many thousands of years.

Why should everyone loose their unique identity?

Why should people not be proud of their identity or uniqueness?

A lot of privileges that the "Brahmins" have can be mostly attributed to the fact that they were not competing with the colonial interests like business and were used as native informants and peons & clerks.

This gave them a head start compared to the rest of the population who were reduced to penury and in many case ended up as substitutes for black slavery in the form of bonded labourers.

So in using the caste card people are covering up the devastating effects of colonisation.

The privileges held by the colonising classes and collaborators, esp. Christians as they gobbled up enormous amounts of state resources, temple lands in the form colonial grants and 99 year lease to the church. Yet it is politically incorrect to point out these privileges.

[diebeforei485]

> Virtually all Brahmins proudly advertise their caste

Nonsense.

> and their caste is also obvious from their last name

What exactly do you suggest be done about this?

[random314]

I am calling you out for your fake story of Christians trying to figure out who is a brahmin by patting their backs. It is completely unnecessary as you can tell who is a brahmin from the last name. You just made up a fake story to play victim and transfer blame to Christians here and in several other comments.

It is a well known fact that the primary form of caste discrimination occurs against lower castes by upper castes. Your attempts at subterfuge are futile.

[saagarjha]

Hacker News is not a place for you to call people out for their "fake" stories, it's a place where you do your best to take comments in good faith. People have different experiences than you do, and yes, sometimes people will lie online. But that's no reason to immediately jump to accusations, and especially not here.

[random314]

The fact that you responded to me and not to any of mama123 comments - a textbook case of what urban casteism looks like - tells me a lot about what an upper caste person's definition of good faith and bad faith is.

[saagarjha]

I picked the bottom of the thread as I skimmed by, which was capped by a clearly egregious comment. That doesn’t mean there weren’t others that were also bad. No idea why you think caste comes into the picture at all?

[diebeforei485]

I think you are directing your moral outrage at the wrong person.

[random314]

I confused you with the OP. Unfortunately, I cannot edit my comment. Apologies for that.

Going back to the original comment- I was making it clear that nobody needs to pat someone on the back to figure out if they are brahmins - you can tell from the last names.

I dont really know the castes of my friends except Brahmins, because they keep informing me.

1. Tamil brahmins - any domestic post on Facebook has a reference to the "TamBram" community.

2. My manager informed me once that the reason he was light skinned while south Indian was because his ancestors were north Indian brahmins who moved to the south to work as priests. I never asked him about his skin color. He brought it up himself.

3. One of my peers - a maharashtrian brahmin explained to me how his particular brahmin subcaste was even superior to other brahmins because of some XYZ reason. I didn't know he was a Brahmin before this.

There are several more instances. Of course, there must be brahmins amongst my friends where I don't know about their caste. But the only friends who have brought up their caste voluntarily were brahmins.

[diebeforei485]

> Of course, there must be brahmins amongst my friends where I don't know about their caste. But the only friends who have brought up their caste voluntarily were brahmins.

Yes, this is called selection bias. In what context did your friends talk about their caste?

I'm still not sure what you suggest about people's last names. This is not unique, it's also true for the last names of all sorts of people who have faced discrimination or discriminated against others - "white" people can be eg. Jewish, Irish, Italian, Anglo, German etc and there are names common to each of those groups.

Asking people to change their names is quite a heavy lift and impractical - I know some parts of India have historically made it easy for people to drop their last names and move to a system similar to Iceland where each generation uses the their parents' names as their last name.

[mama123]

When people refer to themselves as TamBram, they are just referring to their heritage.

If you are offend by them carrying their tradition or culture that they have inherited for 100s of generation.

How would you then think of Indians named John or Mohamed? You know that, these political religions spread almost exclusively through violence and colonisation.

India is a strange country where it is ok to engage in hate against indigenous people/culture, yet political incorrect to even speak of the violent history of Christianity or Islam.

You are perhaps engaging in the same kind of hate the Nazis spread of the jews.