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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
The caste comes into the picture because no one from a lower caste would find my comment out of line. There are a considerable amount of lies being peddled about Indian Christians by 2 commentors in multiple comments with minor doses of Islamophobia thrown in.
Of all the things you found out of line is my comment calling out one of these lies.
If you are engaging in good faith, you would be replying to any of the several lies being trotted out in this thread, such as "caste system was created by British and Indian Christians via colonialism" instead of expressing hostility to somebody who is countering the lies - by trying to make some irrelevant meta point to distract from the core issue.
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.
> 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.
The point is that no one apart from brahmins amongst my colleagues and friends bring up their caste. And absolutely no one asks fhem about their caste. In my managers case he brought up his own skin color in the presence of several reports and segued into his caste.
And I have not asked anyone to change their name. All I did was refute the fake allegation against the Indian Christians patting the back of brahmins to figure out their caste. For anyone coming from India this is a hilariously absurd lie.
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.
> You know that, these political religions spread almost exclusively through violence and colonisation.
This is again pseudo history peddled by the RSS. Another instance of Hindu exceptionalism. This is completely counter to actual history and is a lie propagated by the Indian right wing. You should talk to an actual historian instead of relying on WhatsApp forwards by RSS.
> You are perhaps engaging in the same kind of hate the Nazis spread of the jews.
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.