5 ms·

I'm not Indian American my origins are Caribbean but I have some Indian origins and can offer a few answers from my experience. > Is this something that comes

by yardie 4y ago

I'm not Indian American my origins are Caribbean but I have some Indian origins and can offer a few answers from my experience. > Is this something that comes up in conversation among Indians? It starts casually with "where are you from?" and the questions get more invasive. > Do names tend to correlate to you caste? In India, yes it does family name is derived from caste. I had some friends adopt English names to get from under their caste names. So quite a few Johnsons, Smiths, Matthews, Pauls out there.

__MatrixMan__ 4y ago
> It starts casually with "where are you from?" and the questions get more invasive. Whenever I mention to a team member that I was interviewing somebody for a position on our team, they always ask: "are they in India?" I had never really wondered why before.
paxys 4y ago
> I had some friends adopt English names to get from under their caste names. So quite a few Johnsons, Smiths, Matthews, Pauls out there. There is an interesting history behind this. When Christian missionaries first arrived in India to spread their religion (in the late 1700s/1800s) they were initially unable to make much progress, but then found success among lower caste Indians by promising them a life of equality. So the vast majority of Christian converts in India are from these castes.
- yardie 4y ago
  LOL. The first Indian American I met with an English surname I assumed was adopted. Then I met another with the same surname and assumed they were related.
  - AareyBaba 4y ago
    India also has a minority population of Anglo-Indians with British surnames. Williams, Jones, Norton, Barnes, Peters, O'Brien are names you can find in Mumbai and Kolkata and Chennai. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Indian_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Indian_people
- hef19898 4y ago
  If I remember correctly, Sikhs are standing outside the caste system as well.
  - statguy 4y ago
    In principle yes, but in practice no: https://theprint.in/theprint-essential/who-are-dalit-sikhs-new-punjab-cm-channis-caste-is-just-one-among-a-complex-hierarchy/736821/ https://theprint.in/theprint-essential/who-are-dalit-sikhs-n...
    - hef19898 4y ago
      And again I learned something... Perceived elitism seems to be universal, unfortunately.
- muro 4y ago
  Christian missionaries arrived in India much, much earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Thomas_Christians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Thomas_Christians
  - HideousKojima 4y ago
    In fact Saint Thomas (as in literally Doubting Thomas the apostle in the New Testament) was supposedly martyred in India, according to tradition at least.
- AareyBaba 4y ago
  The history was more complex. There are Syrian Christians (600AD), Catholics (1500), Anglican Protestants (1800) and more recently, evangelical Christians. Each group is linguistically and culturally distinct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_India Mangalorean Catholics for instance are mostly Saraswat Brahmins who converted around 1700s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangalorean_Catholics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangalorean_Catholics
kevinmchugh 4y ago
NB: "where are you from?" is a question your HR training should already explicitly tell people not to ask candidates. I'm not in HR or management and I still make sure to mention it to new hires before doing my first interview alongside them. National origin is a protected class. Even within the US , "where are you from?" can proxy for a protected class. Race, mostly, or possibly religion. It's also a question that's very easy to ask in good faith while making small talk, which makes it noticeably dangerous.
- Gorbzel 4y ago
  Ugh, this is a classic example of skewed logic going way too far before the underlying truth can catch up. I am in tech management (also a recovering attorney) who routinely conducts interviews, and it is perfectly acceptable to ask where someone is from in a professional setting. The unacceptable part, as OP at least hints at, is using the response as a proxy for some other verboten criteria or perhaps to kickoff an overly intrusive line of questioning. These behaviors are odious on their own and why HR should be explicit in training against antipatterns, not spreading meaningless FUD which miss the point and permit bad habits to foster elsewhere. It’s really inane that modern software recruiting claims to focus on getting a proper picture of the whole candidate , yet untrained interviewers counterfeit the whole endeavor thinking they’re politically correct because they’re afraid to ask anything but the same broken whiteboard questions.
  - thaeli 4y ago
    If you don't collect the data in the first place, you can't misuse it - and it's much easier to prove that you didn't misuse it, because all you have to show is that you never had the dangerous data in the first place. This is the same advice we give about handling PII in applications.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sreevisakh 4y ago
> In India, yes it does family name is derived from caste. That is not always correct (but is true in most cases). There are caste-neutral names in India - especially Tamil Nadu. But that itself is a hint about the person's caste, since it is adopted mostly by people of the unprivileged caste.

by yardie 4y ago

__MatrixMan__ 4y ago

> It starts casually with "where are you from?" and the questions get more invasive. Whenever I mention to a team member that I was interviewing somebody for a position on our team, they always ask: "are they in India?" I had never really wondered why before.

paxys 4y ago

> I had some friends adopt English names to get from under their caste names. So quite a few Johnsons, Smiths, Matthews, Pauls out there. There is an interesting history behind this. When Christian missionaries first arrived in India to spread their religion (in the late 1700s/1800s) they were initially unable to make much progress, but then found success among lower caste Indians by promising them a life of equality. So the vast majority of Christian converts in India are from these castes.

yardie 4y ago
LOL. The first Indian American I met with an English surname I assumed was adopted. Then I met another with the same surname and assumed they were related.
- AareyBaba 4y ago
  India also has a minority population of Anglo-Indians with British surnames. Williams, Jones, Norton, Barnes, Peters, O'Brien are names you can find in Mumbai and Kolkata and Chennai. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Indian_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Indian_people
hef19898 4y ago
If I remember correctly, Sikhs are standing outside the caste system as well.
- statguy 4y ago
  In principle yes, but in practice no: https://theprint.in/theprint-essential/who-are-dalit-sikhs-new-punjab-cm-channis-caste-is-just-one-among-a-complex-hierarchy/736821/ https://theprint.in/theprint-essential/who-are-dalit-sikhs-n...
  - hef19898 4y ago
    And again I learned something... Perceived elitism seems to be universal, unfortunately.
muro 4y ago
Christian missionaries arrived in India much, much earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Thomas_Christians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Thomas_Christians
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  In fact Saint Thomas (as in literally Doubting Thomas the apostle in the New Testament) was supposedly martyred in India, according to tradition at least.
AareyBaba 4y ago
The history was more complex. There are Syrian Christians (600AD), Catholics (1500), Anglican Protestants (1800) and more recently, evangelical Christians. Each group is linguistically and culturally distinct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_India Mangalorean Catholics for instance are mostly Saraswat Brahmins who converted around 1700s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangalorean_Catholics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangalorean_Catholics

kevinmchugh 4y ago

NB: "where are you from?" is a question your HR training should already explicitly tell people not to ask candidates. I'm not in HR or management and I still make sure to mention it to new hires before doing my first interview alongside them. National origin is a protected class. Even within the US , "where are you from?" can proxy for a protected class. Race, mostly, or possibly religion. It's also a question that's very easy to ask in good faith while making small talk, which makes it noticeably dangerous.

Gorbzel 4y ago
Ugh, this is a classic example of skewed logic going way too far before the underlying truth can catch up. I am in tech management (also a recovering attorney) who routinely conducts interviews, and it is perfectly acceptable to ask where someone is from in a professional setting. The unacceptable part, as OP at least hints at, is using the response as a proxy for some other verboten criteria or perhaps to kickoff an overly intrusive line of questioning. These behaviors are odious on their own and why HR should be explicit in training against antipatterns, not spreading meaningless FUD which miss the point and permit bad habits to foster elsewhere. It’s really inane that modern software recruiting claims to focus on getting a proper picture of the whole candidate , yet untrained interviewers counterfeit the whole endeavor thinking they’re politically correct because they’re afraid to ask anything but the same broken whiteboard questions.
- thaeli 4y ago
  If you don't collect the data in the first place, you can't misuse it - and it's much easier to prove that you didn't misuse it, because all you have to show is that you never had the dangerous data in the first place. This is the same advice we give about handling PII in applications.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

sreevisakh 4y ago

> In India, yes it does family name is derived from caste. That is not always correct (but is true in most cases). There are caste-neutral names in India - especially Tamil Nadu. But that itself is a hint about the person's caste, since it is adopted mostly by people of the unprivileged caste.