I missed this story about a lawsuit against Cisco for caste based discrimination until a friend who lives in Cupertino told me about it. L was asking me if I thought this had any merit and if this was even possible. There is a certain level of bizarreness to this whole business that causes disbelief. Our desi brethren have apparently transplanted prejudice that is thousands of years old to their country of domicile. Not at all hard to believe. I have not seen as much of an active caste system in play in companies I have worked or consulted with. In many of these places there are large contingents of desis in leadership. What I have seen in the high concentration of individuals from the same region of India with a shared language and culture - there is certainly some logic to that whether we like it or not.
So if say the boss is Punjabi it would be no surprise to find a large number of Punjabis in the ranks of the organization. They would be the kudzu choking out other varieties of desis - Tamils, Biharis, Marathis and so on. The organization, in this case, if hiring a desi would have a strong propensity for the Punjabi kind. The story is the same for just about every other variety of desi minus Bengalis. We are not an easy bunch to work with, generally insubordinate and difficult to drive towards any shared, common goals. We tend to be too opinionated and rate our own abilities a little too highly. So if the person in a leadership role is Bengali, they don't try to bring in other Bengalis to stir trouble in the ranks. So back to the Cisco story, it will be interesting to see what comes out of it and who ends up prevailing.
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