Skip to main content

Old Wars

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. 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques
6 comments
Read more