Dota writes:
Caste based occupations may lose relevance in our era, but not the institution of caste itself. Caste is the most fundamental facet of an individual’s identity as individualism is non existent in Indian culture. As long as the majority of Indians select for caste when mating, the institution will endure.
And as caste has so badly damaged the Indian’s empathy and consideration for his fellow man (taken for granted in the west) that even if caste were to vanish, it wouldn’t follow that Indians would wake up the next day and automatically become law abiding, civic minded, and compassionate people. Doesn’t work that way.
This is my feeling about caste. It is simply not going to go away. I can give you as an example the Punjabi Sikhs I know around here. Keep in mind that these are Sikhs, and Sikhs supposedly are not allowed to practice caste by their religion. Nevertheless, they become contaminated by Hindu society and now almost all of them practice it.
Only one man told me that he did not practice caste. All of the others, with maybe one exception, practiced caste. How could I tell? I told before, I can read minds. When I bring up caste, they do not say so outright, but I can tell by how they are talking about the subject that they practice caste, they are proud of it, and they are never going to give it up, ever. They act like they will defend til the end. A lot of them seem to know it’s wrong, too. They know it’s wrong, but they don’t care.
I haven’t asked around, but I assume that almost all Punjabis in the US are high caste. High caste Indians ferociously defend caste and act like they will fight to the death to keep it. As I have never met any lower caste Punjabis or even Hindus, I do not know how lower castes feel about caste, whether they defend it the way the high castes do.
Caste gives high caste people a built in lock on the good life. Power does not give up without a fight, as Lenin said. The people with the power, the high castes, will not unilaterally disarm and give up their power (their caste is their power) voluntarily.
The first people to renounce caste will be those who gain nothing from it, the low castes. The high castes will be the last to go.
Further, as Dota notes, millennia of caste has so damaged the Indian’s sense of empathy and the common good that even if caste subsides, the cruelty, callousness, lack of empathy and lack of communitarian feeling that callousness, radical individualism, survivalism, opportunism, amorality, corruption and a scofflaw attitude towards laws and rules (the glue that holds the society of men together) will continue apace.
