This is a long post. Microsoft Word puts it at 4,542 words! Possibly the longest I have written. It explores a diversity of ideas and themes: a moniker called MERIT colleges to replace the inelegant IIT / IIM we use to earmark an elite college in India, the emergence of two parallel tracks of merit, a national consciousness that elite Indians share, and finally their privilege blindness. I hope you …
Caste
What’s in a first name? Your social status
I wrote this for The Times of India in July 2019, about how first names convey social status and even class capital amongst middle castes in India today. Link to the Times of India post.
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A few years ago, in a Facebook post that is now offline, poet and activist Meena Kandasamy encouraged upper caste Indians to drop their surnames. These surnames, she said, had considerable caste capital …
Say Hello to India’s Newest and Fastest-Growing Caste
Sometime around 2012 or ’13, my daughters stopped speaking in Konkani, our mother tongue. It isn’t entirely clear what provoked it; perhaps it was a teacher at their Mumbai school encouraging students to speak more English at home. Or perhaps it was something else. It doesn’t matter.
What did matter was that our home became an almost exclusively English-speaking household, with the occasional sporadic Konkani conversation. We were not alone. …