Comment by imheretolearn

I am an Indian and I genuinely don't know exactly where I stand in the cast hierarchy. In India it was pretty common for people to ask me my caste. However, what struck me the most was, that during my Master's in the US, other Indians who I was attending university with, would ask me the same question. When I would tell them that I genuinely don't know the answer, they would mock and imperceptibly laugh at me. I felt like an outcast because this seemed to be a common question shared by all the regional Indian groups(yes, mostly people from the same region will hang out with each other and refrain from hanging out with people from other regions). I was raised in a metropolitan Indian city where this isn't an issue and I had not met many Indians from other parts of India. So this was a shocker to me. Having not faced discrimination in India, I faced discrimination in an entirely different country, just because I was unaware of my "social status". Wow!