Today has been a rather usual day - just like the countless others that have preceded it. I am unsure which is better - a rigidly unwavering life like mine or a life that is uncertain and unknown. I once compared my life to a game of sudoku - every number has to be in its rightful place, for the player to win the game. Now that doesn't mean that my life is perfect, it just means that lately it has become extremely mechanical and unfortunately follows a - what some might call - "boring" logic. Enough of this diatribe about my life. This is not why I began writing this post - not to denounce the monotony of it, but to write about something that has been bothering me lately.
This all started when I got a message to join a K community on my Orkut page. Curious I checked out the link and found a member introduction thread. To my dismay, I found that most members had explicitly mentioned their "caste." Now I know this is NOT indicative of a larger social phenomena, and it would be a folly to generalize from this one instance, the very fact that there were a bunch of 20 somethings proudly displaying their castes as if it were a scholastic achievement disconcerted me. Even more concerning was the fact that this is not just a single community - a single community search for the word brahmin returned 517 hits! Now should this bother me, given that everything in India is steeped within the caste system - especially electoral and distributive politics? Some might think not.
Growing up in a family that has deliberately avoided any connection to caste, had made me indifferent to it. Living in a fool's paradise for the past 25 years, I had come to believe that people my age - definitely those from urban areas and educated in the so-called public schooling system of the country - would reject caste as a historical sociological artifact. Unfortunately my recent experiences on Orkut and elsewhere have dispelled this belief. Caste is as alive in India today as it was in my grandmother's generation, perhaps in an even more sinister and insidious manner. Cases in point: the university reservation issue and the recent gujjar standoff in Rajasthan.
It is perhaps not a heroic assumption to make that the majority of Indian members of Orkut are of the age group 18-30 (This age group accounts for around 70 % of the demographic of the site, while members from India account for arouond 15% of the total Orkut membership. See http://www.orkut.com/MembersAll.aspx) and presumably from urban and suburban areas (a 2007 Internet usage study by an online research firm JuxtConsult states that there are about 21.4 millions urban online users. It however does not give any figures on what percentage this is of all Internet users in the country - I am assuming it is pretty high.). The question I have here (and I do not claim to have an answer to) is that are networking sites like Orkut helping reinforce identities that might have been eroding as development is picking up pace in the country or are these identities so deeply entrenched in the social and cultural psyche of the Indian youth that such online communities are merely a reflection of what is out there in reality? Both scenarios are extremely worrying. More on that in my next post.
This all started when I got a message to join a K community on my Orkut page. Curious I checked out the link and found a member introduction thread. To my dismay, I found that most members had explicitly mentioned their "caste." Now I know this is NOT indicative of a larger social phenomena, and it would be a folly to generalize from this one instance, the very fact that there were a bunch of 20 somethings proudly displaying their castes as if it were a scholastic achievement disconcerted me. Even more concerning was the fact that this is not just a single community - a single community search for the word brahmin returned 517 hits! Now should this bother me, given that everything in India is steeped within the caste system - especially electoral and distributive politics? Some might think not.
Growing up in a family that has deliberately avoided any connection to caste, had made me indifferent to it. Living in a fool's paradise for the past 25 years, I had come to believe that people my age - definitely those from urban areas and educated in the so-called public schooling system of the country - would reject caste as a historical sociological artifact. Unfortunately my recent experiences on Orkut and elsewhere have dispelled this belief. Caste is as alive in India today as it was in my grandmother's generation, perhaps in an even more sinister and insidious manner. Cases in point: the university reservation issue and the recent gujjar standoff in Rajasthan.
It is perhaps not a heroic assumption to make that the majority of Indian members of Orkut are of the age group 18-30 (This age group accounts for around 70 % of the demographic of the site, while members from India account for arouond 15% of the total Orkut membership. See http://www.orkut.com/MembersAll.aspx) and presumably from urban and suburban areas (a 2007 Internet usage study by an online research firm JuxtConsult states that there are about 21.4 millions urban online users. It however does not give any figures on what percentage this is of all Internet users in the country - I am assuming it is pretty high.). The question I have here (and I do not claim to have an answer to) is that are networking sites like Orkut helping reinforce identities that might have been eroding as development is picking up pace in the country or are these identities so deeply entrenched in the social and cultural psyche of the Indian youth that such online communities are merely a reflection of what is out there in reality? Both scenarios are extremely worrying. More on that in my next post.
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