prateekshac

This is ofcourse just my take. But it is some take, so go ahead and take a look.
So here is the thing. In my world, there are many forms of caste-ism. Traditional caste-ism like Brahmins and Kshatriyas in Hindus, catholics and protestants in Christians etc. This is the accepted definition of caste-ism. But there are hundreds of examples even outside of this which in my world is still Caste-ism.
I’ll name a few.
Music fanboy groups. All music lovers are divided into very distinct groups. There are the metalheads, the boyband fans, the retro fans, the classical fans and so on and so forth.
Then there are the technology fanboy groups. The main groups here are the open source guys and the not so open source guys.
There are also fanboy groups in hmm say movie watchers. Some examples include the ‘i love any form of senti mush’ group, to the ‘i love bollywood masala and fantasy’ group, to the ‘quentin tarantino type i love only critically acclaimed movies’ group to the ‘i love mindless action’ group.
I think you get my drift by now.
Now why do I say all of these are castes?
Caste-ism according to me; is a form of groupism where each group is identified by a set of qualities, the primary one being the identifying quality that puts you in the group in the first place ( like you liking metal or you liking bollywood movies or you being born to a brahmin family). However this is accompanied by a set of other qualities deeply associated with each group as a result of the aggregation of all qualities displayed by the group members from times immemorial. This can include good and bad qualities, and this set of qualities that you associate with a particular caste differs from person to person. (Note: in this post I use the word group and caste interchangeably just to reduce monotony)
I for example associate the qualities ‘passionate’,'interesting’ and ‘arrogant’ with the group ‘metalheads’ . Ive met thousands and am married to one so its not like I have anything against them. Its just that over time I have gotten myself to associate the above mentioned set of qualities with a metalhead. You on the otherhand might associate a completely different set of qualities with the same group.

Lets move on to a more controversial caste ‘Brahminism’. I associate the following qualities to ‘Brahminism’.. ‘well educated’,'arrogant’,'lucky’,'vegetarian’,'orthodox’ and ‘religious’ (lucky being less of a quality and more of just a result of being in the right place at the right time in the wrong system) . I was born to a Brahmin family, so once again I do not have anything against them.

So what I mean by all this is that to me this entire world is filled with lots of groups of people(called castes in a social context) identified in my mind by certain traits. I have to point out here that in my mind, just by possessing the identifying quality one need not necessarily belong to a particular group. However once someone chooses to belong to a particular group, they will invariably always most definitely be assigned all the qualities of that group by me, whether they like it or not. For eg: I was born a Brahmin like I mentioned, but I voluntarily choose not to belong to that group because even though I am well educated, lucky and may be arrogant too :-), I am neither orthodox nor religious.

So hence my theory states the following:
One is highly likely to identify themselves as belonging to a particular group/caste if
a) they possess the identifying quality AND
a) they feel they possess all or most of the qualities ‘they think’ are associated with that group(other than the identifying quality) AND
b) the qualities they don’t possess are qualities they wish to possess or wish for others to believe that they possess AND
c) the group of qualities they possess and associate with the group do not comprise of a ‘negative quality’ that they would not wish others to think that they possess.

If you are still with me, don’t forget to leave a comment. :-)
Oh going back to the title, I personally dislike caste-ism primarily because I do not like to be generalized in any manner, whether it be good or bad.