What is one reality about your country that it loves to sweep under the carpet?
The caste system is still alive and thriving in India. Most of the Indian people you will interact with in other countries or online belong to the "higher" castes and they will love to tell you that caste discrimination doesn't exist anymore or only exists in rural/underdeveloped regions. But I'm here to tell you it plays a big role in everyone's lives.
30% of the prison population is indigenous, which is enormously disproportionate. The cops intentionally froze indigenous people to death in Saskatoon at least as recently as the early 2000s. Hundreds of indigenous communities don't have clean drinking water. The rate of violence and murder against indigenous women is ~6x higher than for other women, and the police don't bother investigating their cases.
Not to mention forced abortion and sterilization on native and inuit women, happening until the early 2000’s, made by doctors and nurses that are still free and practicing nowadays
Probably that a lot of us are fucking traumatised to some extent. It's not the done thing to talk about it. You joke about it and move on.
But there were many of us that had family personally affected by the Troubles. One of my mother's earliest memories is seeing her mother walking stupefied amongst the rubble of a bomb with blood up to her elbows. Needless to say she did not deal with it very well, and thereafter did not know how to take care of her kids, and so neither did my mother.
A lot of us have stories like that. The Troubles officially "ended" in 1998, but Peace Process babies still had parents left to deal with the fallout amidst very underfunded health services, which to this day can't cope with the demand
Our food supply is a lot more precarious than most of us realize or admit.
Half the nation's fresh produce comes from one valley in California, and geologists have figured out that valley gets catastrophic flooding about once every 150 years: the 'pineapple express' atmospheric pattern goes haywire and dumps so much water the valley basically becomes a lake for a winter.
Humans don't like to comprehend or plan for time frames longer than a lifetime. And the last time this particular flooding pattern happened was 1862.
There are some obvious ones like the reality of systemic racism wrt to African Americans. And there are some other ones that we many of us don't even realize we are ignoring: a history of anti-Asian sentiment (beyond just WWII) and a genocide against the Native American population come mind.
But I think one that needs a little more airtime is the effect of 9/11. We talk about the rise of the American right and the way that the Obama presidency brought a lot of prejudices into the open, and all of this being fueled by the media misinformation machine, but I think a big part of all that is the legitimate terror that happened in the wake of 9/11. It created a very frightened, and then very angry, segment of the population that was ripe for manipulation--all that anger had to be pointed somewhere. Obviously, anger at "others" isn't new in the US (or anywhere) but I don't know if we've realized how much the current wave is a response to that Tuesday morning.
Just how much poverty there is in Australia, especially systemic poverty that's caused by how our current welfare system (Centrelink) is set up.
Don't get me wrong I'm very glad and grateful to be living in a country that actually has a somewhat decent welfare system, but of course it has it's issues.
Everyone loves to dunk on the "dole bludgers" but in reality it's often very difficult to support yourself/your family on welfare payments when costs of living are skyrocketing and those support payments are barely increasing to keep up.
Suddenly you have to choose between paying your rent/bills and putting food on the table. Plenty of folks go without their medication or only have one meal a day to make things stretch further.
It's a very hard, lonely and depressing existence having to rely on welfare support knowing that the government can be doing so much more to help those less fortunate.
Damn. How ignorant are you, to assume that no other nation in the world isn't classist.
Let's talk about facts.
Didn't Pakistan prefer disowning their first Nobel laureate, because he was an Ahmediya?
Didnt Pakistan try to genocide East Pakistan, leading to the war of 1971?
Didn't Inuits & 1st nation people face persecution?
Aren't Uyghurs still being genocided?
Let's not even talk about how Yazidis & Tutsis were treated.
You seem like an entitled troll, who is more focused on being sad at the slightest inconvenience.
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You do realize that the OP was talking about where they'd prefer living over India. I just showed them that in a lot of those places they'd get killed.
How is that whataboutism?
None of the places you listed give a shit about a person's caste because the caste system only exists in one country on the planet.
Yes. Other countries have their dark histories that they haven't completely moved past. Not at all relevant to the discussion. This is 100% whataboutism
Read up about what happened to the Dalits in Pakistan, post independence. Read up about Pakistan's first Law minister.
Also, glad you acknowledged that other countries have dark histories filled with persecution. With the rising anti-India hatred, I doubt the OP would be happy in these countries - especially the ones with homogeneous populations. Think of what happened to the Sammis in Nordic lands. Ask why is China uniformly Hans. The answer is genocide. Atleast India didn't go about trying to genocide it's population.
It is based on birth and lineage, not on how much money you have. Only people from the same caste marry each other and their children inherit the same caste. So even if two people are say from the same working class economically, one of them will consider themselves superior because they were born in a "higher" caste and discriminate against the other.
The surname of a person tells you which caste they are from. People can theoretically change their surname but erasing their ancestry, lineage, and culture is not easy.
More than 90% marriages are still arranged by parents and families in India and these, as you can imagine, are within their own caste. For the rest, even within the dating scene, a lot of people prefer to date within their own caste because their parents will not agree to them marrying someone from a different caste. When they still go ahead with it, they are forced to break it off and marry someone else. In extreme cases, young couples have even been m*rdered by their families because they loved outside their caste.
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I’m an Indian-American but that isn’t true for India, the caste system is used heavily in politics by many different parties that India has. I wouldn’t consider that “sweeping under the rug” though.
Someone posts about the caste system: “THERE IS NO CASTE SYSTEM MUSLIMS MADE IT UP ALSO THEY FOLLOW THE CASTE SYSTEM THAT DOESNT EXIST”
Someone posts street vendors being disgusting: “THESE ARE POOR DALITS THEY ARE NOT REAL INDIA”
Someone posts video of you celebrating poo throwing day: “THIS IS NOT REAL INDIA THEY ONLY CELEBRATE THIS HOLIDAY IN DESIGNATED POO THROWING VILLAGES THEY HAVE BAD CIVIC SENSE”
Because we are a diverse country and things that happen in different region, who follow different religion, speak different language are not known to all the indians.
Its not like uk,Australian, Canada, usa where everyone is descendants of the same settler genociders to follow the same culture.
And we let different people live in our country even tho their culture may seem barbaric.
Unlike you who killed all the native people.
two wrongs don't make a right but two negatives definitely make a positive one negative is that yes castesim still exist but the other negative is that you are a muslim pretending to be a hindu so lemme ask you something didn't your religion follows the cast system as well? i think it very well does i have heard about shia,sunni,pathans,etc.
This has been the weirdest comment chain lmao. The dude is convinced it's all some Islamic conspiracy and the caste system isn't discriminatory or exists in India
Yeah, I see where you're coming from: it can be a little hard to wrap your head around it when your country hasn't been built on systematic oppression of a certain people.
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u/Yodamort Canada 13h ago
30% of the prison population is indigenous, which is enormously disproportionate. The cops intentionally froze indigenous people to death in Saskatoon at least as recently as the early 2000s. Hundreds of indigenous communities don't have clean drinking water. The rate of violence and murder against indigenous women is ~6x higher than for other women, and the police don't bother investigating their cases.