How Indian Americans Came to Love the Spelling Bee

Since 2008, a South Asian American child has been named a champion at every Scripps National Spelling Bee.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/style/spelling-bee-south-asian-a...

In 2016 and 2017, Indians accounted for almost 75 percent of all H-1B visa holders in the United States. This “changed the character of the community, in terms of skewing it more professional and more highly educated,” Dr. Mishra said.

Parents were looking for hobbies for their children that prioritized “all kinds of educational attainment,” said Dr. Shankar. Spelling as an extracurricular activity soon began to spread by word of mouth. “They tell their broader ethnic community about it, and they bring each other to these South Asian spelling games, which are really accessible and held in areas where there’s a large concentration of South Asian Americans,” she said.

The hobby is also passed down — within families — to younger siblings and cousins. (“If the older sibling did it, the younger one often follows,” said Dr. Shankar.) That was the case for the 2016 Scripps champion, Nihar Janga, 16, whose passion for spelling was born out of a sibling rivalry going back to age 5. Watching his mother quiz his older sister, Navya, as she was preparing for the bee, Nihar started chiming in, reciting spellings even before Navya could finish.

“I looked up to the fact that my sister was participating in something like this, but I also wanted to be better at it. Eventually, it grew into my own love for spelling and everything it’s taught me,” Nihar said.

An Engine for Success
Navya and Nihar’s family, who live in Austin, Texas, first came across spelling bees through Navya’s bharatanatyam (an Indian classical dance) teacher, who was involved with the nonprofit North South Foundation.

The foundation has over 90 chapters, hosts regional and national educational contests in a variety of subject areas, and raises money through these events for disadvantaged students in India. A spelling bee is among the contests run by the organization, and it’s common for top contenders to continue on to Scripps.

Pew: Religion and Education Around the World
Large gaps in education levels persist, but all faiths are making gains – particularly among women

Hindus in India, who make up a large majority of the country’s population (and more than 90% of the world’s Hindus), have relatively low levels of educational attainment – a nationwide average of 5.5 years of schooling. While they are more highly educated than Muslims in India (14% of the country’s population), they lag behind Christians (2.5% of India’s population). By contrast, fully 87% of Hindus living in North America hold post-secondary degrees – a higher share than any other major religious group in the region.

https://www.pewforum.org/2016/12/13/religion-and-education-around-t...

India’s Muslims: An Increasingly Marginalized Population
India’s Muslim communities have faced decades of discrimination, which experts say has worsened under the Hindu nationalist BJP’s government.

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/india-muslims-marginalized-populat...

Summary
Some two hundred million Muslims live in India, making up the predominantly Hindu country’s largest minority group.

For decades, Muslim communities have faced discrimination in employment and education and encountered barriers to achieving wealth and political power. They are disproportionately the victims of communal violence.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the ruling party have moved to limit Muslims’ rights, particularly through the Citizenship Amendment Act, which allows fast-tracked citizenship for non-Muslim migrants from nearby countries.

“The longer Hindu nationalists are in power, the greater the change will be to Muslims’ status and the harder it will be to reverse such changes,” says Ashutosh Varshney, an expert on Indian intercommunal conflict at Brown University.

Pakistani doctors recognize the heroes of pandemic among them | ksdk.com

https://www.ksdk.com/article/news/health/pakistani-physicians-of-st...

T. LOUIS COUNTY, Mo. — The Association of Physicians of Pakistani Descent of North America recognized healthcare workers for being on the front lines during the ongoing pandemic.

"I think there's strength in numbers," said Dr. Tariq Alam, St. Louis Chapter President of APPNA. "One physician alone can't win this fight. We all have to pour in our ideas. Get the best from everyone and get the best solution for our region."


For the 250-plus members, collaborating across healthcare networks in our region was easy, Dr. Alam said. He also says it brought doctors closer to the community.

"We have many who have language barriers, or economic barriers," Dr. Alam said. "Basically being able to reach out to them, I think that is one of our highlights."

Member and St. Louis County Health Director Dr. Faisal Khan said there's not enough praise to go around.


"The only reason we aren't looking at a 3 million or 4 million death count is because of the selfless work and sacrifice of healthcare providers across the country," Dr. Khan said. "We owe them everything."

Khan said the work isn't done yet.

"I am very happy that nearly 35% in the St. Louis region is vaccinated," Dr. Khan said. "I am equally worried that 65% of us are not. We are not out of this yet."

Khan is happy that county leaders support strong health guidelines until we cross the finish line. He said it's going to take more community action before things return to normal.

"It depends entirely on how the virus behaves, on the number of people getting vaccinated and the spread of disease in smaller communities in high-risk groups," Khan said.

Until then, doctors say mask up and get the vaccine or encourage others to do so.

Zaila Avant-garde: #African-#American Teenager makes history at #US #spellingbee. it’s the first time since 2008 that at least one champion or co-champion of the Scripps National Spelling Bee is not of #SouthAsian descent. #Indian-#American - BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57773502


A teenage basketball prodigy has become the first African American to win the US Scripps National Spelling Bee.

Zaila Avant-garde, a 14-year-old from New Orleans, Louisiana, cruised to victory with the word "murraya", a type of tropical tree.

To get to that point she had to spell out "querimonious" and "solidungulate".

Despite practising for up to seven hours a day, she describes spelling as a side hobby - Zaila's main focus is on becoming a basketball pro.

She already holds three world records for dribbling multiple balls at once, and has appeared in an advertisement with the NBA megastar Stephen Curry.

Zaila saw off a field of 11 finalists on Thursday to win the title and bagged a first-place prize of $50,000 (£36,000) at the event in Orlando, Florida.

In the final round, she beat 12-year-old Chaitra Thummala of Frisco, Texas.

It was the first time since 2008 that at least one champion or co-champion of the Scripps National Spelling Bee was not of South Asian descent, the Associated Press news agency reports.

Why do Indian-Americans win spelling bee contests?
Zaila had earlier in the evening hesitated over the word nepeta, a herbal mint, but managed to spell it correctly.

"For spelling, I usually try to do about 13,000 words [per day], and that usually takes about seven hours or so," the home-schooled teen told New Orleans paper the Times-Picayune.

"We don't let it go way too overboard, of course. I've got school and basketball to do."

Zaila is the second black girl to win the tournament - Jody-Anne Maxwell, of Jamaica, was crowned champion in 1998 at the age of 12.

In 2019, eight children came joint-first for the first time in the spelling bee's history. The tournament was cancelled last year because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Virgin Galactic's Sirisha Bandla, an #Indian-#American woman aeronautical engineer, wants more women, people of color in space. Historically, most astronauts have been white, male, and military. #VirginGalactic #SpaceTourism #Branson #Unity22 https://www.newsweek.com/virgin-galactic-sirisha-bandla-women-peopl...

The first time non-white and women astronauts were selected by NASA was in 1978 as the agency looked to add candidates with a wide variety of backgrounds for its then-upcoming Space Shuttle program.



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Sirisha Bandla is one of five people joining billionaire Richard Branson on board a Virgin Galactic flight to space on Sunday.

The 34-year-old scientist is Virgin Galactic's vice president of government affairs and research, and will be handling a University of Florida research project onboard.

When V.S.S. Unity reaches its maximum 55-miles up, Bandla will become only the second India-born woman and third person of Indian descent to leave Earth's atmosphere. Although there is some debate about the point at which the planet ends and space begins.

The scientist has spoken out about a lack of diversity in the space industries—and space itself—in the months leading up to the flight.

"Women and people of color you don't often see...I don't often see students that look like myself in this industry just yet," Bandla said in a September 2020 interview with Matthew Isakowitz Fellowship, a program helping college students into the commercial spaceflight industry.


Historically, most astronauts have been white, male, and military.

Analysis of NASA's intake from 1959 to 2017 by National Geographic, however, has shown how things are changing at the space agency. It did not look at the emerging private space industry, of which Virgin Galactic is a part.

#Dalit Scientists Face Barriers in #India's Top #Science Institutes. About 17% of India’s population, Dalits who are officially referred to as “Scheduled Castes” in government records. #caste #Apartheid #Hindutva #Modi #Brahmin https://undark.org/2021/07/26/dalit-scientists-face-barriers-in-ind... via @undarkmag

https://twitter.com/haqsmusings/status/1419710594815434757?s=20

Interviews with young Dalit scientists, along with a growing body of academic work, detail the obstacles Dalits still face on their path through scientific training. Those barriers begin early: Just getting into science and engineering education has been a challenging and uncommon choice for Dalit students in the first place, according to Wankhede, the educational sociologist. “Science education is very expensive. Highly inaccessible,” he said. Students pay higher tuition rates for science courses than in other areas, because they are required to take additional classes to do experiments. And to keep up with their coursework, science students often pay for instruction in pricey private academies called coaching institutes, something many Dalit families cannot afford.

For those Dalits who make it into elite scientific institutes, cultural barriers remind them of the caste divide. During his time at IISc, Thomas found that his lower-caste and Dalit sources identified reflections of upper caste culture throughout the institute. Thomas focused on the Carnatic music concerts that Brahmin students organized. Traditionally, Carnatic music, a type of classical music, has long been the domain of Brahmins in southern India. In one instance at IISc, after the singer finished her song, the Brahmin audience continued singing, showing their familiarity with the art form, writes Thomas. But such events alienated researchers who were not Brahmin. One saw Carnatic music as a “symbol of domination” and said he preferred “folk songs and songs of resistance by Dalit reformers.”

“The mindset remains extraordinarily Brahminical in these elite institutions,” said Abha Sur, a historian of science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has written about caste and gender in Indian science. That mindset, she added, tacitly aligns itself with caste hierarchy: “There is implicit devaluation of people that continuously erodes their sense of self.”



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EVEN AS DALIT researchers like Sonkawade and Kale recount fighting against casteism, many upper-caste researchers describe themselves as caste-blind, or beyond caste — a phenomenon, critics say, that has made it more difficult to address ongoing disparities in top scientific institutions.

In 2012, social anthropologist Renny Thomas joined a chemistry laboratory at the Indian Institute of Sciences to study caste dynamics at the institute, arguably India’s most elite science university. That year, he interviewed 80 researchers, and later observed a cultural festival celebrated at the institute. Again and again, Thomas found, Brahmin researchers denied that caste existed in their lives or on the campus. “Caste!?? Oh, Please! I have nothing to do with caste,” one molecular biologist from a Brahmin family told Thomas, according to a paper he published last year. “It never registered in my mind.”

Such claims aren’t limited to academic science. In a 2013 paper, University of Delhi sociologist Satish Deshpande argued that for many upper-caste Indians, caste is “a ladder that can now be safely kicked away,” but only after they convert those high-caste privileges into other forms of status, such as “property, higher educational credentials, and strongholds in lucrative professions.” Many Dalits, Kale said, would also like to forget their caste. But upper-caste people, he added, “don’t let us.”

Rich #Indians leaving #India: Some of the most sought-after residential visas are for countries like #US, #UK, #Portugal, and #Greece. These jurisdictions provide various investment options, and attractive returns on real estate. #Modi #BJP #economy #COVID https://www.business-standard.com/article/markets/more-more-rich-le...

Wealthy Indians are increasingly domiciling their families and businesses overseas for better investment opportunities, wealth preservation, lifestyle, and health care.

Some of the most sought-after residential visas are for countries, such as the US, the UK, Portugal, and Greece. These jurisdictions provide various investment options, as well as attractive returns on real estate. “After the lull in immigration programmes during the initial phases of the pandemic, we are now seeing more and more families evaluating alternative residencies and citizenship programmes,” said ...

Americans: Results From the 2020 Indian American Attitudes Survey
SUMITRA BADRINATHAN, DEVESH KAPUR, JONATHAN KAY, MILAN VAISHNAV

https://carnegieendowment.org/2021/06/09/social-realities-of-indian...

U.S. Census data affirm that Indian Americans enjoy a standard of living that is roughly double that of the median American household, underpinned by substantially greater educational attainment—the share of Indian Americans with at least a bachelor’s degree is twice the national average.4 However, these aggregate figures mask severe inequalities within the community. Although overall levels of poverty are lower than the American average,5 there are concentrated pockets of deprivation, especially among the large number of unauthorized immigrants born in India and residing in the United States.6

Additionally, a narrow focus on demographics such as income, wealth, education, and professional success can obscure important (and sometimes uncomfortable) social truths. What are the social realities and lived experiences of Indian Americans? How does this group perceive itself, and how does it believe others perceive it? To what extent does the community exhibit signs of shared solidarity, and are there signs of division as the group grows in number and diversity? These are some questions this paper attempts to address.

While the social realities of Indian Americans are often glossed over, recent events have brought them to the fore. In 2020, California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing filed a lawsuit against U.S.-based technology company Cisco Systems after an employee from one of India’s historically marginalized caste communities (“Dalits”) alleged that some of his upper caste Indian American colleagues discriminated against him on the basis of his caste identity.7 The suit, and subsequent media melee, triggered a wave of wrenching testimonials about the entrenched nature of caste—a marker of hierarchy and status associated with Hinduism (as well as other South Asian religions)—within the diaspora community in the United States.8

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Thirty percent of non-citizen IAAS respondents possess a green card (or a permanent residency card), which places them on a pathway to gaining U.S. citizenship. Twenty-seven percent are H-1B visa holders, a visa status for high-skilled or specialty workers in the United States that has historically been dominated by the technology sector. On average, an H-1B visa holder reports living in the United States for eight years, although 36 percent of H-1B beneficiaries report spending more than a decade in the country (that is, they arrived before 2010). Eighteen percent of non-citizens reside in the United States on an H-4 visa, a category for immediate family members of H-1B visa holders. Fourteen percent of non-citizens are on F-1, J-1, or M-1 visas—categories of student or scholar visas—while another 5 percent hold an L-1 visa, a designation available to employees of an international company with offices in the United States. A small minority of non-citizen respondents—6 percent—claim some other visa status.

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Ten percent of IAAS respondents identify as “South Asian American,” a term which refers to diaspora populations from countries across the region such as Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Six percent choose no hyphenation at all and identify only as “American” and another 6 percent classify themselves as “Asian American,” an identity category that includes a wide range of diaspora groups from the Asian continent. Two percent of respondents identify as “Other,” indicating that none of the declared options satisfy them, while just 1 percent identify as “Non-resident Indian,” the official appellation used by the Government of India to refer to Indian passport holders living outside of India.

The Casteism I See in America - The Atlantic


https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/india-america-cas...


A 2016 study by Equality Labs, an American civil-rights organization focused on caste, found that 41 percent of South-Asian Americans who identify as lower-caste reported facing caste discrimination in U.S. schools and universities, compared with 3 percent of upper-caste respondents. The survey indicated that 67 percent of lower-caste respondents said they had suffered caste discrimination in the workplace, versus 1 percent of upper-caste individuals. (The survey of more than 1,500 people focused on Hindus. Though upper castes hold more power, caste discrimination is more complex than simply being meted out by upper castes against lower castes, Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Equality Labs’s executive director, told me. “In fact,” she said, “it is all castes against all castes.”)

More recently, a September 2020 study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace found that first-generation Indian immigrants to the U.S. were significantly more likely than U.S.-born respondents to espouse a caste identity. The overwhelming majority of Hindus with a caste identity—more than eight in 10—self-identified as upper-caste, and first-generation immigrants in particular tended to self-segregate, making their communities more and more homogenous in terms of religion and caste. Respondents to the Carnegie survey had varying responses to experiencing different forms of discrimination, depending on whether the discrimination occurred in the U.S. or in India, and who suffered from it. Overall, 73 percent viewed white supremacy as a threat to American democracy, but only 53 percent saw Hindu majoritarianism as a threat to Indian democracy. On the question of affirmative action in university admissions, the data suggest higher levels of support for the policy in the U.S. (54 percent) than India (47 percent).



The anguish caused by casteism is much like that caused by racism, resulting not simply from hateful slurs but from an expansive and intimate system woven into behavior, cultural practice, and economics. On a granular level, upper-caste Hindus do not share utensils or drinking water with those of lower castes, and lighter skin tones are preferred to darker ones. On a systemic level, society self-segregates, with upper castes often congregating in the same neighborhoods; the achievements of upper-caste Hindus come at least partially at the expense of lower-caste communities.

The system dictates that every child inherits their family’s caste, which is indicated by a person’s middle and last name—the name of one’s village and the profession of the family. Caste determines social status and spiritual purity and defines what jobs a person can do and whom they can marry. As outlined in Hindu mythology, men were created unequal by Lord Brahma, the Creator, supreme among the triad of Hindu gods that also includes Lord Shiva, the Destroyer, and Lord Vishnu, the Preserver. From Brahma’s head came the Brahmans—priests and intellectuals. From his arms came kings and warriors; from his thighs, white-collar workers; and from his feet, blue-collar workers. A fifth group, once described as untouchables, was kept outside of the caste system entirely, its place in the social order to clean toilets, sweep streets, and dispose of dead bodies. (The word pariahcomes from the Tamil language and refers to one of the most persecuted and lowest of caste groups, the paṛaiyar, in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Pariah is a global standard for social outcasts, but Tamil-Brahman families, including mine, use it as a term of abuse, and it has come to mean “someone who is despised.”)



The top three groups—Brahmans, warriors, and traders—are the upper castes and can intermarry and dine with one another.

Umar Saif
@umarsaif
Some reality check …

Twitter- Parag Agarwal
Google - Sundar Pichai
Microsoft - Satya Nadella
IBM - Arvind Krishna
Adobe- Shantanu Narayen
VMWare - Raghu Raghuram
Vimeo - Anjali Sud
Google Cloud - Thomas Kurian
NetApp - George Kurian
Palo Alto Networks - Nikesh Arora

https://twitter.com/umarsaif/status/1465622837641859077?s=20

New Twitter CEO (Parag Agarwal) highlights struggle to halt India's brain drain - Nikkei Asia

Rupa Subramanya is a researcher and commentator. She is a distinguished fellow of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada and the co-author of "Indianomix: Making Sense of Modern India."

https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/New-Twitter-CEO-highlights-struggle...

I identified the fact that most of these success stories typically involve people with graduate degrees, training and work experience all acquired in the U.S. Well trained in mathematics, fluent in English and at ease in the American business culture, Indians are able to transition into leadership roles much more comfortably than many other Asian-born corporate executives in the U.S., including those born in China.


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But the success of Indians on Wall Street, Silicon Valley and in Ivy League colleges is both a glass-half-full and a glass-half-empty story.

On the one hand, Indians excel in the meritocratic American work culture, but on the other, they are escaping a stiflingly bureaucratic, crony-driven, inefficient work culture back home where innovation and creativity are often punished rather than encouraged and rewarded. With the notable exception of several prominent recent startups, mostly in the tech sector, the biggest Indian conglomerates are typically headed by their founders or their descendants.

These push and pull factors driving talented Indians to the U.S. are revealed dramatically in official statistics. Using data from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and a reply to a question in the Indian Parliament, my analysis shows that from January 2014 to September 2021, a little under 1 million Indians have given up their passports to acquire foreign citizenship. Indian law does not allow multiple nationalities, so those giving up their passports are doing so because they have acquired citizenship elsewhere.

Of those giving up their Indian passports from 2014 to 2019, the years for which we have comparable data, more than 30% on average were giving up their Indian citizenship to become naturalized Americans. In 2019, the year before the pandemic, that was a whopping 45%. In other words, almost half of those giving up their Indian passports were acquiring American ones.

China, which also requires those citizens who obtain citizenship of another country to relinquish their Chinese passport, has seen no such exodus. Data from the DHS from 2003 to 2019, the last year for which data is available, shows a consistently higher number of Indians becoming naturalized every year compared to Chinese-born immigrants.

On average, 40% more Indians became naturalized in a given year than Chinese, bearing in mind that China has a larger population than India. In 2019, a whopping 64% more Indians were naturalized than Chinese. Given the large number of Indians giving up their passports in the last couple of years, that percentage may even tick up a few more points when the latest U.S. numbers become available.

This reality of a mass exodus of talent from India is not new, a phenomenon that goes back to the 1960s. However, it is a far cry from the optimistic free-market rhetoric of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his early days in office, when his main slogan was "minimum government, maximum governance."

Modi convinced many at the time that India would once again be a land of opportunity, as it had been in the mid to late 2000s under the previous Congress-led government when the economy was growing at nearly double digits, prompting many Indians to return home with some even giving up the coveted American green cards. That hope soon faded against the backdrop of corruption scandals that helped usher Modi to power in 2014.

What’s the secret behind India’s IIT, which produced Twitter chief Parag Agrawal and other tech titans?
The Indian Institute of Technology is an elite network of 23 engineering schools which boasts the ‘the most difficult admission exam on the planet’
‘IITians’ include Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen, Micron Technology’s Nikesh Arora and Sun Microsystems’ Vinod Khosla


https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/economics/article/3160906/whats-secr...

Above the imposing main entrance of the first Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), which opened back in 1951, is the motto “Service to the Nation”. For years, as many graduates of the country’s elite network of engineering schools headed off for greener pastures in the US, the joke among Indians was “which nation?”.
Twitter’s new chief Parag Agrawal recently joined a long list of talented IIT graduates who have become tech titans in Silicon Valley, including Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen, Micron Technology’s Nikesh Arora and Sun Microsystems’ Vinod Khosla to name just a few.

By global standards, IIT – which has grown to 23 campuses around India – is way down the academic league tables, according to the widely used QS World University rankings. IIT Bombay fared best of all Indian educational institutions in 2021, coming 177 out of the leading 200 universities in the QS global rankings. By contrast, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was in top position. While IIT scores well on employer reputation, with 70 out of 100 points, it loses heavily on its lack of international students and faculty.

Why Brahmins lead Western firms but rarely Indian ones

https://www.economist.com/asia/2022/01/01/why-brahmins-lead-western...


what do the chief executives of Adobe, Alphabet, ibm, Match Group (which owns Tinder), Microsoft, OnlyFans (a subscription service featuring content creators in various stages of undress) and Twitter have in common? All seven happen to be of Indian origin. That is not surprising considering the abundance of subcontinental talent drifting into Western companies: in recent years Indians have been granted well over two-thirds of America’s h-1b visas for highly skilled workers.

But these particular bosses share something else, too. They are all top-caste Hindus. Four are Brahmins. Traditionally associated with the priesthood and learning, this pinnacle of the caste pyramid’s 25,000-plus sub-groups makes up just 50m or so of India’s 1.4bn people. The other three ceos come from castes traditionally associated with commerce or “scribal” professions such as book-keeping. These groups account for a similarly slim section of the pyramid’s capstone: the 30% of Hindus that the government classes as “forward” castes, as opposed to the 70% who fall among such categories as “backward” or “scheduled” castes (Dalits, formerly known as untouchables) and “scheduled tribes”

Dalit Diva
@dalitdiva
(Thenmozhi Soundarajan)

In the grand silicon valley tradition of white cismen passing the torch to Brahmin cismen Jack Dorsey is stepping down and Parag Agarwal is the new CEO of Twitter. Will he also remain silent about Caste? #casteintech

https://twitter.com/dalitdiva/status/1465358123640655875?s=20

Remember Microsoft went from Steve Ballmer to Satya Nadella & Alphabet from Larry Page to Sundar Pinchai. These companies still have caste discrimination while having leadership that is racially diverse but caste priviliged. DEI is the need of the hour. #Casteintech

https://twitter.com/dalitdiva/status/1465358125616152581?s=20

#Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes found guilty of 4 counts of fraud, acquitted on 4. Her #Indian-#American partner & ex boyfriend Ramesh Balwani is facing his own charges and a separate trial. #SiliconValley #technology
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/elizabeth-holmes-ver... via @nbcnews

The government's case included text messages between Holmes' former business partner and ex-boyfriend, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, discussing Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou. The couple expressed concerns over Carreyrou writing a negative article, with Balwani promising to "nail" the reporter.

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Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes was convicted of four federal fraud charges Monday and acquitted on four others while a jury deadlocked on the three remaining charges after months of trial.

Holmes, 37, was the force behind a modernized blood test —advertising a cheap finger prick that could offer comprehensive results for a number of medical issues. But The Wall Street Journal reported in 2015 that Theranos devices were inaccurate, beginning the company's eventual downfall.

She was initially facing 12 fraud counts, but one was dismissed earlier in her trial, the result of an earlier error by prosecutors. Holmes potentially faced 20 years in prison, fines and potential restitution to defrauded investors.

The jury spent seven days going over the evidence and charges. On the third day of deliberations, jurors asked the judge to listen to audio clips of a 2013 call Holmes had with investors.

A week into deliberations, the jury sent a note that said it was deadlocked on three charges. Judge Edward J. Davila, at the prosecutor’s request, read the jury instructions known as an “Allen charge” — telling them to resume deliberations and attempt to reach a verdict on the outstanding charges.

The jury remained unable to reach a unanimous verdict, they said in another note Monday.

#India's #IIT professor says 'ghosts exist', claims to have driven out 'evil spirits' via chants. Behera teaches Electrical Engineering. He has a PhD from IIT #Delhi. His specialities include #robotics and Artificial Intelligence (#AI) #Hindutva #BJP #Modi https://www.timesnownews.com/the-buzz/article/iit-mandi-director-pr...

KEY HIGHLIGHTSProfessor Laxmidhar Behera, Director of IIT Mandi, said that "ghosts exists"In a video, he claimed that he went to Chennai in 1993 to drive out "evil spirits" from his friend's house and familyHe said that he chanted holy mantras in his apparent act of exorcism

A video of the newly appointed Director of IIT Mandi, Professor Laxmidhar Behera, talking about his apparent act of exorcism to get rid of "evil spirits" from his friend's house by chanting holy mantras has surfaced online.

In the five-minute video, Behera recalled the 1993 incident when he travelled to Chennai to help a friend who was in distress as his "family was affected by ghosts".

The professor said that he had started "practising the thoughts and wisdom in the Bhagavad Gita" along with chanting the 'Hare Rama Hare Krishna' mantra. He said that he had decided to help his friend to "demonstrate the potency of the holy name", The Indian Express reported.

"So I took two of my friends and reached at 7 pm. He was in a research scholar apartment. After 10-15 minutes of loud chanting, we suddenly saw his father, who was a very short... person, absolutely old, barely able to walk, and suddenly his hand and leg was... he was creating such a ghastly dance and his head is almost touching the roof. You could feel that he is being completely devoured by the evil spirit," Behera said in the video.

He added that the mother and wife of the friend were later "possessed by the evil spirit'. It took them around "45 minutes to an hour" of loud chanting to ward off the "evil spirit", he said.

The video was posted seven months ago on a YouTube channel named "Learn Gita Live Gita". The tagline of the channel is "Project by IITIANS who live Gita."

Behera told IE, "I narrated what I said. Ghosts exist, yes."

Behera is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering. He has done PhD from IIT Delhi and his areas of speciality are robotics and Artificial Intelligence.

The catastrophic cost of junk science, bogus information and the Hindutva inferiority complex
Pseudo-science will be the death of us.
Rohit Chopra
May 01, 2021 · 07:30 am

https://scroll.in/article/993255/the-catastrophic-cost-of-junk-scie...

In part, the packaging of junk science as genuine Hindu scientific knowledge represents a deep-seated complex about the significance and worth of Hindu identity in a global world. In the Hindutva schematic, Hindu identity is, of course, conflated with Indian identity. In part, this phenomenon is a product of a very specific battle that Modi has been fighting forever with the legacy of Nehru, who is his intimate enemy, the figure he wants to surpass and displace from institutional, collective, and public memory in India.

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As India collectively gasps for breath, confronted by a catastrophic surge of Covid-19 infections and deaths, the control and content of information related to all aspects of the pandemic have become highly politicised, even more so than has usually been the case for a good while now.

Having masterfully managed, threatened and eventually dominated most of the legacy media over the last seven years, the Bharatiya Janata Party government suddenly finds itself haplessly trying to contain not just the virus but the narrative about the extent of the carnage, the breakdown of the healthcare system, and the reasons for the clearly visible failures of Modi’s leadership.


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In February 2021, at an event which was attended by the health minister, Dr Harsh Vardhan, Ramdev claimed that Coronil had received certification from the World Health Organisation, an assertion that was shortly thereafter denied by the WHO and condemned by the Indian Medical Association.

In April 2020, Jaggi Vasudev, who has built a fortune by peddling senseless jargon like “inner engineering” to gullible and stressed Indian techies in Silicon Valley, stated with his characteristic confidence that “the virus does not want to kill you. This virus is living in our body because we are a wonderful habitat for it.”

As a defence strategy, Vasudev advocated not treatment, but mental strength, calm, and a positive attitude. Good virtues all, no doubt, but unproven as a remedy for illnesses. As Siddhartha Mukherjee, doctor, researcher, and author of the Pulitzer-prize winning book on cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies, states, “A positive attitude does not cure cancer, any more than a negative one causes it.”

Cow urine party
In March 2020, a Hindutva group, the Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha, held a cow urine drinking party as a means of providing protection against the virus. Given the reach of Ramdev and Vasudev and the incessant promotion of gaumutra by the Hindu Right since 2014, these grand pronouncements beg one big question: if there is any significant measure of truth to any of these claims, why was the virus not effectively vanquished or contained in India within a few months of these remedies being trotted out?

As with celebrity affirmations of dubious science, though, the more alarming issues here are, one, the complicity of the BJP government in actively promoting snake oil cures and, two, the moral and ethical responsibility for the harm arising from the propagation of such inaccurate and misleading information among the Indian populace.

To be clear, these kinds of arguments are not an invention of the Modi era nor exclusively believed by Hindu nationalists. They have a long history, dating back to at least the nineteenth century. The historian Gyan Prakash’s fine study, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (1999), describes how such claims are rooted in colonial-era anxieties about the universalist nature of neglected Hindu knowledge, which, Hindu intellectuals argued, had the potential to hold its own against Western science and technology though it first needed to be resuscitated from the depths of time.

#UkraineWar has exposed #inequity in #India's #medical school admissions. #Indian medical entrance exam favors students from elite backgrounds (upper caste) who can afford specialized coaching or those who can attend expensive private colleges ($100,000) https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2022/0328/How-th...

Every year, roughly 1.5 million students take the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, or NEET, to compete for some 90,000 seats in medical schools across India. About half of those are at private universities where tuition and other fees easily exceed $100,000. As a result, tens of thousands of Indian students opt to study medicine in countries like China, Russia, and Ukraine, where education is cheaper.

Opposition to NEET has been brewing since the government introduced the exam in 2013. Critics say that NEET favors students from elite backgrounds who can afford specialized coaching – echoing arguments against the SAT and ACT in the United States – or who can attend expensive private colleges where the bar for admission is lower. “The system is not fair; there cannot be any doubt on that,” says Dr. Anand Krishnan, a professor of community medicine at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi. “Medical profession is not just pure knowledge. You have to be more humane. There are a lot of other characteristics which are important to look for.”

When Mr. Gahlot was in 11th grade, he left his hometown of Siryawali in northwest Uttar Pradesh to go to Kota, Rajasthan, the academic coaching capital of India. There, he says, he followed a grueling regimen of studying six to seven hours a day, but fell about 50 points short of what was required to get into a government-run college.

“It was totally depressing. I would think I’m not smart enough to be a doctor, I can’t do this,” he says. Several of his friends in similar situations chose different career paths. But Mr. Gahlot had made up his mind to become a doctor in eighth grade, and turned to his last resort – going abroad. He says he was too ashamed to tell his peers he was leaving India, because many see foreign medical students as “quitters” who weren’t able to crack NEET.

The fierce competition for Indian medical school seats cost another student his life. Naveen Gyanagoudar had gone outside to buy food when he was killed by Russian shelling in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Speaking to local reporters, his distraught father lamented that despite scoring 97% on high school exams, his son couldn’t get admission to a medical school in his own country.

The double blow of high competition and high cost means India’s new generation of doctors lacks diversity. “They are predominantly urban-centric kids, from well-entrenched, reasonably well-off middle-class families,” says Dr. Sita Naik, a former member of the Medical Council of India, which used to oversee medical education. Dr. Naik says these graduates are unlikely to move to rural areas, where the demand for doctors is the greatest. Rural India is home to two-thirds of the country’s population but only 20% of its doctors, according to a 2016 report.

'God has not blessed us': Low #caste #Indian boy’s response to a reporter about #schools over #temples goes viral. #education #Hindu #religion https://news.yahoo.com/god-not-blessed-us-indian-213134685.html?soc... via @YahooNews


A video of a teenage boy in India telling a reporter why classrooms are more important than temples has garnered attention online.

The clip, which has gone viral on social media, shows a local reporter from SM News interviewing a 13-year-old boy from Varanasi city, in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

Asked what he plans to do when he grows up, the boy said he wants to serve his community by becoming an Indian Administrative Service officer.

When the reporter then asked the teen about going to temple, he talked about the merits of schools instead. “When we study, then we’ll get a job,” the boy said.

According to the young interviewee, he would “rather be in a classroom” because schools are more important.

“God has not blessed us,” he reasoned. “God will not give us anything. But education will.”

The stunned reporter then asked him about his caste, a social system that divides Hindus into rigid hierarchical groups and has long been used for discriminatory practices in Indian society.

“I am from the Chamar community,” the boy answered.

The reporter remarked: “You are from the Chamar community, and you say this with such pride!”

Under modern India’s system of affirmative action, Chamars are classified as a Scheduled Caste, the lowest in the caste hierarchy. Being called a Chamar is considered derogatory in India.

While discrimination based on the caste system has been banned in India since 1948, its existence over thousands of years continues to provide the upper castes with societal privileges while the lower castes remain repressed and limited in job opportunities.

The teen said that instead of looking up to gods in a temple, he admires Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar, a member of a low-caste community who went on to become a notable Indian scholar, politician, jurist, social reformist and author of the Indian constitution.

Ambedkar, also referred to as an honorific title Babasaheb, was instrumental in leading public movements that advocate for marginalized communities.

With the crowd starting to boo the reporter, he went on to ask the teen why he would want to worship Ambedkar but not the gods.

“Babasaheb gave us reservation and constitution,” the boy said. “What did gods do for us? We don’t go to a temple, we go to schools. God has given us nothing. I would rather get an education in a school.”

The two-minute clip has been widely shared across social media platforms, receiving many comments from social media users who were impressed by the boy’s response.

#US Professor Calls #India "Sh*****E". "They're taught that they are better than everybody else because they are Brahmin elites and yet, on some level, their country is a sh*thole,” UPennProfessor Amy Wax said. #Caste #Brahmin #Xenophobia #Hindu https://www.ndtv.com/indians-abroad/us-professor-calls-india-sh-e-i... via @ndtv

Leading Indian-Americans, including US Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi, have slammed a law professor from University of Pennsylvania for her disparaging comments about the Asian American community, with a specific disdain for Indian-Americans.
In a recent interview to Fox News, Prof Amy Wax from the University of Pennsylvania alleged that “Blacks” and “non-Western” groups have “a tremendous amount of resentment and shame against western people for [their] outsized achievements and contributions.” “Here's the problem. They're taught that they are better than everybody else because they are Brahmin elites and yet, on some level, their country is a sh*thole,” Wax, who has a long history of inflammatory remarks, said.

She also said that the westerners have outgunned and outclassed the Asian Americans in every way.

“They've realised that we've outgunned and outclassed them in every way… They feel anger. They feel envy. They feel shame. It creates ingratitude of the most monstrous kind,” she said.

Wax then targeted the influential Indian-American doctors' community as well. “They are on the ramparts for the antiracism initiative for ‘dump on America,'” she alleged.

The comment was condemned by the Indian-Americans across the US.

“After President Trump left office, I thought the days of calling others “shithole” countries were over,” Krishnamoorthi said in a tweet.

“As an Indian-American immigrant, I'm disgusted to hear this UPenn Professor define Indian-American immigrants, and all non-white Americans, in such insulting terms,” he said.

Stating that such comments are borne of hatred and fear, he emphasised that such talks make it much harder to accomplish common-sense immigration reform.

“Comments like these are borne of hatred and fear, and they lead to real harm for my constituents and our minority communities. They fuel hate crimes against minorities, and they make it much harder to accomplish common-sense immigration reform,” Krishnamoorthi said.

Indian-American Law professor Neil Makhija also slammed Wax for her comments.

“It's irresponsible to use your position to lend credibility to these overtly racist sentiments that don't recognise Indian-Americans for who we are," he told Axios.

Indian-American Impact is slated to hold a summit next month in DC Makjiha told Axios he's planning to adjust programming to discuss the incident and create solutions against anti-Asian and South Asian hate in educational settings.

“The most unfortunate thing is that we have a lot of brilliant and incredible students at the law school,” he told NBC News.

“It makes you question whether she can fairly grade or educate,” he said.

This is not the first time Wax's controversial comments about race have gone viral, the US media reported.

Her appearance on Carlson's show is not the first time Wax has made anti-Asian remarks. In an interview in December, she said that Indians Americans should be more “grateful” to be in the US and that the country would be “better off with fewer Asians.” Penn has confirmed that the school is in the middle of disciplinary proceedings against Wax, NBC News reported.

“The University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School has previously made clear that Professor Wax's views do not reflect our values or practices,” it quoted a representative as saying.

“In January 2022, Dean Ruger announced that he would move forward with a University Faculty Senate process to address Professor Wax's escalating conduct, and that process is underway,” the report quoted the Penn representative as saying.

Ivy League Professor Amy Wax joins Tucker Carlson to go on a wildly racist rant that will make you wince. Adrienne Lawrence breaks it down on Rebel HQ.

https://youtu.be/xU-MAVo1GVU

A mysterious new report tells you who funds Hindu nationalism in US, and with how much money
While Hindu groups like the HSS flag the report as 'unreliable', anti-Hindutva activists say that it's based on available data but not getting enough attention.
VANDANA MENON

https://theprint.in/features/a-mysterious-new-report-tells-you-who-...

Drawing upon publicly available resources, the report details the financial ties of groups in the US that are spending millions to influence American education and further the interests of the Indian government, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Over almost 20 years — 2001 to 2019 — seven of these charitable groups spent at least $158.9 million, sending some of it to groups in India. Around half of this money, nearly $85.4 million, was spent between 2014 and 2019.

While Hindu groups in the US have flagged the unreliability of the report, anti-Hindutva activists have said that it is based on publicly available data but not getting enough public attention.


Titled ‘Hindu Nationalist Influence in the United States, 2014-2021: The Infrastructure of Hindutva Mobilizing,’ the report is authored by Jasa Macher and facilitated by the South Asian Citizens Web. It’s a researched update on a 2014 report, authored by someone who uses the same initials and email address: JM.

But Google the author and you won’t find a digital footprint — only references to their report.

“We find it strange that a report on the alleged nefariousness of various organisations, including our own, is likely written under an unacknowledged pseudonym, seemingly created solely for the purpose of this report,” wrote the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) to ThePrint in an email response.

Following the money
So, where does the money come from? Philanthropists among the diaspora, fundraising drives, wealthy family foundations and American taxpayers themselves.

Organisations like the Bhutada Family Foundation and the Puran Devi Aggarwal Family Foundation donated around $2 million to groups like the HAF, the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS), Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (VHPA), and Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation of USA between 2006 and 2018, according to tax records. While the report points out that the donors’ ideological opinions can’t be assumed based on the fact that they’ve donated to Hindu non-profit groups, it lists the Sangh affiliations of those who head these family foundations.

According to a 2021 Al Jazeera report, five Right-wing groups — Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation of USA, HAF, Infinity Foundation, Sewa International, and VHPA — received $833,000 of U.S. federal Covid relief funds, paid for by the American taxpayer. The HAF filed a defamation suit against the reporter, Raqib Hameed Naik, as well as others named in the report, including members of another US-based group, Hindus For Human Rights. ThePrint has reached out to the organizations mentioned in this article for their comments on the report.

#IndiaAt75: #Tech giants confront rampant #caste discrimination among #SiliconValley #Indians. They're taking a modern-day crash course in #India’s ancient caste system. #Casteism #casteisminindia #Modi #Hindutva #Islamophobia #Apple #Cisco #Google #IBM

https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/caste-califor...

Caste in California: Tech giants confront ancient Indian hierarchy By Paresh Dave

Apple, the world’s largest listed company, updated its General Employee Conduct Policy nearly two years ago to explicitly prohibit discrimination based on race, which it defined as existing categories such as race, religion, gender, age and ancestry. joined together.

The inclusion of the new category, which was not previously reported, goes beyond US discrimination laws, which do not explicitly ban racism.

The update came after the tech sector – which counts India as its top source of skilled foreign workers – received a wake-up call in June 2020 when California’s employment regulator asked Cisco on behalf of a lower-caste engineer. Systems, which accused the two upper-castes. Bosses blocking his career.


Cisco, which denies wrongdoing, says an internal investigation found no evidence of discrimination and that some allegations are unfounded because race is not a legally “protected class” in California. An appeals panel this month rejected the networking company’s bid to push the matter to private arbitration, meaning a public court case could come as early as next year.

The controversy – the first US employment lawsuit about alleged racism – has forced Big Tech to confront a millennium-old hierarchy where the social status of Indians has been based on family lineage, from the top Brahmin “priest” class to Dalits. Until, the “untouchables” and were sent to slave labor.

Since the lawsuit was filed, several activist and employee groups have begun calling for updated US discrimination legislation — and also calling on tech companies to change their policies to help fill the void and stop racism. Is.

Their efforts have produced poor results, according to a Reuters review of policy in US industry, which employs hundreds of thousands of workers in India.

“I’m not surprised that the policies would be inconsistent because that’s almost what you would expect if the law isn’t clear,” said Kevin Brown, a law professor at the University of South Carolina who studies race issues. Include it in US laws.

“I can imagine that … (a) some parts of the organization are saying it makes sense, and other parts are saying that we don’t think it makes sense to take a stance.”

Apple’s core internal policy on workplace conduct, which was spotted by Reuters, added references to equal employment opportunity and race in anti-harassment sections after September 2020.

Apple confirmed that it “updated the language a few years ago to ensure that we prohibit discrimination or harassment based on race.” It states that the training given to the employees also explicitly mentions caste.

“Our teams assess our policies, training, processes and resources on an ongoing basis to ensure they are comprehensive,” it said. “We have a diverse and global team, and we are proud that our policies and actions reflect this.”

Elsewhere in tech, IBM told Reuters that it added race, which already had India-specific policies, to its global discrimination rules after it filed a Cisco lawsuit, though it declined to give a specific date or reasoning. Gave.

The company said that IBM’s only training in which caste is mentioned is for managers in India.

Many companies do not specifically mention race in their core global policy, including Amazon, Dell, Facebook owner Meta, Microsoft and Google. Reuters reviewed each policy, some of which are published internally for employees only.

'Go Back To India': Indian-Origin US Lawmaker Gets Threat Messages In all the messages, the male caller is heard threatening the lawmaker with dire consequences and in one instance she is being asked to go back to her country of origin, India. https://www.ndtv.com/indians-abroad/indian-origin-us-lawmaker-prami... Indian-American Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal has been receiving abusive and hate messages over the phone from a male caller who even asked her to go back to India. On Thursday, Chennai-born Jayapal posted a collection of five such audio messages. In all the messages, portions of which have been redacted because of obscene and abusive content, the male caller is heard threatening her with dire consequences and in one instance she is being asked to go back to her country of origin, India. https://twitter.com/RepJayapal/status/1567943349763559426?s=20&...

Only 3% Muslims are in Indian national media

https://muslimmirror.com/eng/muslims-are-only-3-in-indian-national-...


Recently, Oxfam India released a report titled “Who Tells Our Stories Matters: Representation of Marginalised Caste Groups in Indian Media.” It says; 90% of leadership positions in Indian media are occupied by Upper Caste groups with not even a single Dalit or Adivasi heading Indian mainstream media.

Exactly the same findings were made by the social activist and psephologist, Yogendra Yadav in 2006 who did a similar survey about the social profile of the national media professionals in India.

Yadav recalls the days of the Mandal II agitation in 2006 when he did this survey; “It was more a rudimentary headcount than a scientific survey but it confirmed our worst suspicions about caste, gender, and religion across Indian media.”

“We drew up a list of 40 national media outlets (Hindi and English TV channels and newspapers) and requested someone there to draw a list of their top 10 editor-level decision-makers. Then we recorded information on the gender, religion, and caste against each name. We had shortlisted 400 persons but were able to collect information on 315 only” he recalls.

Our findings were; “A staggering 88 percent of this elite list were upper-caste Hindus, a social group that cannot possibly exceed 20 percent of India’s population. Brahmins alone, no more than 2-3 percent of the population, occupied 49 percent of positions. Not even a single person in this list turned out to be from Dalit or Adivasi background. More relevant to the case in point, the OBCs, whose population is estimated to be around 45 percent, was merely 4 percent among the top media professionals. Women accounted for only 16 percent.

Yadav says that “the representation of the 14 percent Muslims was only 3 percent in the national media. He adds that brazen anti-minority headlines get routinely generated in media and the communal flare-up gets 9 times more coverage than caste conflict in India.”

Yadav says what we summarized in 2006 that India’s ‘national’ media lacks social diversity; it does not reflect the country’s social profile comes true with findings of the Oxfam report on media in India. The big picture that remains the same even after 15 years is that 20 percent of the country gets 80 percent voice in the media and the remaining 80 percent is limited to 20 percent media space.

Yogendra Yadav’s writeup “Hindu upper-caste Indian media is a lot like White-dominated South Africa” can be accessed in The Print, October 27, 2022.


---------------

Media has been perceived by the masses as a sacrosanct institution but how these are governed is a matter of mystery. While a wide range of issues are discussed, covered and aired both in print as well as on news channels, caste disparity within media houses has hardly ever been a topic of serious discussion. The deliberate ignorance of the issues that affect marginalised communities has led them to come up with their own channels.

This study is an attempt to find out the status of representation among SC, ST, OBC & DNT in different media outlets. The research team has explored the challenges faced by newsrooms, looked for existing best practices that different countries have adopted and also provided suggestions to make newsrooms more inclusive.


https://www.oxfamindia.org/knowledgehub/workingpaper/who-tells-our-...

We were Dalits living underground. A minority within a minority. A shadow of the margin. Precocious and keenly aware of how different our family was, I urgently wanted to pretend that I could be just like all the other oblivious American kids. But a deeper current of trauma was always swirling around my family. A whirlpool of a wound that had no name but was everywhere. It brought a jagged edge to all our happy family photos. It was a crisis that could drop at any moment. A truth that felt like it could end everything.

Soundararajan, Thenmozhi. The Trauma of Caste (p. 11). North Atlantic Books. Kindle Edition.

It was a fear that bound us into silence and broke us over and over again. Even more so because we did not name it. Running, passing, hiding. This is the litany of the Dalit American. At ten years old, I was also consumed by a report about the Bhopal disaster, the world’s worst industrial accident, when over forty tons of deadly gas exploded from the Union Carbide pesticide plant, killing thousands.1 It was a catastrophe on the scale of Chernobyl, but with people who looked like me. I couldn’t believe an American-owned company could destroy the land and human bodies like that with no accountability. The suffering of the disaster was so great that it could for a moment break through the endless parade of whiteness in the media. And for that moment the whole world heard my people scream.

Soundararajan, Thenmozhi. The Trauma of Caste (pp. 11-12). North Atlantic Books. Kindle Edition.

I remember as a child being haunted by the images of the disaster. I put my hands on the faces of the survivors and the dead in magazine photos. I was struck by one author describing the disaster as if the whole city had become a gas chamber. I imagined the horror of a city drowned in toxic plumes that in an instant blinded, burned, and torched the throats of thousands of people even as they screamed. I was moved by a tragedy that I didn’t really have the maturity to grasp; but it touched me in ways that I still cannot name. And it is a tragedy that is still ongoing. The Indian government, Union Carbide, and its parent company, Dow Dupont, all continue pointing fingers at each other, while the seventy-acre site in Bhopal has yet to be cleaned up. Many survivors struggle even today. A disproportionate number of those deaths were of people called “untouchables.” I didn’t know what that meant. The word itself had no logic. Why would

Soundararajan, Thenmozhi. The Trauma of Caste (p. 12). North Atlantic Books. Kindle Edition.

you not touch someone? I had to stop and look it up. This was before the internet. Knowledge was held in encyclopedias, the kind that took up an entire bookshelf, bound in fake leather with titles in gold letters. Knowledge was expensive: most encyclopedia sets were hundreds if not thousands of dollars. But my mom, being the Dalit mother she was, believed in knowledge, that it should be free or low cost, and that it was important for me and my sister to have as much of it as possible. So she went to every thrift store in the city and found a set that was ten years old at the Salvation Army for $50. I loved them and would read them from beginning to end.

Soundararajan, Thenmozhi. The Trauma of Caste (p. 12). North Atlantic Books. Kindle Edition.

Soundararajan's parents are from a village in rural India where they experienced inter-caste violence. Her father is a doctor and her mother is the first woman from her family to get a college education.[5] In the fifth grade, after reading about the effects of the Bhopal disaster on the Untouchables, she learned from her mother that she is a Dalit.[6]

Soundararajan publicly revealed that she is a Dalit when she made a documentary film on caste and violence against women as a part of her college thesis at the University of California, Berkeley. For Soundararajan, this decision had many consequences: while fellow Dalits secretly confided in her about their identity, she has also stated that she faced discrimination from almost all of the Indian professors in her campus and that they refused to advise her on projects.[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thenmozhi_Soundararajan

Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy says IITs have become victims to rote learning due to coaching classes


https://www.timesnownews.com/business-economy/companies/infosys-fou...

As more and more students leave India for higher studies, Infosys founder Narayana Murthy proposed that governments and corporates should “incentivise” researchers with grants and provide facilities to work here. “The 10,000 crore per year grants for universities under the New Education Policy will help institutions become competitive", he said.


https://youtu.be/2vzSwExIoNg

Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy on Tuesday expressed concern over India’s education system saying that even the IITs are becoming a victim of learning by rote due to the “tyranny of coaching classes.” Murthy suggested that our education system needs a reorientation directed towards Socratic questioning.
The Infosys founder, who himself is an IIT alumnus, batted for Socratic questioning in the classroom in order to arrive at solutions to real-world issues. “Many experts feel that (in) our country, (there is an) inability to use research to solve our immediate pressing problems around us… (this) is due to lack of inculcating curiosity at an early age, disconnect between pure or applied research," he said.

As to what could be done to solve this, the 76-year-old suggested that the first component is to reorient teaching in schools and colleges towards Socratic questioning in the classroom to solve real-world problems rather than passing the examinations by rote learning. Socrates was a fifth century (BCE) Greek philosopher credited as the founder of Western philosophy.
Speaking at the 14th edition of the Infosys Prize event in Bengaluru, Murthy said that the nation’s progress on the economic and social front depends on the quality of scientific and technological research. Research thrives in an environment of honour and respect for intellectuals, meritocracy and the support and approbation of such intellectuals from society, he noted.

Neither Indian nor Pakistani universities make the top 100 world rankings. 

Japan Needs Indian Tech Workers. But Do They Need Japan?
Recruiters call the push a crucial test of whether the world’s third-largest economy can compete with the U.S. and Europe for global talent.


https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/12/business/japan-indian-tech-worke...

Mr. Puranik said fellow Indians often called him for help with emergencies or conflicts — the wandering father with dementia who ends up in police custody, the daughter mistakenly stopped by border agents at the airport. He once even fielded a call from a worker who wanted to sue his Japanese boss for kicking him.

His own son, he said, was bullied in a Japanese school — by the teacher. Mr. Puranik said he repeatedly talked to the teacher, to no avail. “She would always try to make him a criminal,” he said, adding that some teachers “feel challenged if the kid is doing anything differently.”

A similar dynamic can sometimes be found in the workplace.

Many Indian tech workers in Japan say they encounter ironclad corporate hierarchies and resistance to change, a paradox in an industry that thrives on innovation and risk-taking.

“They want things in a particular order; they want case studies and past experience,” Mr. Puranik said of some Japanese managers. “IT doesn’t work like that. There is no past experience. We have to reinvent ourselves every day.”

---------

As it rapidly ages, Japan desperately needs more workers to fuel the world’s third-largest economy and plug gaps in everything from farming and factory work to elder care and nursing. Bending to this reality, the country has eased strict limits on immigration in hopes of attracting hundreds of thousands of foreign workers, most notably through a landmark expansion of work visa rules approved in 2018.

The need for international talent is perhaps no greater than in the tech sector, where the government estimates that the shortfall in workers will reach nearly 800,000 in the coming years as the country pursues a long-overdue national digitization effort.

The pandemic, by pushing work, education and many other aspects of daily life onto online platforms, has magnified the technological shortcomings of a country once seen as a leader in high tech.

Japanese companies, particularly smaller ones, have struggled to wean themselves from physical paperwork and adopt digital tools. Government reports and independent analyses show Japanese companies’ use of cloud technologies is nearly a decade behind those in the United States.

“As it happens to anyone who comes to Japan, you fall in love,” said Shailesh Date, 50, who first went to the country in 1996 and is now the head of technology for the American financial services company Franklin Templeton Japan in Tokyo. “It’s the most beautiful country to live in.”

Yet the Indian newcomers mostly admire Japan from across a divide. Many of Japan’s 36,000 Indians are concentrated in the Edogawa section of eastern Tokyo, where they have their own vegetarian restaurants, places of worship and specialty grocery stores. The area has two major Indian schools where children study in English and follow Indian curricular standards.

Nirmal Jain, an Indian educator, said she founded the Indian International School in Japan in 2004 for children who would not thrive in Japan’s one-size-fits-all public education system. The school now has 1,400 students on two campuses and is building a new, larger facility in Tokyo.

Ms. Jain said that separate schools were appropriate in a place like Japan, where people tend to keep their distance from outsiders.

“I mean, they are nice people, everything is perfect, but when it comes to person-to-person relationships, it’s kind of not there,” she said.

How India’s caste system limits diversity in science — in six charts

https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-023-00015-2/index.html

Data show how privileged groups still dominate many of the country’s elite research institutes.

This article is part of a Nature series examining data on ethnic or racial diversity in science in different countries. See also: How UK science is failing Black researchers — in nine stark charts.

Samadhan is an outlier in his home village in western India. Last year, he became the first person from there to start a science PhD. Samadhan, a student in Maharashtra state, is an Adivasi or indigenous person — a member of one of the most marginalized and poorest communities in India.

For that reason, he doesn’t want to publicize his last name or institution, partly because he fears that doing so would bring his social status to the attention of a wider group of Indian scientists. “They’d know that I am from a lower category and will think that I have progressed because of [the] quota,” he says.

The quota Samadhan refers to is also known as a reservation policy: a form of affirmative action that was written into India’s constitution in 1950. Reservation policies aimed to uplift marginalized communities by allocating quotas for them in public-sector jobs and in education. Mirroring India’s caste system of social hierarchy, the most privileged castes dominated white-collar professions, including roles in science and technology. After many years, the Indian government settled on a 7.5% quota for Adivasis (referred to as ‘Scheduled Tribes’ in official records) and a 15% quota for another marginalized group, the Dalits (referred to in government records as ‘Scheduled Castes’, and formerly known by the dehumanizing term ‘untouchables’). These quotas — which apply to almost all Indian research institutes — roughly correspond to these communities’ representation in the population, according to the most recent census of 2011.

But the historically privileged castes — the ‘General’ category in government records — still dominate many of India’s elite research institutions. Above the level of PhD students, the representation of Adivasis and Dalits falls off a cliff. Less than 1% of professors come from these communities at the top-ranked institutes among the 23 that together are known as the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), according to data provided to Nature under right-to-information requests (see ‘Diversity at top Indian institutions’; the figures are for 2020, the latest available at time of collection).

“This is deliberate” on the part of institutes that “don’t want us to succeed”, says Ramesh Chandra, a Dalit, who retired as a senior professor at the University of Delhi last June. Researchers blame institute heads for not following the reservation policies, and the government for letting them off the hook.

Diversity gaps are common in science in many countries but they take different forms in each nation. The situation in India highlights how its caste system limits scientific opportunities for certain groups in a nation striving to become a global research leader.

India’s government publishes summary student data, but its figures for academic levels beyond this don’t allow analyses of scientists by caste and academic position, and most universities do not publish these data. In the past few years, however, journalists, student groups and researchers have been gathering diversity data using public-information laws, and arguing for change. Nature has used some of these figures, and its own information requests, to examine the diversity picture. Together, these data show that there are major gaps in diversity in Indian science institutions.

Indians are top earners in the US, even ahead of Americans; China, Pakistan miles behind

https://www.firstpost.com/world/indians-are-top-earners-in-the-us-e...

According to an American Community Survey, Indian-Americans (USD 100,500) have the highest median household income in the US. They are ahead of people from countries like Sri Lanka, Japan, China and Pakistan


Top American lawmaker Rich McCormick, while addressing the US House of Representatives, recently said that the Indian-Americans constitute about one per cent of the US population and pay about six per cent of the taxes.

What’s more interesting to know is the fact that Indians are the highest earning ethnic group in the US — ahead of people from countries like Pakistan, China and Japan.

According to US Census Bureau, 2013-15 American Community Survey, Indian-Americans (USD 100,500) have the highest median household income in the Joe Biden-led country. They are ahead of people from countries like Sri Lanka, Japan, China and Pakistan.

The data also highlights that 70 per cent of the Indian-American population in America holds a Bachelor’s degree, while the national average is just 28 per cent.

While this data is from an old survey, a more recent numbers also indicate the same thing.

According to an August 2021 report of Press Trust of India, Indians in the US, with an average household earning of USD 123,700 and 79 per cent of college graduates, have surpassed the overall American population in terms of wealth and college education.

As per the latest census data in the US, the number of people who identify as Asian in the United States nearly tripled in the past three decades, and Asians are now the fastest-growing of the nation’s four largest racial and ethnic groups, the PTI report stated.

Why Indians have highest median household income in the US?

Harsh Goenka, chairman of RPG Enterprises, took to Twitter to share a chart that shows Indian Americans having the highest median household income in the US. He asserted that Indians shine in the US because “we value good education and are the most educated ethnic group.”

“We work very hard along with being frugal in our habits… We are smart… We are in IT, engineering and medicine- the highest paying jobs,” he added.

How Median Household Income is calculated?

Household income usually refers to the combined gross income of all members of a household above a specified age, according to Investopedia.

The median is the middle number in a group. For example, if there are three incomes in one household of Rs 10,000, Rs 15,000 and Rs 20,000, in this case median income is Rs 15,000.

Domination of Indian-Americans in the US

In his first speech in the US House of Representatives, Rich McCormick urged for a streamlined immigration process. “I rise to this occasion to just appreciate my constituents, especially those who have immigrated from India. We have a very large portion of my community that’s made up of almost 100,000 People who have immigrated directly from India. One out of every five doctors in my community is from India. They represent some of the best citizens we have in America, we should make sure that we streamline the immigration process for those who come here to obey the law and pay their taxes.”

He added, “Although they make up about 1 per cent of American society, they pay about 6 per cent of the taxes. They are amongst the top producers, and they do not cause problems. They follow laws. They don’t have the problems that we see other people have when they come to the emergency room for overdoses and depression anxiety because they’re the most productive, most family oriented and the best of what represents American citizens. God bless my Indian constituents”.

#Indian-#Americans Rapidly Climbing in #US Politics. The relative wealth of Indian #immigrants and high #education levels have propelled a rapid #political ascent for 2nd & 3rd generations. #KamalaHarris #NikkiHaley #Hindu #SiliconValley #Tech #Pakistan https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/27/us/politics/indian-american-poli...

In 2013, the House of Representatives had a single Indian American member. Fewer than 10 Indian Americans were serving in state legislatures. None had been elected to the Senate. None had run for president. Despite being one of the largest immigrant groups in the United States, Americans of Indian descent were barely represented in politics.

Ten years later, the Congress sworn in last month includes five Indian Americans. Nearly 50 are in state legislatures. The vice president is Indian American. Nikki Haley’s campaign announcement this month makes 2024 the third consecutive cycle in which an Indian American has run for president, and Vivek Ramaswamy’s newly announced candidacy makes it the first cycle with two.

In parts of the government, “we’ve gone literally from having no one to getting close to parity,” said Neil Makhija, the executive director of Impact, an Indian American advocacy group.

Most Indian American voters are Democrats, and it is an open question how much of their support Ms. Haley might muster. In the past, when Indian Americans have run as Republicans, they have rarely talked much about their family histories, but Ms. Haley is emphasizing her background.

Activists, analysts and current and former elected officials, including four of the five Indian Americans in Congress, described an array of forces that have bolstered the political influence of Indian Americans.

------


Indians did not begin moving to the United States in large numbers until after a landmark 1965 immigration law. But a number of factors, such as the relative wealth of Indian immigrants and high education levels, have propelled a rapid political ascent for the second and third generations.

Advocacy groups — including Impact and the AAPI Victory Fund — have mobilized to recruit and support them, and to direct politicians’ attention to the electoral heft of Indian Americans, whose populations in states including Georgia, Pennsylvania and Texas are large enough to help sway local, state and federal races.

“It’s really all working in tandem,” said Raj Goyle, a former state lawmaker in Kansas who co-founded Impact. “There’s a natural trend, society is more accepting, and there is deliberate political strategy to make it happen.”


------

In retrospect, the watershed appears to have been 2016, just after then-Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana became the first Indian American to run for president.



That was also the year (2016) Representatives Pramila Jayapal of Washington, Ro Khanna of California and Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois were elected, bringing the number of Indian Americans in the House from one — Representative Ami Bera of California, elected in 2012 — to four. It was also the year Kamala Harris became the first Indian American elected to the Senate.

I won a birth lottery on caste, but learned fortune need not mean cruelty
Shree Paradkar
By Shree ParadkarSocial & Racial Justice Columnist

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2023/04/15/i-won-a-birth-lotter...


I come from a Brahmin family. This means I won a birth lottery. It means that while other identities may pose barriers, caste is never one. In fact, in certain situations, it is the secret handshake that opens doors, sometimes literally.

Caste privilege looks like — among many things — never hesitating to say your last name, being considered to come from a “good family,” having a higher chance of a sheltered upbringing (innocence is prized but not granted to all women) and being treated with deference in public spaces.

Brahmins around me insist they are not casteist. They say they don’t even think about caste let alone know the names of various castes, yet their social circles are almost entirely made up of fellow Brahmins. They say that caste oppression is now reversed and that Brahmins are now the real victims, sidelined in the caste system.

These are debates without empirical data, backed up by an anecdote or two about an undeserving “lower caste” person getting this job or that. (For a Brahmin, everybody else is “lower caste.”) By various counts, Brahmins, who form about four to five per cent of the Hindu population, comprise half of Indian media decision-makers and at least a third of bureaucrats and judges. Meanwhile, according to Oxfam, Dalits’ life expectancy can be up to 15 years less than other groups.

If forced to discuss caste, Brahmins will often claim the orginal varna system was fluid at its founding thousands of years ago, again with no evidence that Dalits could ever have educated themselves enough to then be considered Brahmin. As Indian social justice advocate Dilip Mandal noted recently on Twitter Spaces, a discussion on caste is neither theological nor historical nor abstract. It’s about lived experiences today.

Being ignorant of caste is a marker of privilege. I, too, only learned of the details of the caste system thanks to the tireless advocacy of Equality Labs in the U.S. Understanding anti-Black racism awoke me to caste-based brutality. Of course, learning that one’s gloried background is the carrier of such cruelty causes harsh cognitive dissonance. Reckoning with this reality is painful, but that discomfort pales in comparison to the generations of trauma inflicted on the marginalized. There is also little point in guilt or self-hatred; both emotions, while wrenching, simply continue to centre on the self.

None of us are born with a ready-made analysis of oppression. None of us choose to be born into the identities we inherit. The least the holders of power can do is to sit quietly, listen, reflect — not “Am I complicit” but “In what ways am I complicit” — learn, make space. And then they should let go of the reins.

'Hindutva Is Nothing But Brahminism'

https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/hindutva-is-nothing-but-...


The author (Kancha Ilaiah) of Why I Am Not A Hindu on his view that 'Dalitisation' alone can effectively challenge the threat of Brahminical fascism parading in the garb of Hindutva.


How would you characterise contemporary Hindutva? What is the relationship between Hindutva and the Dalit-Bahujans?

As Dr.Ambedkar says, Hindutva is nothing but Brahminism. And whether you call it Hindutva or Arya Dharma or Sanatana Dharma or Hindusim, Brahminism has no organic link with Dalit-Bahujan life, world-views, rituals and even politics. To give you just one example, in my childhood many of us had not even heard of the Hindu gods, and it was only when we went to school that we learnt about Ram and Vishnu for the very first time. We had our own goddesses, such as Pochamma and Elamma, and our own caste god, Virappa. They and their festivals played a central role in our lives, not the Hindu gods. At the festivals of our deities, we would sing and dance--men, women and all-- and would sacrifice animals and drink liquor, all of which the Hindus consider 'polluting'.

Our relations with our deities were transactional and they were rooted in the production process. For instance, our goddess Kattamma Maisa. Her responsibility is to fill the tanks with water. If she does it well, a large number of animals are sacrificed to her. If in one year the tanks dry up, she gets no animals. You see, between her and her Dalit-Bahujan devotees there is this production relation which is central.



----
In fact, many Dalit communities preserve traditions of the Hindu gods being their enemies. In Andhra, the Madigas enact a drama which sometimes goes on for five days. This drama revolves around Jambavanta, the Madiga hero, and Brahma, the representative of the Brahmins. The two meet and have a long dialogue. The central argument in this dialogue is about the creation of humankind. Brahma claims superiority for the Brahmins over everybody else, but Jambavanta says, 'No, you are our enemy'. Brahma then says that he created the Brahmins from his mouth, the Kshatriyas from his hands, the Vaishyas from his thighs, the Shudras from his feet to be slaves for the Brahmins, and of course the Dalits, who fall out of the caste system, have no place here. This is the Vedic story.

What you are perhaps suggesting is that Dalit-Bahujan religion can be used to effectively counter the politics of Brahminism or Hindutva. But Brahminism has this knack of co-opting all revolt against it, by absorbing it within the system.

It is true that although Dalit-Bahujan religious formations historically operated autonomously from Hindu forms, they have never been centralised or codified. Their local gods and goddesses have not been projected into universality, nor has their religion been given an all-India name. This is because these local deities and religious forms were organically linked to local communities, and were linked to local productive processes, such as the case of Virappa and Katamma Maisa whom I talked about earlier. But Brahminism has consistently sought to subvert these religious forms by injecting notions of 'purity' and 'pollution', hierarchy and untouchability even among the Dalit-Bahujans themselves, while at the same time discounting our religious traditions by condemning them as 'polluting' or by Brahminising them.

A third of India's most sought after engineering graduates leave the country

https://qz.com/a-third-of-indias-iit-graduates-leave-the-country-18...

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31308/w31308.pdf

Banaras Hindu University saw a 540% spike in immigration among graduates after it was turned as an IIT in 2012

One-third of those graduating from the country’s prestigious engineering schools, particularly the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), migrate abroad.

Such highly-skilled persons account for 65% of the migrants heading to the US alone, a working paper (pdf) of the US-based National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) has concluded.


Nine out of 10 top scorers in the annual joint entrance examination held nationally for admission to the IITs and other reputed engineering colleges have migrated. Up to 36% of the top 1,000 scorers, too, have taken this path, according to the paper published this month.

In the US, there is a long list of IIT graduates now leading executives and CEOs. However, most immigrants move to the US as students and eventually join the US workforce. The NBER paper found that 83% of such immigrants pursue a Master’s degree or a doctorate.

“...through a combination of signaling and network effects, elite universities in source countries play a key role in shaping migration outcomes, both in terms of the overall propensity and the particular migration destination,” the report said.

India has 23 IITs across the country. The acceptance rates at most these hallowed institutions are lower than those of Ivy League colleges, especially at the most sought-after IITs at Kharagpur, Mumbai, Kanpur, Chennai, and Delhi. In 2023 alone, 189,744 candidates registered for the JEE, competing for only 16,598 seats.

Global economies are keen on highly skilled Indians
The US graduate program is a key pathway for migration, to recruit the “best and brightest,” the NBER report said.

Similarly, the UK’s High Potential Individual visa route lets graduates from the world’s top 50 non-UK universities, including the IITs, stay and work in the country for at least two years. For doctoral qualification, the work visa is for at least three years.

Fresh IIT graduates looking to move abroad are helped by a network of successful alumni and faculty already settled abroad, the report said. Some even provide access to particular programs where they have influence over admissions or hiring decisions.


The interesting case of Banaras Hindu University

In 2012, the century-old Banaras Hindu University (BHU), also India’s first central university, was accorded IIT status. The institute located in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, was elevated without any changes to its staff, curriculum, or admission system.

The NBER report studied 1,956 BHU students who graduated between 2005-2015 with a BTech, BPharm, MTech, or integrated dual degrees. It found a 540% increase in the probability of migration among graduates after the grant of the IIT status.

“...the quality of education/human capital acquired by the students in the cohorts before and after the change remained constant, while only the name of the university on the degree received differed,” the report said.

India’s diaspora is bigger and more influential than any in history
Adobe, Britain and Chanel are all run by people with Indian roots


https://www.economist.com/international/2023/06/12/indias-diaspora-...

The Indian government, by contrast, has been—at least until Mr Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp) took over—filled with people whose view of the world had been at least partly shaped by an education in the West. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, studied at Cambridge. Mr Modi’s predecessor, Manmohan Singh, studied at both Oxford and Cambridge.

India’s claims to be a democratic country steeped in liberal values help its diaspora integrate more readily in the West. The diaspora then binds India to the West in turn. The most stunning example of this emerged in 2008, when America signed an agreement that, in effect, recognised India as a nuclear power, despite its never having signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (along with Pakistan and Israel). Lobbying and fundraising by Indian-Americans helped push the deal through America’s Congress.

The Indian diaspora gets involved in politics back in India, too. Ahead of the 2014 general election, when Mr Modi first swept to power, one estimate suggests more than 8,000 overseas Indians from Britain and America flew to India to join his campaign. Many more used text messages and social media to turn out bjp votes from afar. They contributed unknown sums of money to the campaign.

Under Mr Modi, India’s ties to the West have been tested. In a bid to reassert its status as a non-aligned power, India has refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and stocked up on cheap Russian gas and fertiliser. Government officials spew nationalist rhetoric that pleases right-wing Hindu hotheads. And liberal freedoms are under attack. In March Rahul Gandhi, leader of the opposition Congress party, was disqualified from parliament on a spurious defamation charge after an Indian court convicted him of criminal defamation. Meanwhile journalists are harassed and their offices raided by the authorities.

Overseas Indians help ensure that neither India nor the West gives up on the other. Mr Modi knows he cannot afford to lose their support and that forcing hyphenated Indians to pick sides is out of the question. At a time when China and its friends want to face down a world order set by its rivals, it is vital for the West to keep India on side. Despite its backsliding, India remains invaluable—much like its migrants.

TOP TALENT, ELITE COLLEGES, AND MIGRATION:
EVIDENCE FROM THE INDIAN INSTITUTES OF TECHNOLOGY
Prithwiraj Choudhury
Ina Ganguli
Patrick Gaulé


https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31308/w31308.pdf


We study migration in the right tail of the talent distribution using a novel dataset of Indian high
school students taking the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE), a college entrance exam used for
admission to the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). We find a high incidence of
migration after students complete college: among the top 1,000 scorers on the exam, 36% have
migrated abroad, rising to 62%for the top 100 scorers. We next document that students who
attended the original “Top 5” Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) were 5 percentage points
more likely to migrate for graduate school compared to equally talented students who studied in
other institutions. We explore two mechanisms for these patterns: signaling, for which we study
migration after one university suddenly gained the IIT designation; and alumni networks, using
information on the location of IIT alumni in U.S. computer science departments.

------


Highly skilled immigrants make important contributions to innovation and technology in
the United States. Often, they study in elite universities in their home countries before getting
advanced degrees abroad. For example, many successful Indian immigrants in the technology
industry—including Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet Inc./Google, and Arvind Krishna, the
CEO of IBM—are undergraduate alumni of the selective Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs).
Similarly, Chinese students in U.S. Ph.D. programs overwhelmingly come from a set of highly
selective Chinese universities (Gaulé and Piacentini, 2013).
In this paper, we study migration in the very right tail of the talent distribution for high
school students in India, focusing on the extent to which elite universities in their home country
facilitate migration. We focus on the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). The IITs are
prestigious and highly selective technical universities with lower acceptance rates than Ivy League
colleges, particularly for the original five IIT Campuses.
1 Admission to the IITs is solely through
the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE), where nearly one million exam takers compete for less than ten
thousand spots. Desai, Kapur, McHale, and Rogers (2009) document anecdotal evidence related
to the role of elite institutions in India, such as the IITs and the All India Institute of Medical
Sciences, in facilitating skilled migration to the United States. IIT students have even been
described as “America’s most valuable import from India” (Leung, 2003).
Emigration is often difficult to observe from administrative datasets, and few surveys have
been conducted with a focus on top talent that are not selected on future success or mobility.
2 We
were able to overcome these challenges by leveraging the unanticipated public release of the names
and scores of JEE exam takers in 2010, combined with an intensive manual collection effort on
exam takers’ outcomes. The result is a novel dataset of high school students who took the JEE
exam, linked to college attended and later career, education, and migration outcomes. The data
provides individuals’ scores received on the exam and their national ranking. An important feature

Why #Indians don't want to be Indian #citizens anymore? More than 1.6 million Indians have renounced their Indian citizenship since 2011, including a whopping 225,620 in 2022 alone, averaging around 618 per day. #Modi #BJP #Hindutva
#chaos #anarchy
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/nri/migrate/why-indians-dont-w...

"The principal reason why people migrate is economic well being. Everyone wants a better life and their hope is that they would find it in another country," Amit Dasgupta, former Consul-General of India in Sydney, told IANS.

"In sociology, this is referred to as 'the push factor'. You are pushed out to a place which offers better prospects," Dasgupta said.Many Indian students who go for higher studies abroad also end up settling there as these countries provide them better jobs with attractive pay scales.According to the latest Education Ministry data, more than 770,000 Indian students went abroad to study in 2022 -- a six-year high.

Also, many Indian students find it tough to find jobs after returning home, which is why they apply for permanent residency in their country of study.

More than 90 per cent of the students do not wish to come back to India, say estimates.When it comes to India's rich, they want to swim in foreign waters to diversify their fortune, set up alternative residencies, conduct business and pursue a better quality of life even though India continues to be an attractive environment for business activity and corporate growth.

A 2020 Global Wealth Migration Review report said that among many reasons why people make the decision to migrate to other countries is safety of women and children, lifestyle factors like climate and pollution, financial concerns including taxes, better healthcare for families and educational opportunities for children, and to escape oppressive governments.A low passport score of a country can also make individuals emigrate.

A higher passport index ranking ensures one gets better access to travel visa-free to many countries.The Indian passport registered the largest global fall in the Passport Index 2023 -- ranking at 144th position this year with a mobility score of 70.

This means Indians can travel to 21 countries visa-free, and need a visa for 128 countries.In contrast, a Greece or Portugal residency card provides Indians visa-free travel across all Schengen countries.

Hindu Violence against Buddhism in India has NO Parallel


by Syed Ehtisham


The ruthless demolition of Buddha statues by the Taliban leaders in Afghanistan has invited severe criticisms from different quarters of the world. It is quite surprising to note that the Hindu Nazi-led Indian Govt. supported by all other Hindu Nazis has condemned the Taliban action. It appears paradoxical that the ancestors of the present Hindu Nazis in India wantonly destroyed the Buddhist statues and brutally killed the followers of Buddha in India. An impartial student of history can unequivocally remark that the Indian Nazis have no moral right to criticise the Taliban action.

Hundreds of the Buddhist statues, Stupas and Viharas were destroyed in India between 830 AD and 966 AD in the name of the revival of Hinduism. Indigenous and foreign sources, both literary and archaeological, speak volumes of the havoc done to Buddhism by the Nazis in India.

Role of Sankaracharya
Nazi leaders like the Sankaracharyas and many kings and rulers took pride in demolishing the Buddhist images aiming at the total eradication of the Buddhist culture. Today, their descendants destroyed the Babri Masjid and they have also published a list of mosques to be destroyed in the near future. It is with this sin of pride that they are condemning the deed on the part of the Afghans.

The Hindu ruler, Pushyamitra Sunga, demolished 84,000 Buddhist stupas which had been built by Ashoka the Great (Romila Thaper, Ashoka and Decline of Mauryas, London, 1961, p 200). It was followed by the smashing of the Buddhist centres in Magadha. Thousands of Buddhist monks were mercilessly killed. King Jalaluka destroyed the Buddhist viharas within his jurisdiction on the ground that the chanting of the hymns by the Buddhist devotees disturbed his sleep. (Kalhana, Rajatharangini, 1:40). In Kashmir, King Kinnara demolished thousands of Viharas and captured the Buddhists villages to please the Brahmins. (Kalhana 1:80).

Demon’s role

A large number of Buddhist viharas were usurped by the Brahmins and converted into Hindu temples where the Untouchables were given no entrance. The Buddhist places were projected as the Hindu temples by writing Puranas which were concocted myths or pseudo-history.

The important temples found at Tirupati, Ahoble, Undavalli, Ellora, Bengal, Puri, Badrinath, Mathura, Ayodhya, Sringeri, Bodhgaya, Sarnath, Delhi, Nalanda, Gudimallam, NagarjunaKonda, Srisailam and Sabarimala (Lord Ayyappa) in Kerala are some of the striking examples of the Brahmanic usurpation of the Buddhist centres.

At Nagarjunakonda, the Adi Sankara played a demon’s role in destroying the Buddhist statues and monuments. Longhurst who conducted excavations at Nagarjunakonda has recorded this in his book Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India No: 54, The Buddhist Antiquities of Nagarjunakonda (Delhi, 1938, p.6.).

Non-Brahmins burnt alive
The ruthless manner in which all the buildings at Nagarjunakonda were destroyed is simply appalling and cannot represent the work of treasure-seekers because many of the pillars, statues, and sculptures have been wantonly smashed to pieces. Local tradition relates that the Brahmin teacher Sankaracharya came to Nagarjunakonda with a host of followers and destroyed the Buddhist monuments. The cultivated lands on which the ruined buildings stand was a religious grant made to Sankaracharya.

In Kerala, Sankaracharya and his close associate Kumarila Bhatta, an avowed enemy of Buddhism, organized a religious crusade against the Buddhists. We get a vivid description of the pleasure of Sankaracharya on seeing the people of non-Brahmanic faith being burnt to death from the book Sankara Digvijaya.

op Source Countries of Immigrant STEM Workers in US in 2019

1. India (720,000) 2. China (273,000) 3. Mexico (119,000), 4. Vietnam (100,000), 5. Philippines (87,000), 6. South Korea (84,000), 7. Canada (56,000), 8. Taiwan (53,000), 9. Russia (45,000), 10. Pakistan (35,000).

https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/foreign-born-stem-workers-united-states

Since 2000, the share of foreign-born workers in the STEM workforce has increased by more than 40 percent.

The share of foreign-born workers in STEM occupations has grown significantly in recent years. As shown in Table 2, the number of foreign-born STEM workers increased from 1.2 million (16.4 percent of the STEM workforce) in 2000 to 2.5 million (23.1 percent of the STEM workforce) in 2019.

Because immigrant STEM workers tend to possess skills that complement those of their U.S.-born co-workers, the presence of immigrants in the workplace increases the productivity (and therefore the wages) of all workers. Moreover, innovation by immigrant workers increases the revenue of the firms in which they work, which enables employers to hire more workers. The overall share of workers who are foreign-born and hold advanced degrees from either a U.S. or a foreign university is also associated with higher levels of employment among U.S.-born workers. A 10 percent increase in the share of foreign-born workers with advanced degrees working in STEM occupations boosted the U.S.-born employment rate by 0.03 percent. This means that every additional 100 foreign-born workers with an advanced degree working in a STEM occupation creates roughly 86 jobs for U.S. workers.

Latest US Census Data Released in 2023

https://data.census.gov/table/ACSSPP1Y2022.S0201?q=S0201:+Selected+...

Pakistani-Americans Median Household Earning: $106,281, Mean Earnings: $149,178

---------------


White Americans: Median household Income $78,636 Mean Earnings $112,415

African Americans : $52,238 $76,888

American Indian Alaska Native $61,778 $85,838

Asian Indian $152,341 $197,732

Bangladeshi $80,288 $116,500

Chinese $101,738 $160,049

Taiwanese $122,952 $180,906

Filipino $109,090 $122,635

Pakistanis $106,286 $149,178

Nepal $92,262 $120,146

Asians $104,646 $149,363

Social Realities of Indian Americans: Results From the 2020 Indian American Attitudes Survey - Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

https://carnegieendowment.org/2021/06/09/social-realities-of-indian...


Thirty percent of non-citizen IAAS respondents possess a green card (or a permanent residency card), which places them on a pathway to gaining U.S. citizenship. Twenty-seven percent are H-1B visa holders, a visa status for high-skilled or specialty workers in the United States that has historically been dominated by the technology sector. On average, an H-1B visa holder reports living in the United States for eight years, although 36 percent of H-1B beneficiaries report spending more than a decade in the country (that is, they arrived before 2010). Eighteen percent of non-citizens reside in the United States on an H-4 visa, a category for immediate family members of H-1B visa holders. Fourteen percent of non-citizens are on F-1, J-1, or M-1 visas—categories of student or scholar visas—while another 5 percent hold an L-1 visa, a designation available to employees of an international company with offices in the United States. A small minority of non-citizen respondents—6 percent—claim some other visa status.

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The overwhelming majority of Hindus with a caste identity—more than eight in ten—self-identify as belonging to the category of General or upper caste.

The Hindutva Lobby, by Andrew Cockburn

https://harpers.org/archive/2024/10/the-hindutva-lobby-hindu-nation...

In the summer of 2023, California legislators approved a bill banning discrimination on the grounds of caste. Defined in the bill as “an individual’s perceived position in a system of social stratification on the basis of inherited status,” caste is a central feature of life for hundreds of millions of people in India and beyond. The measure had been championed by California’s Dalit community. Once known as “untouchables,” Dalits occupy the bottommost rung of the Hindu hierarchy, and they have traditionally been confined to menial occupations on the fringes of Indian society, purely by virtue of their birth.

Dalits in California report that this ancient system has been imported to the United States where it remains prevalent in the Indian diaspora, including among those in the tech industry. “They say that in California this doesn’t exist,” declared the measure’s sponsor, State Senator Aisha Wahab. “If it doesn’t exist, then why do we have so many people advocating for the need of this bill?” (As if to corroborate Wahab’s allegations, Google had canceled a planned talk in 2022 by the Dalit activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan, in reaction to the vehement objections posted on internal Google message boards that denounced her as “Hinduphobic”—a common defense against claims of casteism.) Despite furious opposition from leading figures in California’s Hindu tech community—such as Asha Jadeja Motwani, widow of the engineer who helped craft the original Google search algorithm—by September the measure had passed both House and Senate with overwhelming bipartisan majorities and was sent to Governor Gavin Newsom for his signature. While Newsom deliberated, Dalit activists, led by Soundararajan, waged a monthlong hunger strike outside the state legislature. Then, in October, Newsom announced that he was vetoing the bill. It was unnecessary, he claimed, because any discrimination was already covered by existing civil-rights laws.

Newsom’s decision took many by surprise, but others knew better. A month earlier, the ambitious governor, widely considered a future Democratic presidential candidate, flew to Chicago, where Joe Biden’s campaign had convened major donors for a meeting of the Biden Victory Fund PAC. Among them was Ramesh Kapur, a wealthy Massachusetts entrepreneur, whose voice and checkbook carry weight in the firmament of Democratic Party fundraising. In Chicago, Kapur made it clear to Newsom that he faced an important choice: if he ever hoped to secure Kapur’s support, he had better make the right decision on the caste bill. Kapur was hoping to encourage competition between Newsom and Kamala Harris, whose mother was Indian. “I raised money for her when she ran for the Senate and the presidency,” Kapur told me. (His goal, he said, is to elect the first Indian-American president—“hopefully before I get reincarnated!”) “If you want to be our next president,” Kapur bluntly informed the governor, “veto the bill.”

Newsom received an equally unequivocal message from Ajay Jain Bhutoria, another major Biden fundraiser who had served as deputy finance chair of the Democratic Party. “We used very strong words,” Bhutoria, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, later recounted on Twitter,

Excerpts from "They Called Us Exceptional" by Prachi Gupta (pp. 7-8) . Crown. Kindle Edition.

White America crafted a tempting story to explain the ascent of Asian Americans—“an important racial minority pulling itself up from hardship and discrimination to become a model of self-respect and achievement,” as a 1966 article in U.S. News & World Report described Chinese Americans. Those once seen as “Yellow Peril” and “Dusky Peril” became a “model minority,” creating a new racial category: Asians were those who could assimilate into whiteness but maintain a distinct cultural identity. In America, riches await, and with a little grit, anyone can reap them. The story tempered the racial progress of the civil-rights era, as if to tell Black people: If those Asians can be so successful, why can’t you? Racism was a part of America’s sordid past. The success of these new Asians proved that. Indian Americans have since been allotted a specific prominence within the context of this story. In 2009, the year I graduated from college, an article in Forbes declared Indian Americans “the new model minority,” hailing families like ours as “the latest and greatest ‘model.’ ” Within a little more than a generation, Indian Americans have become one of the wealthiest and most highly educated immigrant groups in the country, earning a median income of more than one hundred thousand dollars. The steep ascent of Indian Americans reified the pernicious model-minority myth. They called us exceptional. We fulfilled their prophecy. But the story of our subcommunity’s rise wasn’t one of genetics, nor can it simply be explained by work ethic, as pundits may have one believe. The true story, as described in The Other One Percent: Indians in America, is largely due to a rigorous but invisible selection process that often begins in India itself. In India’s highly stratified society, middle- and upper-class Indians from dominant castes typically access the best schools and jobs that feed into opportunities in America, which favor immigrants who bring specialized skills in tech and science. The result: an American diasporic community that is roughly nine times more educated than Indians in India. These conditions enabled Indian families like ours—families that had been thrice-filtered and stratified—to prosper like few other immigrant groups have ever done in America. Even though pockets of Indian Americans still struggle, this insular group has become the poster image for America’s post-racial fantasy.

Debunking the Gandhi Myth: Arundhati Roy

https://youtu.be/4-yMiBGBOe0?si=S3W67tFMyc3-XTNu

Gandhi defended the caste system. Called it a genius.

Gandhi was a Hindu, a religion that sanctified the caste system.

Gandhi fought for the rights of Indian traders in South Africa to have the freedom to do business in Transvaal. He helped create a third category of race between Whites and Blacks with higher status and greater rights than Blacks.

Gandhi was a misogynist. Ambedkar believed that control of women was at the heart of the caste system imposed by the upper caste Hindus. Ambedkar supported Dalit conversion to other religions to get away from the Hindu caste system

Ashok Swain
@ashoswai
The Times of India calls Indian-Americans the 'New Jews'! They call Tulsi Gabbard, a West Samoan Indian because she belongs to a Hindu cult. Even compares Pichai & Nadella with Einstein. Jews had fled to the US because of Hitler. Why Indian-Americans are fleeing from India? Modi?

https://x.com/ashoswai/status/1872775624131264657

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How NRIs in the US became the ‘new Jews’ in the immigration debate - Times of India

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-plus/international/how-nris...

Jagdish Bhagwati, the influential economist who has taught at MIT and Columbia in the US for over half a century, once described Indians as the new Jews in America, successful in all fields except the mafia. He may have meant it in a lighter vein, but there’s lots of data to back up what he said.

The Indian-American community is easily the most successful ethnic minority in the US, with members occupying prominent positions in government, business and academia, among other fields. Its annual median household income of about $145,000 in 2022 was almost double the US household median income of $77,540 (the median income for white households was pegged at $80,320).

Ashok Swain
@ashoswai
Vivek Ramaswamy exposes his Sanghi mindset behind the put-on American accent. Hindutva Brahmins think and believe they are culturally superior to anyone else, even White Americans!

https://x.com/ashoswai/status/1872758996895187405

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Vivek Ramaswamy
@VivekGRamaswamy
The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.

A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.

A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers.

(Fact: I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates).

More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”

Most normal American parents look skeptically at “those kinds of parents.” More normal American kids view such “those kinds of kids” with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.

Now close your eyes & visualize which families you knew in the 90s (or even now) who raise their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest.

“Normalcy” doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.

This can be our Sputnik moment. We’ve awaken from slumber before & we can do it again. Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.

That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence. I’m confident we can do it. 🇺🇸 🇺🇸