I was born and brought up in Chennai. So I knew almost nothing about caste. I did study in a Brahmin school called Vidya Mandir Adyar. There of course caste was evident. Everybody knew who was a Brahmin and who was not a Brahmin. The way Brahmin kids moved with non Brahmins and the way Brahmin kids moved with Brahmins was different. So that was very evident. But it was never open caste discrimination. But yeah, there was some discrimination amongst students and even with teachers. Maybe in Chennai even Brahmins discriminate and keep a distance from others, but other caste they never discriminate. Outside my school there seems to be no caste discrimination whatsoever. So I almost never knew about caste. Only school was weird.

In eleventh standard, I moved to Kumaraja Muttaya Higher Secondary School. There was simply no caste discrimination and I never knew that my fellow mates could be so friendly, and I have never experienced that in my last ten years in Vidya Mandir, it was so weird and refreshing, Everybody respected me by default, and I never held grudge against anybody, because none treated me bad. In Vidya Mandir, if you can show me my classmate and ask him whether he’s a Brahmin or not, I could tell it. In Kumarajya Muttaya, if you show me a person, my classmate and ask me his class, there is no way I am going to know about it. It simply wasn’t there.

The cast was over. I never experienced caste in my higher secondary school. I never experienced caste in my college, and I never experienced cast in my twenty years of work. Except for one incident. When I worked in HCL, somehow a guy found that I belonged to his caste and he started inviting me for marriages and other functions. I never respected it. So maybe, yeah, his grudge against me led to my downfall in HCL.

The mind of a Chennai person never ever thinks about caste. I was born and brought up in Chennai and I know it. Almost nobody in Chennai experiences existence of caste. We do know what caste we belong to, we do know it exists (unfortunately), but it serves us no practical purpose.

I did consult for one of my friends’ company, and they are from South Tamilnadu, and every second and every breath in their life is caste. I really don’t know why. Why caste matters for them so much. It was funny moving with them. They would say this film, this scene, where a upper caste person is doing something wrong to a lower caste person. I never saw it that way. I just saw a bad guy doing wrong stuff to a good guy. That’s it. It was very weird the way they interpreted everything on the basis of caste.

For a Chennai person who thinks that there is almost no caste stuff, (maybe Chennai Brahmin’s stick with it,) this was really weird. These guys are not Brahmins. These guys are normal Tamils, but they seem to be adherent to caste so much. It was then I remembered, it was before my marriage, one of the person who was working under me and who was from Madurai said ‘You can never get married to a girl who’s from another caste.’ It was weird. In fact, he was five years younger than me and his thought was thousands of years old. I couldn’t respond. I was just appalled by his old rusty brain. I didn’t get married to a girl who’s not from my caste, and none of us felt any caste come between us.

One of my friend he is from Cheyaar, Tamil Nadu, he says there are different streets in this village where only people of certain castes are allowed. So there is a street for lower caste and there is a street for higher caste. This village is kind of one hundred and forty kilometers from Chennai, and I’m just so appalled by existence of this system. On the brighter side, it looks like the system is waning now.

What I find is, yes, from my first standard to tenth standard is weird because I studied with Brahmins who for past thousands of years have been taught that they are the superior, and they are the one who are supposed to uphold caste system. So I understand their pathetic state of mind. But outside my school I never experienced any caste, but in s people who are living in South Tamilnadu, caste seems to dominate everything.

It’s very weird for me because I don’t even believe in religion. My Muslim and Christian friends go to temples, they consult Hindu astrologers, whereas I totally don’t believe. People from my family go to church, mosque, and all those stuffs. There is no real difference between any religion in Chennai, as far as I know. But people in South Tamilnadu are so much adhering to caste. Even after they have grown up, even after they seem to know caste has got to do nothing with human talent, and it has got nothing to do with whoever you are. In fact, people of two different caste in Tamil Nadu eat the same stuff, study in the same school, speak the same language, go to the same jobs. Tamilnadu is a homogeneous society.

Tamil Nadu is a state where tall leaders rose. None in Tamil Nadu have their cast names after their name. It was because of the calling of Periyaar, everybody dropped it. If you are a Tamil and have a caste name after your name, you are seen as a barbaric person, stuck in the old ways. In such a state, people from the south, they believe in caste so much, and they have Tamil, they are not even Brahmins who believe the Varna system of segregating humans like cattle. It just shocks me.

Caste was there in Chennai. My grandfather’s name and the end carried the cast name, but he dropped it. He never signed our caste name, and it was not listed in no official records, but called by his name, everybody called him by his caste name, and his caste name also carried some kind of superiority in society. He didn’t mind, but today’s generation if somebody calls me with my cast name I will get really wild.

I am a Tamil. I never want to belong to a group that says it’s superior to all other fellow humans. It’s a scientific fallacy to claim like that. So I don’t really want my caste name. I wish somehow people of southern Tamil Nadu get the mindset of Chennai people, and somehow they come out of this caste system. There’s nothing in it. There’s nothing in caste. One should think about development and adding value to society than worrying about caste.

What else to say?