The Surface Dwellers Are at It Again Meme

Trapped in Silicon Valley'south Hidden Degree Arrangement​

Built-in in a cowshed in India, Siddhant at present works for Meta in California. But he hides his groundwork as a Dalit and fears he tin can never reveal his true self.

Indians from oppressed caste backgrounds are landing plum jobs in Silicon Valley. But tech is no escape from the bigotry of their homeland. Photograph: Arsenii Vaselenko

Siddhant was 14 when he learned of the watch. His father, a depression-wage worker on the Indian railway, was trying to salvage up for information technology, tucking away a few rupees when he could. Fabricated of steel, the watch had in its dial a sketch of a portly man, his face framed by circular glasses and his wide shoulders clad in a broad-lapelled jacket. It was his male parent'south hero, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the man nearly responsible for weakening the caste system'due south grip on Indian order.
After school, Siddhant liked to ride his bike down the crowded streets of Nagpur, Republic of india, past groups of kids playing cricket, to a squat concrete building where his father rented a small office with his friends, all anti-caste activists. Inside, he'd find the men sitting in plastic chairs, swapping tales of their exploits with Ambedkar, surrounded by posters of the man and newspapers spilling off bookshelves. Equally he sabbatum listening, Siddhant couldn't help just notice equally i friend so another and a third appeared at the office with the sentry strapped to their wrists.

1 twenty-four hours, Siddhant showed up on his cycle and, to his immense surprise, saw on his father a different version of the watch. A souvenir from a big-shot friend, this one was insufficiently luxe. Instead of the metallic strap it had a leather band, and it was quartz, battery-powered rather than a windup. Siddhant couldn't help but blurt out: "I want that scout!"

Siddhant, like his begetter, is a Dalit, a member of the virtually oppressed caste in Southern asia'southward nascency-based hierarchy. Fifty-fifty amongst Dalits, their family was especially poor. Siddhant sometimes spent his evenings crouched near the firepit where his family cooked their nutrient, repairing his torn rubber sandals with a hot iron rod that melted the straps dorsum onto the sole. Seeing his father's watch, something clicked: This was a symbol of everything he was later—to exist an aristocracy, educated Dalit, just like Ambedkar.

Siddhant'due south father made him a deal. If Siddhant finished loftier school with start honors, he could have the watch. A yr later, Siddhant came home brandishing his report bill of fare from the Maharashtra board of instruction: He'd done it. While his begetter, beaming, scanned the results, Siddhant grabbed the lookout man off a shelf and adjusted the strap to his wrist.

Siddhant has worn the watch virtually every day since—while riding his cycle 12 miles to college, while earning his first paycheck every bit an engineer, while getting married. When he flew across the Atlantic to commencement a tech career in the San Francisco Bay Area, he wore it. It was on his wrist when he interviewed for, and landed, the task that convinced him he might finally escape the orbital pull of India and his family's multigenerational poverty: as a software engineer at Facebook, with an offer parcel that totaled almost $450,000.

In Silicon Valley, it's routine for people from India to land high-paying jobs; they make upwards a full quarter of the technical workforce. Yet those successes have, almost exclusively, come from historically privileged castes. Seven decades after Republic of india legally abolished "untouchability," many Dalits yet contend with enormous setbacks—hate crimes, poverty, express economic opportunity.
When they practice find their fashion to the Us, Dalits tend to keep their backgrounds private to avoid inviting trouble. "It is very, very dangerous, revealing the identity even to any person," says Siddhant, who asked to employ a pseudonym. In 2020, such fears may have seemed justified when a California country agency filed a lawsuit confronting the San Jose–based tech giant Cisco, alleging caste bigotry against a Dalit employee. In the weeks that followed, more Dalit tech workers came frontward. A South Asian civil rights group called Equality Labs received more than 250 unsolicited complaints confronting colleagues at Google, Netflix, Amazon, and Facebook, among other places. The individuals claimed that other Indians had made casteist slurs, engaged in discriminatory hiring and firing, sexually harassed them, and aggressively hunted for bear witness of a closeted Dalit'due south caste.

On the dial of Siddhant's watch is a sketch of Bhimrao Ambedkar, the human being well-nigh responsible for weakening the degree arrangement'southward grip on Indian club.
Photograph: Arsenii Vaselenko

For outsiders, caste grievances can be difficult—bordering on impossible—to recognize. "One of the most dangerous things almost degree," says Yashica Dutt, writer of the memoir Coming Out as Dalit, "is that it'due south invisible. And considering it's invisible, there are many codes and cloak-and-dagger languages that exist around us." Questions virtually a person's last name or abode hamlet can exist seen as invasive attempts to identify degree. A pat on the shoulder might be a friendly greeting—or a search for a sacred thread that some ascendant-caste Hindu men wear beneath their shirts. What counts equally a transgression varies from person to person, but Dalits tend to agree that constantly navigating caste is a tremendous burden. Their lives are weighed down past always wondering whether a bad thing happened to them because of who they are.

For Siddhant, who at present lives in the South Bay in a $2 million home, wearing his begetter'southward Ambedkar watch reminds him of where he comes from—and where he still wants to get. Even now, whenever the stakes seem specially high, he'll put on the lookout and double-check that his shirt sleeves are long enough to conceal it.

Only every fourth dimension he chooses to consciously hide his identity, he agonizes over whether it's time to out himself. Because money and prestige are not, on their own, enough. Siddhant is waiting for some moment, some sign, that he can finally put his anxieties to residue and merely be himself.

Bhimrao Ambedkar, the father of the modern Dalit movement, was born in 1891. At the time, social movements against India'due south caste orthodoxy were gaining momentum. His family unit was from the Mahar caste, which ranked betwixt other Dalit communities of rope makers and leather workers. Ambedkar's father worked in the military. His job gave the family unit a small amount of social mobility, and Ambedkar attended schools where he could report English. But he faced frequent hostilities. His teachers barred him from sharing a water tap with his classmates and from studying Sanskrit, the language of ancient Hindu scriptures.

Still, he excelled. He became the first Dalit to win a prominent regional scholarship, which allowed him to travel to New York to study at Columbia University. There, he was mentored by social reformers such as John Dewey and had a close-up view of the women's suffrage motility. Ambedkar began crafting a blueprint for a radically equal guild, which later formed the basis of his famous spoken communication, The Annihilation of Caste.

He left New York to earn a PhD at the London School of Economics, where he continued to enjoy life every bit an equal to his classmates. Simply when he returned to Bharat, doors slammed in his face up. Eventually, a London acquaintance recommended him for a professorship in Bombay, but even at that place he was not allowed to share drinking h2o with the other professors.

And then, in 1926, the governor of Bombay nominated Ambedkar for the one metropolis council seat representing the untouchable community. He started to requite radical speeches advocating for economical and social equality, and he grew a following. Every bit violence against resistant Dalits grew, Ambedkar's supporters formed the paramilitary grouping Samata Sainik Dal, or Regular army of Soldiers for Equality, to assistance spread his message. The soldiers helped protect thousands of Dalits when they followed Ambedkar on a march to the Mahad hamlet in Maharashtra, where he performed the radical human action of drinking from a communal well.

Ambedkar studied parallels to caste elsewhere, and in the 1940s he appealed to W. E. B. Du Bois in a letter: "There is then much similarity betwixt the Untouchables of India and of the position of the Negroes in America that the report of the latter is non only natural just necessary," he wrote. In 1947, equally India became independent from Britain, Ambedkar became the new land's constabulary minister. He was tasked with drafting its constitution, and he used the opportunity to work on caste protections. He outlawed discrimination based on degree, race, and sexual practice and introduced affirmative action. But the reforms didn't go as far every bit he wanted. He concluded upward resigning in frustration.

Ambedkar believed that Hinduism codification Dalits' oppression, and he closely studied South asia'southward religions in search of an alternative. In October 1956, Dalits far and wide left their homes on foot to trek to a xiv-acre site in Nagpur. In front of a body of water of men and women dressed mostly in white, Ambedkar converted himself from Hinduism to a new faith: Buddhism. Then he turned to the hundreds of thousands of Dalits earlier him and recited 22 vows to convert them to his interpretation of the religion. By shedding Hinduism, they were announcing they no longer believed their by lives condemned them to their electric current fate.

Among the Samata Sainik Dal soldiers working the consequence that day was Siddhant's father, age nineteen. Two decades afterward, his wife gave nascency to Siddhant in a cowshed in a remote village exterior Nagpur. They moved soon after to a slum in the city. Like their young man slum dwellers, they raised him as both a Buddhist and fervent follower of Ambedkar—an Ambedkarite.

For Siddhant'south first 13 years, his family lived in a small-scale hut next to a shop that sold cheap liquor. In the evenings, crowds milled around outside, fights erupted, and drive-past stabbings occurred regularly. Every morning, Siddhant and his mother woke up at 4 to fetch water from the public tap, which ran for a few hours a 24-hour interval. The men of the slum left for work early as well, oft to jobs equally day laborers, garbage collectors, or rickshaw pullers.

The kids in his neighborhood often got into smoking and drinking, but Siddhant'south male parent kept strict spotter over him and his four siblings. He spoke to them of Ambedkar every bit a godlike figure with the ability to uplift them and who ought to be emulated—so education came kickoff. Siddhant first attended a school his father helped build, where lessons were conducted in Marathi, the primary language of Maharashtra, and teachers shared stories from the lives of Buddha and Ambedkar. When he was 9, Siddhant started accompanying his begetter to weeklong activist camps, where they spent afternoons discussing how Buddha's teachings and Ambedkar'due south life lessons might improve their own lives and communities.

It was around this historic period when his mother, walking barefoot, stepped on a metal spike, and a bad infection caused her leg to swell. They couldn't beget the hospital entry fee, and Siddhant's begetter raised funds for days while she suffered at habitation. Luckily, she survived, merely Siddhant became convinced that he had to get his family out of those circumstances. His optics were as well opening to life beyond India. When his father's school welcomed a visit from Japanese Buddhists, Siddhant tagged along to greet them—and discovered the existence of airports and airplanes. When an Ambedkarite doctor came to visit his family unit, Siddhant was in awe: Here was a real professional, with a stethoscope, willing to stay nether their humble roof. Transfixed past the doctor's stories, Siddhant realized he wanted to be like him, both a professional person and a social activist.

Past the time Siddhant was in the eighth grade, his father had scraped together enough savings to move the family out of the slum and into a new neighborhood, where they were surrounded past families from privileged castes. Siddhant and his mother worked difficult to build their new domicile by hand, with Siddhant collecting water to pour into the concrete to assist it prepare. In high schoolhouse, when his teachers switched from conducting his math and science courses in Marathi to English language, Siddhant started tripping over unfamiliar words such as "perpendicular," and he compiled a personal dictionary in the back pages of his notebooks. As he neared graduation, he got his first pair of closed-toe shoes. When he enrolled in Nagpur University to study calculator engineering, he was 1 of two Dalits out of nigh lxxx students in the program. He figured it was his best shot at one mean solar day becoming known as a sahib—a sir, someone worthy of respect.

To bring in extra income, Siddhant and his older sister took on tutoring jobs, and during the massive almanac festival to celebrate Ambedkar'southward conversion, he set upward a stall to sell his hero's written works. The earnings helped pay for his textbooks and gave him pocket money to start riding the motorcoach to schoolhouse. His grades were proficient. But when he'd eavesdrop a classmate say that he was in that location only because of affirmative activity, he'd start to experience cocky-conscious. When Siddhant applied for a chore as an technology trainee at the urging of a professor, his interviewer asked probing questions about his family's home, their last name, and his father's vocation—all of which elicited answers that pinpointed his caste. Siddhant didn't get the job. He was convinced it was because of his caste.

He hopped on the train to Bombay, moved in with a roommate who didn't object to his caste, and eventually took his grad school archway exams. When he learned he had gotten into IIT Bombay itself, he phoned his family to deliver the joyous news. Moreover, he had been accepted non through the category reserved for his degree merely as a research banana, which would help fund his education and allow him to send coin home.

The position came with a phone and desktop computer, which Siddhant set in his room. Feeling isolated at the cutthroat university, he used his new computer to search the schoolhouse databases for recognizable Dalit names. He sent out cold emails to 60-odd students, inviting them to a meeting in his room; nearly 25 showed up. He started a Yahoo group for Dalits and called it Apna IIT—apna existence the Hindi give-and-take for "mine." They met up in his room to talk, study, and share his phone and calculator.

When Siddhant was in his final twelvemonth at IIT and preparing his thesis, a professor presented him with a challenge. The professor was nearly to exit for the US, and he said he would return to supervise Siddhant's thesis just if he finished v big assignments in three months. Siddhant thought information technology was an impossible chore. But he pigeon in and slogged through 17-hr days. The whole time, though, he wondered whether the professor causeless he would requite up because of his caste. Siddhant had seen other classmates from oppressed backgrounds drop out after facing similar obstacles. At the three-calendar month mark, Siddhant submitted the assignment, and the professor kept his give-and-take. Siddhant figured, with a impact of both pride and despair, that he had proven to the professor that his caste would not concur him back.

With the help of a professor, Siddhant got a job at a tech startup in Bangalore (now known every bit Bengaluru), and he felt freer to be himself. It was a small thing, but he allowed himself to roll up his sleeves and expose his watch. In his home state of Maharashtra, his concluding name was a expressionless giveaway. Just in Bengaluru, in a different region with different customs, he felt he could pass more easily every bit a privileged-caste person.

When Siddhant's bosses told him they were sending him to work in the United states, he was ecstatic. He flew to Chicago and moved with three Indian colleagues into a iii-room, company-endemic apartment in the Chicago suburb of Schaumburg. Siddhant slept in the hallway. His roommates were Hindus from Tamil Nadu who chose to wear the sacred white thread beyond their chest and over their left shoulders to marker their Brahmin identity. Siddhant decided, given the circumstances, that he had no choice but to be himself. In the mornings, he said a quick two-minute prayer to Ambedkar. When a roommate invited him to a local temple, Siddhant told him he was "no longer" a Hindu—a clear reference to caste and his bequeathed conversion—and his roommate's jaw dropped in surprise. Merely in the evenings their common interests took precedence, and they binged movies and talked politics.

On the surface, his new life was a dream come true. Merely he again felt isolated. And he was uneasy about abandoning his community back domicile. So Siddhant saved every penny, and in October 2004 he quit and returned to India, to the urban center of Pune, a startup hub southeast of Mumbai. He got a new chore, started another Apna Yahoo group, and, with a few others, rented a two-sleeping accommodation apartment to serve equally an function for Ambedkarite activities. Every weekend, some 50 people, mostly bachelors in Information technology, showed up. They strategized how to act on Ambedkar'south call to "educate, arouse, and organize" people living in dissimilar slums while tutoring each other and discussing technical work.

At piece of work, withal, Siddhant still kept a depression profile, peculiarly afterward his director said he needed to rent more people—and and then rattled off a bunch of dominant-degree surnames as examples. Knowing Dalits struggled to go hired and secure housing, Siddhant started a small training constitute and a service to find people hostels. He recruited tutors at local Buddha viharas, the spaces where Buddhists gathered and prayed, and paid them out of pocket to teach English and math. Dreaming of becoming a founder, Siddhant also tried to build a startup aimed at hiring people from marginalized communities, but the company didn't last. Meanwhile, his solar day job wasn't going well either. When his company lost a US customer, his director blamed Siddhant for screwing up the contract. Siddhant ended that his manager had picked him as the easiest scapegoat—again, because of his caste.

Distressed, Siddhant quit and found a job at Cisco, which recruits much of its workforce in Republic of india. He earned roughly $fifty,000, on the high end for Indian engineers. In 2015, inspired past tales of Indian American CEOs and sky-high salaries, he persuaded his managers to transport him back to the The states, but this fourth dimension to the Bay Area, along with his wife and 2 children.

In the US, he used his Apna groups to start meeting other Ambedkarites. Only outside his Dalit world, he kept his rima oris shut well-nigh his personal life—except on one occasion. His section at Cisco threw a Diwali political party over lunch, complete with Bollywood music and blinking lights. Siddhant went for the nutrient and esprit, and a colleague, an immigrant from Vietnam, asked why he wasn't dressed up in traditional Hindu garb. He smiled and turned away, she recalls. (She requested non to reveal her proper noun out of sensitivity to Siddhant, because she believes others could identify him through her.) "So I kind of brushed it off, maybe it wasn't his thing," she says. He had always seemed a puzzle to her anyhow, never volunteering information about himself.

At piece of work, Siddhant kept his caste groundwork subconscious for fear of repercussions.
Photograph: Arsenii Vaselenko

A yr subsequently, they went out to grab dejeuner, and she asked on the car ride back whether he was planning to celebrate Diwali. Siddhant turned to her equally he drove. "I am going to tell yous this, merely you take to hope me you lot won't tell anyone," he said. He revealed he was a Buddhist, and that he doesn't gloat because of the holiday's Hindu origins.

She didn't understand why he was being secretive, but as a fellow Buddhist she was excited to take a like-minded colleague. Then Siddhant explained the residue—the plight of untouchables, the need to escape the degree arrangement, his family'south conversion. She started to slice together his beliefs the year prior. "After he told me, I was like, oh my God, I have this big secret of his. Only at the same time I felt it was very unfair, or very sorry," she says, "that he has to hide."

In 2017, Siddhant won a competitive lottery for a dark-green carte du jour and started interviewing for new jobs. He had nudged his salary into the half dozen figures and was confident he could double information technology—but now he discovered a new social club he needed to crevice. At a meeting with an entrepreneur looking to hire his company's first engineer, Siddhant asked if he could exist the primary technology officer. The founder asked if Siddhant was "from the FAANG group," meaning had he worked at Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, or Google. Cisco wasn't impressive plenty to potential investors, the human being explained.

So Siddhant focused his task chase on the FAANGs. In March 2018, he was at his desk when he received the telephone call confirming a new chapter in his life: an offer to be a systems infrastructure specialist at Facebook and help build bogus intelligence software. His starting salary, including stock options, was low-cal years beyond what he, equally a child, had believed possible. He immediately phoned his married woman. "Life will be irresolute," he told her, his vocalism brimming with excitement.

Effectually this time, a friend tipped him off that some other Dalit in their network was involved in a fight over caste discrimination at Cisco—and that the case might go to court. Hearing this, Siddhant's spirits sank. Simply he figured that as long as casteism existed in Republic of india, it would creep up anywhere there were large numbers of Indians. He idea about his ain time at the company and wondered whether he had skirted through on pure luck. 1 time, a colleague had tried to praise him in a way that stung. "Brahmin means superior, Brahmin ways talented, Brahmin means intelligent," the colleague had said. "Now you have those qualities, it means that yous are Brahmin. Y'all are no more Dalit."

He pushed these uncomfortable thoughts aside equally he focused on his new chore. He was starry-eyed throughout Facebook's vi-week boot camp for new hires. And he was relieved to acquire that none of his managers were Indian and well-nigh of his teammates were Russian.

2 years went by earlier Siddhant's WhatsApp channels started buzzing with news that the California Section of Fair Employment and Housing had filed a lawsuit against Cisco, and he finally learned the details of the case. A Dalit under the pseudonym of John Doe had worked on a team of all ascendant-caste Indian immigrants. His managing director, a one-time classmate, had told two colleagues that the plaintiff was from a marginalized caste and had attended IIT Bombay under affirmative action. When the Dalit homo confronted his manager about being outed and filed a discrimination complaint, he was removed from the team and demoted, actions the lawsuit argues were in retaliation. Reading the details of the instance, Siddhant remembered again why Dalits tend to play it rubber. "Equally long as they don't disembalm, they won't exist discriminated against and enjoy the aforementioned condition every bit others," he says.

At work, Siddhant watched nervously equally his South Asian colleagues discussed the news in an internal Facebook group. A post of a news story attracted a slew of likes and angry reactions, and he couldn't tell if the acrimony was aimed at Dalits or the alleged discrimination. Some people left comments saying they were appalled or that the accommodate was groundless. Siddhant stayed silent. He was not ready to draw attention to himself—not in front of the roughly 7,000 members in this group.

But in the following months, equally the US was grappling with its own racial caste system afterward the death of George Floyd, the topic of caste discrimination kept coming up. A former employee of HCL America, the US branch of an Indian It company, filed a lawsuit alleging caste bias. A group of 30 Dalit female engineers shared an anonymous statement with The Washington Post most their experiences with bias and argued for workplace protections.

Journalists started looking for Dalits to feature in their stories, and Siddhant helped organize Zoom panels for them through the Ambedkar International Heart, a The states-based advocacy group for oppressed castes. Just many of the Dalits who attended kept their videos turned off and refused to proceed the record, even under pseudonyms. Every bit Siddhant encouraged the members of his community to remain confident and own their experiences, he couldn't help but call up that he ought to listen to his own communication.

His anxiety was skyrocketing. In October 2020, on the advice of his wife and a few close friends, he met with a therapist. He felt that something was missing and turned a disquisitional center on his career. He'd been at his electric current job for years and felt like he'd stalled. He'd ever chased achievements every bit a way to validate himself in the eyes of others. But now he was at a loss. He had no idea how to explain these nerves to a therapist. "I was not able to reveal how I felt internally," Siddhant says. "It's just me who understands how I feel about my own success." He didn't bother to schedule a follow-up session.

Meanwhile, Facebook's London HR squad was organizing a companywide Zoom meeting to discuss caste bias. A Brahmin friend who knows Siddhant's degree condition invited him to be on a console. Instead, Siddhant wrote an anonymous statement that his friend and so read: "I apologize for not speaking with you straight," it began. "Who knows what challenges revealing my identity openly hither bring." He then implored his colleagues to pay attending to the stigma of degree, and he argued that dominant-caste individuals must change their attitudes, just as Ambedkar once convinced his followers to start seeing themselves as worthy. As his friend spoke his words, Siddhant left his Zoom rectangle dark.

In April 2021, the debate over degree cropped upwards fifty-fifty closer to domicile. Siddhant listened in on a video call organized by the Santa Clara County Human being Rights Commission, which was debating whether to add together caste to its antidiscrimination policy. Over vii hours, 269 people queued up to deliver 30-second speeches. Anonymous, self-identified Dalit tech workers kept their videos off as they described how they had lost jobs and faced casteist slurs. Residents from dominant-caste backgrounds spoke of witnessing bias in their communities and in the region'due south tech companies. A representative from the Alphabet Workers Wedlock spoke of how difficult it is for victims, many of whom are in the US on visas, to come forrard. Numerous allies topped off their statements with "Jai Bhim"—a tribute to Bhimrao Ambedkar—but others, including a few who cocky-identified as members of oppressed castes, worried that adding degree as a protected category would perpetuate negative stereotypes nearly Indians, and especially Hindus, as bigots.

Siddhant was amazed that such a contend was happening, allow alone right where he lived. In August 2021, the California Autonomous Political party added caste equally a protected category in its code of comport. A slew of universities announced caste protections, including Colby College, UC Davis, Harvard'due south graduate pupil marriage, UC San Diego'due south ethnic studies department, and most recently, the Cal State University system. (Brandeis Academy was the first, in 2019.) Siddhant is yet waiting to hear what happens with the Cisco lawsuit. At stake, says Kevin Dark-brown, a police professor at Indiana University Bloomington, is whether the state of California volition recognize casteism as a form of discrimination. He sees a strong statement in favor, especially because California bars discrimination on the basis of ancestry.

Milind Awasarmol, a Dalit and a managing director of the nonprofit Dr. Ambedkar International Mission, notes that "degree discrimination doesn't take to manifest through some atrocity." The fact that "y'all are forced to hibernate your identity, you are forced to exist somebody different than what you lot are," Awasarmol says, "is a violation of i's basic rights."

I start messaged Siddhant on WhatsApp in September 2020. I had just attended a Zoom panel he had helped organize with 18 other Dalits, who all shared their experiences. During our beginning interview, Siddhant and I talked for nearly iii hours. He told me about his wristwatch that anyone could see if they looked closely. At the time, the Cisco lawsuit was very much on his mind, and he marveled at the plaintiff'southward guts in coming frontward. Inspired, he agreed to work with me on this story—but under a pseudonym. He aching, immensely, that other members of the Indian diaspora might turn on him for promoting "anti-Hindu hatred," a term whose critics argue is a form of doublespeak—a way to use racial and religious protections to deflect scrutiny from caste.

We spoke regularly for a year and a half, and as time went on, he started to think maybe he should use his name. The interview process had forced him to reckon with his life, and he found his anxiety dissipating. It seemed to me he started looking for ways to out himself for this story, without having to make that decision himself. Earlier the lensman, Arsenii Vaselenko, showed up to shoot the portraits, Siddhant asked if the pictures might turn out amend if his name were attached; I assured him the photos would be cute regardless. During the shoot, when Vaselenko asked if he was comfortable having his forepart side captured, Siddhant angled his face toward the photographic camera's lens.

His wife urged him to reveal his proper noun, and he ran through his list of pros and cons. The pros: helping the world understand the entrenched nature of caste. Helping his community see that they have merit and that their lives involve more than tragedy or trauma. But—the eternal counterbalance—opening up felt like a huge personal gamble. "That is my dilemma," he says.

Ultimately, he couldn't exercise information technology. He still worries other Indians might interpret his words every bit feeding a feud. "Sharing the story of my life, I take no problem," he says. "Talking well-nigh my realities, I have no problem. But if people think I am creating detest via this story, and then it will be a problem."

He continues to push confronting the edges of his comfort zone. He invites the Indian parents of his children's friends into his home, where they can hardly miss the big, framed blackness-and-white portrait of Ambedkar sitting on an chantry past the fireplace, along with a minor statue of the Buddha. Siddhant has told his sons all nigh Ambedkar, and they pray earlier the altar on important days. He likes to explicate that Ambedkar was a peachy leader for their people, just as Martin Luther Rex Jr. was for Blackness Americans.

One day, Siddhant's older son shared a story from his own life. A teacher had asked a group of kids, who were all of Indian descent, most their family backgrounds. Ane by one, the kids shouted out their religion, region, and caste. They all said they were Brahmin. When it was Siddhant's son's turn, he blurted out, "I'm an untouchable!" Everyone laughed.

Hearing the story, Siddhant laughed too. He figures they probably thought his son was being silly. Just Siddhant was more than interested in his son's mindset, utterly free of caste anxieties. "I was happy," he says. "He's not hiding his identity."

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