Walk into the boardrooms of India’s biggest private firms, private-equity offices and unicorn startups, and a striking pattern emerges. Nearly nine out of ten of the country’s leading CEOs, promoters and top business figures hail from a narrow segment of society: the Savarnas, chiefly Brahmins and Banias. This is not affirmative action gone awry. It is, its critics argue, the most enduring and least discussed reservation of all. A 2010 study of India’s 1,000 largest companies found that some 93% of board members came from “forward” castes. A 2012 analysis put the figure for board directors at around 91%. More recent reporting suggests little has changed at the top: upper castes continue to dominate senior leadership roles, while comprehensive official data remain elusive because few companies track caste in hiring or promotions. Hiring realities Discrimination is evident well below the C-suite. Multiple field experiments continue to show that equally qualified candidates with Dal...
The Buddha Behind the Katha: How a Bahujan YouTube Channel Is Retelling the Story of the Jataka Tales Every Saturday, a Hindi-language YouTube channel called Science Journey — an offshoot of the debate channel Rationalist World — puts on a different kind of program. Instead of live debates, the host sits down for a single long monologue aimed at families: children, elders, and "especially women," as he puts it, from India's Bahujan communities (Dalit, Adivasi, and OBC groups). The subject of the inaugural episode in this new series is one that rarely gets prime-time treatment: the Jataka tales, the centuries-old Buddhist birth-stories of the Bodhisattva — and the argument, advanced at length, that much of what is practiced today as "Hinduism" is Buddhism wearing a disguise. It's a provocative thesis, delivered with the pacing of a detective story. And whatever one makes of its politics, it offers a genuinely interesting tour through Buddhist textual ...