Although the caste system was abolished when India gained independence in 1947, prejudices still remain, keeping the Dalits marginalised.
Apologists for the caste system argue that caste and kin networks have traditionally promoted trust, a keystone of any successful business.
The concept, called "Harmolodic, " Coleman says, removes the caste system from sound.
Roy's backdrop is the caste system and its myriad mysteries -- plus the unique nature of Kerala, where Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Christians and Communists coexist, not always comfortably.
The Bombay (Mumbai) meeting is likely to see the anti-globalisation activists focusing on Hinduism's centuries-old social hierarchy, or the caste system, which relegates nearly one-sixth of India's one billion population to the status of low castes known as Dalits, or the oppressed.
While Hindu nationalists claimed that the converts were bribed, a government investigation concluded that they probably simply wanted to cut free from the discriminatory caste system.
"The Ravidassias and other Dalits remain marginalized in Punjab, politically, religiously and economically, " said author Balbir Madhopuri, who has written several books on the Hindu caste system.
Christian converts, most of whom are born as dalits at the bottom of the Hindu caste system, often hide their new faith for fear of losing their rights to state jobs and university places kept for the lower castes.
Their lives continue to be influenced by the ancient Hindu caste system, which assigns each person a place in the social hierarchy.
While common to the caste-like system of Persia, prostration was something the freedom-loving Greeks scorned.
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The Chowdulis are Muslim, and therefore outside of the traditional Hindu caste system.
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Most critics have praised this saga of Phoolan Devi and her lone battle with the oppressive Indian caste system as a brave piece of cinema.
This commands cross party support with such luminaries as the Lib Dem Lord Avebury, the Conservative Lord Deben (the artist formerly known as John Gummer), and Labour's Lady Thornton - and the Dalit Solidarity Network, which campaigns on behalf of those at the bottom of the South Asian caste system (sometimes called "untouchables") is organising a mass lobby in support.
It hit me when I read the information on participants and figured out that even among the press there was a caste system.
But individual investors of all wealth levels need to accept that there is a caste system in the world of investments that excludes them.
The self-imposed newsroom caste system has run its course.
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That poverty, entrenched in a vicious caste system, is the tinder lit by the Maoists.
Make no mistake: What's in play is the emergence of a caste-based traffic system, one of robot-haves and have-nots, of steely-eyed electronic wheelmen vs.
But by accepting the poorest children as pupils, the Christians are seen as undermining India's Hindu caste system, which remains rigid in many areas.
Gypsy-gadje relations are made even trickier where traditional groups still observe laws shaped by a sense of imminent defilement, the idea (more understandable when framed within an Indian caste system) that contact with gadje, particularly sexual contact, is a kind of pollution punishable by banishment.
In one case, there is triumph over a bitter caste and class system marinated by certainty and cruelty, and in the other, over the aftermath of slavery in which some people who were white legally owned others who were black.
Caste politicians are not alone in arguing that this makes a nonsense of the system.
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And with it came a caste system in which relatively few got rich while many remained mired in the worst sort of poverty: Chinese in the 1870s, Japanese two decades later, Hindustanis early in the new century, Mexicans and Filipinos during and after World War I.
They are reinforced by a Hindu caste-system perhaps even more entrenched than that in India, and by the discrimination long suffered by the Madhesi people of the lowland plains neighbouring India.
With its caste system, and bad state schools, India may be a more unequal society than the numbers alone suggest.
While it is easy to characterize this trend as a result of the widening class gap, in a recent discussion, Roth-Douquet characterized it as closer to a caste system.
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