B.R. Ambedkar would have been extremely saddened to witness how his efforts to uproot India’s caste system have gone to waste. Because apparently, even in 2016, the caste you belong to still matters to a lot of people.
While PV Sindhu was aiming to win a gold for her country at the Rio Olympics, several Indians were busy googling her caste. Yes, you read that right.
A quick search for the player on Google, and you’ll know exactly what we’re talking about.
Sadly, even Google’s algorithm proves that. The term ‘caste’ cannot just pop up in the suggestions on its own. Unless of course, a keyword is fed on to Google a certain number of times to make it appear as a suggestion. So we decided to do some digging and find out the results for ourselves:
If you take a look at Google trends, it shows how the Interest over time spiked suddenly on August 19th after picking up pace the previous day when Sindhu won the semi-finals.
Sub-region wise, Andhra Pradesh tops the list with Telangana coming a close second. This suggests that people from these regions compose the majority of population googling her caste.
In related queries, you can see the keywords that have been used the most:
What a shame, India! This only reinforces our fear that India is, and might just continue to be a caste-oriented country. It’s 2016, and here we have Andhra Pradesh and Telangana fighting it out to claim her as their own.