Dick, what "serious" discussion are you expecting to have here without a total review of modern Indian politics? You just woke up and thought "Caste system is bad"? You think that informed people have never worked on this before? Nobody sits around thinking "Caste is great!" India has tried to ban caste—it's in the Constitution. But it's a bit like a government saying they have "banned" racism. It's a nice gesture, and with "education" over time minds do change, but old thoughts die hard. The proactive thing they do is the "reservation" system (we call it Affirmative Action in the US; I don't know the name in all places of the world).

Have you read Ambedkar?

Caste in the second millennium AD has had nothing to do with Brahma being divided into four classes. Nobody cares about that Rigved stuff! That's some colonial antiquarian stuff. It's a complex network of ethnic groups, which varies by locality. Lower socioeconomic classes treat their castes as mutual aid societies, while high socioeconomic groups, not in need of such aid, associate more freely within their social class.

Yes, people CAN move "up." But many do it as a sacrifice—at a loss of identity and heritage that you can't possibly appreciate if your answer is just to tell people to cast aside their identities.

Caste works quite well as an economic system *given* the socially discriminatory attitudes that don't disappear simply because enlightened thinkers wish it so. It works as a regulatory system, and the threat to that regulation is new-liberal economics coupled with a masquerade that it is to the benefit of "low" castes because this kind of capitalism doesn't see "color." Meanwhile, low castes are begging to have their color be seen so that they can have some economic protection of their trades and at least hold onto the once-exclusive means of survival that their parents bequeathed to them and that they expected to be able to bequeath to their children.

Nobody wants caste in the same way that nobody wants to be starving with only one piece of bread to eat. But they'd rather have that one piece of bread to eat today than be told if they hold off eating for several days they'll get two pieces of bread.