Public Radio International (PRI)

GujuratiMatrimony is just one of the many localized marriage websites across India. (Image: screen grab of gujaratimatrimony.com)

The model is familiar to anyone who’s been online dating in the US: you make a series of selections to narrow down your search. The Indian matrimony sites offer countless drop-down menus covering things like eating habits, religion, income, and caste.

The caste system in India is now more about shared commonalities than social standing, says the company CEO, Murugavel Janakiraman. It’s about removing friction in a relationship, simply reducing the chances of two people having uncomfortable differences of opinion. Caste as an indicator of commonality in terms of things such as food, tradition or culture.

Indeed, the higher up India’s social ladder you go, the easier it is to pick and choose which aspects of caste matter to you. In fact, at the very top of the ladder you find a group that’s now able to leave caste behind altogether: the new super-rich, India’s millionaires. More.

What if an academic test that you took at the age of 11 determined your life’s course?

When David Ward was 11 years old, he took a state exam introduced by the British government — it was called Eleven Plus. If he passed the exam, Ward would be among the chosen few, plucked from the working classes to be enrolled in an elite government-run school—and likely college after that. (Photo: David Ward by Patrick Cox, PRI’s The World)

Ward and three others in his class of sixty passed the exam. They had earned themselves places in what in Britain are called grammar schools. But Lesley Ebbetts did not pass the exam. She was sent to a school categorized as Secondary Moderns, which quickly became viewed as places where ungifted children ended up, where they were housed until they were old enough to go to work.

Where Ward and Ebbetts ended up later on in life is a bit of a surprise, but more surprising is how the British government is bringing back its 1960s social experiment. More.

The days when the arc of our lives could be determined by the class we were born into are supposed to be over. Governments have levelled the playing field. Attitudes have evolved. Elites have ceded power to everyone else. But today, we still make life choices based on the social class we were born into.

Across the globe, political parties still claim to represent particular social classes. In the developed world, the big prize is the middle class—the class that virtually everyone says they belong to. In many parts of the developing world, populist movements appealing to working people have currency. That hasn’t stopped politicians, on both the left and right, claiming to have eradicated class differences. But in all societies – traditional or modern, capitalist or communist – class persists.

Next Monday, “PRI’s The World” starts its series of stories exploring these and other issues through the eyes and words of a disparate group of individuals: a bank employee in Egypt, a TV producer in Ukraine, an Indian scientist in New Jersey, a farmer in China, a former mineworker in Britain.

MONDAY, MAY 21: THE RETURN OF A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT
In 1944, Britain introduced the Eleven Plus exam. School students age 11 who passed this mandatory test could enroll in elite secondary schools that prepared them for college. The thinking was that bright working class kids would have a path to a middle class education and career. Those who failed the exam would go to regular schools, with the expectation that they would leave school for good at 15. This two-tiered system was criticized for writing off all but the smartest kids, and it was scrapped in the 1970s. Now however, the Conservative-led government is starting to re-introduce it.

TUESDAY, MAY 22: MIDDLE CLASS REVOLUTIONARIES
Revolutions, it is said, need the support of the middle class to be successful; often they’re led by the middle class. We focus on two middle class women who put their lives and livelihoods on the line for political change. In Egypt, a year after Tahrir Square, a bank employee still holds out hope that the promise of the anti-Mubarak revolution will usher in a more democratic, tolerant society.  In Ukraine, seven years after the Orange Revolution, a TV producer wonders whether it was worth it, as her nation slips back into its corrupt, pre-revolutionary past.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 23: INDIA’S CHANGING CASTE SYSTEM, AT HOME AND ABROAD
In India, society has traditionally been stratified according to the caste system. Caste has its roots in scripture, but over the years it has expanded into many spheres of Indian life: work, education and, most recently, politics. Today, many urban Indians ignore caste, except when it comes to choosing a marriage partner. But abroad, some upper-caste Indians have a nostalgic affection for a system that favored their forefathers.

THURSDAY, MAY 24: THE CLASS THAT MAO SET OUT TO RESCUE?
No-one in China is lower on the totem pole than farmers and villagers. When they migrate to cities to work in factories, they are treated like dirt. So what happened to Mao Zedong’s communist revolution? The revolution was supposed to improve the lot of the rural poor. We visit a part of rural China where Mao once lived.  Mao went there to educate himself about the conditions of the farming class.  But decades later, the descendants of the people Mao interviewed aren’t much better off, at a time when other Chinese are enriching themselves.

FRIDAY, MAY 25: ARE WE CLASSLESS NOW?
For our final story, we return to Britain, the country where the modern class system was born. Since the 1980s, one prime minister after another has declared Britain to be a “classless” society. At the same time, working class institutions have been vanishing: manufacturing factories have closed, union power legislated away, benefits slashed. Everyone is expected to be middle class. If you’re not, you may be described as “feckless,” “lazy” or the “underclass.” Britain, it turns out, hasn’t become classless. It has just re-invented its own class consciousness.  

Use our Program Locator and look for “PRI’s The World” to get for broadcast times in your area. Audio of each day’s broadcast will be available on Theworld.org.

A new study finds that 16- to 34-year-olds without driver’s licenses rose to 26 percent in 2010 from 21 percent a decade earlier. At the same time, biking, walking, and other driving alternatives rose among young people in the past decade. (Photo by Richard Masoner, Flickr)

Samantha Henderson from Denver gave her reasons for not driving as, ” 1) Damn, gas is expensive, and 2) Greener alternatives: awareness and availability (biking, busing, walking, etc).Also, the motor vehicle is no longer as novel an item as it once was for older generations.”

More.

Man finds his mother after 25 years using Google Earth

Twenty five years ago, when Saroo Brierly was five years old, he and his brother boarded a train in India, searching for lost coins and other valuables. Saroo became separated, and ended up on another train. He fell asleep, and woke up 14 hours later on the other side of India, in Calcutta.

Brierly couldn’t read or write, or understand the local Bengali language. And he couldn’t go home, because he didn’t know where he was from. Brierly became a beggar, one of the many children on the streets of Calcutta. After some time, he was taken in by an orphanage, and put up for adoption. An Australian couple adopted him and took him home to Tasmania.

Fast forward a couple decades and Brierly is still wondering where exactly he’s from. He decided to use Google Earth and a formula to try to figure it out.

“I zoomed down and -BANG – it just sort of came up,” Brierly said.

“It” was the town of Khandwa. More.

One year ago, France implemented the “burqa ban,” restricting Muslim women from covering their faces in a burqa or niqab. (Photo: A woman wearing a burqa and her male companion in Paris, France in July 2010. By Max Bernstein, The Takeaway)

It’s estimated that the ban only applies to about 2,000 women in France who wear the traditional veils.

Advocates for the ban argued it would free women from oppression and help Muslims better integrate into French society. The ban received widespread support in France and even some Muslim organizations supported the legislation.

French legislators say the ban is a success. But opponents of the ban say women who still choose to wear their burqa fear leaving their homes because they may be subject to fines by the police or harassment on the streets.

“Since the law passed, women’s lives have become very difficult,” said one woman. “They cannot go into public spaces, they do not have access to hospitals and doctors. They cannot go shopping and buy food in public spaces, they cannot bring their children to school.”

Jacques Myard, the conservative member of the French parliament who authored the ban, says he was “deeply shocked” when he first saw a woman in a burqa.

More.