Going Viral: While Sindhu was making history, Indians were busy googling her caste

Apparently, even in 2016, the caste you belong to still matters to a lot of people. Because, it was not ‘PV Sindhu ranking’ or ‘PV Sindhu images’ or even ‘PV Sindhu age’ that figured among the most searched keywords on Google about the Indian badminton player who created history at the Rio Olympics. According to Google trends, one of the most searched keywords on the search engine for the past week was, ‘PV Sindhu caste’. As per google statistics, the interest over past 7 days for the term “pv Sindhu caste” peaked around the time she won her semi-finals and finals. And in the last one day, her caste was the most searched. 

This particular keyword was most searched from people settled in India, and to be precise, more searches were from Andhra Pradesh and Telengana, where she actually belongs to, according to the Google trend. However, not just Indian residents, but also people settled in Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the UAE have been at the top five spots in searching for the caste that Sindhu belongs to. While some assert that she is a Telangana ‘bidda’ as Sindhu was born and brought up in  Hyderabad, others maintain that she is an Andhra ‘ammayi’ as she belongs to Vijayawada. This only reinforces our fear that India is, and might just continue to be a caste-oriented country. 

It’s 2016, and we still can’t accept a champion, without caste, race, region or ethnicity, and just as a sportsperson who made India proud. Why do we still give a damn about a person’s caste?