Interestingly, I grew up in India but have no clue what my caste is. I could probably ask my parents and they'd know but it has never come up. Religion and sub ethnicity came up a lot more often while growing up. Funnily enough the only ones who have ever asked me about my caste were white people.
I had always assumed the caste system was a thing of the past but looking at how it's still present even at companies in other countries, I imagine I just grew up in a bubble.
Really not surprising considering the size and population of India, but I think the question of real importance is whether you where the one in the bubble or if there are just large bubbles in India were caste is still considered really important.
It goes beyond immigration too. I have an Indian passport and am in an EU country on a work visa for < 6 months and thus don't get a residence permit card. Getting a phone number and a bank account were insanely difficult, as no one wants to accept an Indian passport/visa as proof of identity. I ended up getting a (probably illegal?) sim card from a corner store, which required no identification. That makes me wonder how effective these regulations are.
As for immigration, applying for visas for every single thing is not fun at all. Canada gave me a 4 year visa even though my degree is supposed to take 4.5 years, meaning I had to collect all documents again, pay the high fee, and risk getting rejected and not be able to finish my degree for just one semester. The application did not get processed for months after that because the government wanted me to provide biometrics at a government run facility, which was obviously closed because of the pandemic(they closed 1 day before I had an appointment booked). It ended up being processed after my original visa expired, which was not a very enjoyable time.
US internship visas have restrictions involved saying that I can not go back to the US for full time work without going back to my home country for 2 years. The problem here is I have nowhere to go in my home country anymore.
In the past I've had to withdraw applications for internships in the UK/EU as they required travel for onsite interviews and my visa didn't come through on time. (Bigger companies so they only had a couple of options for onsite days). At least the companies were nice enough to reimburse the visa fees as they are hundreds of dollars for every single visa.
Making plans to go travelling with friends(before the pandemic) was always difficult as I was the only one would have to obtain a visa and so needed atleast a month of lead up time. Even then it's not guaranteed to come on time so the entire trip would have to be cancelled.
Even at the airport, I have been almost refused boarding multiple times despite having all the right documents, because systems don't work perfectly. Usually this is fixed by talking to a supervisor or someone else with more authority, in a couple of cases they called the country's border police to see if I should be let in.
I have tried both approaches a fair amount, and realized that every time I try the cobbler approach I end up getting blocked on some major thing and thus having to rewrite everything because of some basic things that could have been avoided.
I feel like it's getting both better and worse now with docs getting better in general(no of times I end up on stackoverflow has gone down significantly), however a lot of times I end up on medium posts with a list of steps and absolutely zero reason why. Whenever I try cobbling from those articles, I end up very frustrated
I'm about to graduate from UWaterloo now and have only had 2 courses with attendance - language courses. I really liked the option of going to classes when I wanted as I found that end up being on my laptop during class anyway.
Two CS courses(1st year) had a clicker thing going on where you had to answer questions and it'd be worth 5% of the grade. Some courses also had a key chunk of info taken out of the pdfs so as to incentivize going to class. I definitely wasn't a big fan, but it wasn't hard to learn about the topics from other university's notes available online
As a twenty something who lived for free in Fremont for 3 months last year, I'd shell out the extra cash to live in SF/anywhere else next time. Maybe having access to a car would have changed my view?
I had always assumed the caste system was a thing of the past but looking at how it's still present even at companies in other countries, I imagine I just grew up in a bubble.