FFrom Caste to Cohort

The hardest sentence to write honestly about Indian professional life is this: caste still works. It still organizes hiring, lending, marriage, real estate, neighborhood, school admission, and a thousand small acts of trust extension that happen below the level of conscious decision. This is uncomfortable for both the people who benefit and the people who do not. Pretending it is gone is a posture. Naming it is the first step toward replacing it with something better.

¶What caste actually does as a network

Strip the religious and historical layers and look at it as pure social engineering. Caste is a system that delivers extremely high trust within a small ascriptive group and almost no trust across groups. If you are a Marwari trader, you can extend a multi-crore short-term loan to another Marwari trader on a phone call. The default rate is low not because Marwaris are inherently more honest, but because the consequences of default are social annihilation inside a small community where everyone's grandparents know each other.

This is a powerful piece of infrastructure. It is also the wrong piece for a country of 1.4 billion trying to build a professional class that operates across linguistic, religious, and regional lines. Caste delivers what economists call bonding capital. India also needs bridging capital. The two require different network shapes.

¶The cohort as a working alternative

A cohort is a chosen group, of roughly the same age and stage, that goes through something together. A medical school batch. A founder fellowship. A year of YPO. The 2023 batch of a particular fintech. The cohort produces shared experience, shared vocabulary, and shared stakes among people who did not start with a shared background.

The cohort is doing the same job caste does inside its own walls: making trust extension cheap. The difference is that the cohort is voluntary. You choose it. You can be in three at once. You are not born into it. Your children are not automatic members. It is a thin trust layer that is wide rather than deep, and that you can keep accumulating across a career.

¶Why this is hard for India to do well

India has been building cohorts unintentionally for decades. The IIT classes of any year. The IAS batches. The Big Four audit cohorts. The Infosys 2002 joiners. These cohorts produce extraordinary professional trust thirty years later. The problem is that the cohorts are still gated by class and caste at the entry point. The IIT entrance system tracks coaching access more than raw talent, and coaching access tracks family wealth, which tracks caste with depressing reliability.

So the answer is not just to celebrate cohorts. It is to build cohorts with deliberately open and varied entry. A 100-person fellowship in clean energy drawing from 25 states and 18 languages and 14 occupational backgrounds is doing the job. A 100-person fellowship that is 70 percent IIT graduates from one caste cluster is just caste with better branding.

¶The two networks coexisting

For most Indian professionals in 2026, both networks are alive at the same time. You have the caste-adjacent inherited network you got at birth and the cohort-based chosen network you have been building since college. The honest move is to notice both, use both, and slowly shift weight from the first to the second.

This is not anti-tradition. The family, the language community, the regional identity, the school network are all valuable. Nobody is asking anyone to abandon their roots. The argument is about which network you center for professional decisions. If your first call for a new hire goes to your jaati network, that is one kind of country. If your first call goes to your cohort, that is a different country. The country we are trying to build is the second.

Three concrete shifts. First, when you join a new institution, identify your cohort within it and invest there before you invest in the senior hierarchy. Five years out, the cohort moves horizontally with you. The hierarchy does not.

Second, when you make a hiring decision, count how many of your last ten hires came from your inherited networks versus your cohort networks. If the ratio is heavily skewed, ask why. The answer is usually convenience, not principle. Convenience is fixable.

Third, when you join a professional community, prefer ones that take cohort seriously. A community organized around the year you started something is stronger than one organized around where you went to college. The former has a shared problem. The latter has a shared alma mater.

Different Indian cities are at different stages of this transition. Bengaluru and Hyderabad have the most cohort-shaped professional life of any Indian metros, because tech imports talent from everywhere and ascriptive networks cannot dominate. Mumbai is mixed: finance runs cohort-style, old industry runs caste-style. Delhi remains heavily ascriptive. Tier-two cities like Indore, Vizag, Surat, and Coimbatore are early. Smaller cities are still mostly the old network.

A professional community that operates in all these places has to be honest about which version of the country it meets in each.

¶What to do

If you are 25, build five cohort relationships per year. By 40 you will have a network the inherited system cannot match.

If you are 45, audit your last twenty professional favors. To whom, from whom, and on what basis. The pattern is your network. Decide which network you want to feed.

If you run an institution, build cohorts with deliberate variety at entry. Then leave them alone for five years. The trust will compound. That compounding is the asset.