Breed

Few days back while switching channels, had passed throught NDTV good times.
Some sort of interview was going on about "pets", the owner of a club or manager or worker of that club was saying something like  "we track upto 4 generations of the dogs so we are sure of the breed".

2 months back I was on my way to Chennai , its the usual Mangalore-Chennai Mail. The train was approaching Chennai around 5am.My berth was in the middle of the compartment, so i slowly made my way to the last bay. There was an empty side berth and I sat there ,there was a lady in her 40s or 50s on the upper side berth who just came off the berth and sat there. We started talking, normal train talk, and as  I got up she asked my name and I told my
name ( as some south indians i have initials & am used to give first name),so I gave my name, she asked whats my full name , again my first name which itself is comprised of two words ( I knew where she was headed) so i gave my full name without the initial i.,e XXX YYY
Then she says , oh nice name, is it XXX YYY, ZZZZ (ZZZ being caste name, which from this part some have as their Surname.) I smiled and said no its just XXX YYY and stopped the conversation.

I hate such questions, well if am gonna get married via tradional arranged marriage I know this question of caste comes in as a part of Checklist in the proces, but if I find my girl then I wouldn't care a damn.

What am contemplating is, Is asking one's caste so bad or am I just over reacting for a question which
has similar intentions as below:
Assume you are in some trade conference or training or some sort of group activity somewhere in the world say, Iceland.
Now after few hours when you talk with a person from India , we would go further, to
where do u live? oh ur name sounds s. or n.indian? and the question usually goes as close as to
identify the person in relative to us.
If you are the only person from your country then you try to meet people who belong to your industry,then you choose the persons who are in your exact job specification etc.,
So always when we meet people we are trying to see how close that person is to our "Origins".
It need not be because you only want to talk to persons of your type, but its the yearning to see how close you two are already to start a conversation.

Even when I was working among a Scandinavian colleagues where there is no caste system  when it came to the  Prince who got married a girl from outside the country, it wasn't a happy news for everyone a female colleague said " as if he can't find a girl from our country he had to all the way to ... "

We all have the "my type" mentality, Caste based prejudice or discrimination is definitely wrong but may be the "caste" question isn't that evil all the time !