On Caste

Caste is kind of a taboo word. Uttering it invokes sickening notions of caste discrimination, the horrors of the Untouchables, and pre-determined lives. People are denied their rightful places in society because of their births, while others are accorded undue privileges. The Indian government has tried to compensate for centuries of discrimination by hindering the "upper" castes. The hardest hit are the Brahmins, who's college education has basically been squashed. In short, the modern caste system is a sickening abomination.

The caste system used to be an honorable thing, something Society could support and depend upon. Originally, one's caste wasn't irrationally based upon one's heritage. Each individual would voluntarily join a caste based on their occupation, personal leanings, and so on. That system was best, because everybody did what they were born to do. They knew where their passions lay, and dutifully carried them out. People following this system also understood that society needed all of them to function. Without the Brahmins, spiritual advancement would be hard to come by, and society would lose sight of it's over-arching goal. Should the Kshatriyas disappear, then we'd suffer lawlessness. We wouldn't have our leaders to run the country, the military wouldn't be around to protect the nation, and the lack of police would result in anarchy. Vaishyas are necessary to produce the goods we need and regulate the economy. Without them, our shops wouldn't have managers and specialty goods would be non-existent. Finally, Shurdas are an integral part of making sure society functions. Imagine a life without plumbers, janitors, sales clerks, construction workers, or anybody to perform manual labor.

People need to be reminded of this. Shurdas aren't low-life, sub-human apes. They're honest, hard-working, often-times intelligent people, no different than the unrightfully elevated Brahmins. Each just has a different path to walk, nothing more, nothing less.

Now, an example of pthreads in C/C++:


Scratch that. I just realized how ugly a program would look without syntax highlighting. So instead, I'm going to link you to a good, basic tutorial.

http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/LinuxTutorialPosixThreads.html

Just a few generic notes:
-You should always have a void * parameter. That's what pthread_create() passes, so you need one. You don't have to actually do anything with it. Shoot, it doesn't even have to be anything. Just pass it NULL. Just make sure you pass it SOMETHING.
-Your function should return a void *. Although it'd make sense to have it return void, it's just far easier to return a void * because, for whatever reason, that's what pthread_create() expects.
-Always use pthread_join(). If you don't you'll run into the problem of main() terminating long before it's threads do. Obviously, that's not good.

Well, I've got scholarships to chase.

Naa Varain