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Questions:
1. For married women, what becomes more important: their varna as brahmana, ksatriya, vaisya or sudra (as per qualification, not birth), or their duty of serving the husband - regardless what varna he is from? From Srimad Bhagavatam, Canto 7, Chapter 11, verses 25-29 it seems like the women are a "varna" of their own, but then in the purport of verse 30, Srila Prabhupada writes "If a woman of a high caste marries a man of a lower caste, their union is called pratilo. If a woman of a low caste, however, marries a man of a higher caste, their union is called anulo." - indicating that women do have a varna as well. In ISKCON marriages, varnas are not always matched, so women with brahminical qualities might marry a man with less than brahminical qualities. For those women, is it still the highest duty to serve the husband (who, above all varnas, is of course an aspiring Vaishnava)? In other words: does, for women, marriage superimpose varna?
2. If we look at the brahminical qualifications, it seems as if hardly anybody fits that profile in this current age. And this is not just for the reason that the garbhadhana samskara isn't performed anymore (which would base varna more on birth, wouldn't it?).
However, when we look at the percentages Sivarama Swami Maharaja gave in his presentation; that only 1% of the population is of the brahminical class, it reminds me of the educational distribution in society, where the 1% could correlate with the highest educated class.
We often hear that in Kali yuga everybody is born (!) sudra. Are the highly educated class the brahminical sudras, so to speak? Is that what we would base our varnashrama on? In other words: are we to identify people's varna based on degraded forms/manifestations of the 4 castes? If so: what would the Kali yuga qualifications for each varna look like?
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