Pseudo-Secularism

This is a nice article on the subject of reservation Pseudo-Secularism.

Reservation

Reservation in indian institutes of higher education has become a debated issue these days. With the government threatening to reserve 50% of the seats for backward classes, there is huge uproar amongst the student community as well as parents.

Some thoughts

1. If you are going to have 50% reservation, does that mean that if you are talented and can get into a college without reservation, you will still be forced to enter in one of the reserved seats? In other words, suppose that you are from one of these backward classes, but you have talent, you are hard working and you have not been oppressed for hundreds of years. So you are in the main stream, and can compete like anybody else. Should you be forced to take one of the reserved seats and be made to live with the shame that accompanies being a reserved seat student? Believe me, there is shame. During my time in IIT I felt sorry for those reserved guys. They did miserably in class, flunked subjects (the same subjects that we studied the previous night of the exam and did reasonably well in).

2. What happens to students who are from general category and are poor. They have been oppressed too. They are more deserving than many of the “backward class” kids who used to own motorbikes while the rest of use had to make do with bicycles. Shouldn’t they be helped?

3. Reservation is a nice concept – you say “well these seats are for you. See, we have done so much for your kids”. Well once these kids come into the class room, they get the same question paper as the rest of us. Is that ethical? They are going to flunk. After all, IIT has a lesser acceptance rate than MIT. So, you put these kids into college. Then what? Set different question papers for them? Sadly most of these kids did worse than the worst general category kid. Is that right? If you were a kid like that, how would you live every day?

4. Help them. They deserve better than the curtain that’s being pulled over their eyes. They deserve primary education. They deserve decent hospitals. They deserve housing. What will they do with something that only very few can ever get? There weren’t enough SC/ST kids to fill up all the seats at my batch at IIT Kgp. There never are. They can’t make the cutoff.

How long will this last? Can you really improve someone’s lot by reserving seats? How well has this experiment worked? We have 50 years of data. Has it worked like it should have?

We need a John Galt. When will we be truly free? When will true talent get what it deserves in our country?

There was a dream that was India. So sad that no one dreams that dream any more.