It's been a looong time since I wrote anything here, almost a year infact. I don't expect that being a software enigneer working from 8 am to 9pm, five days a week would suffice to be an excuse for my extreme laziness. Well...bleah! I am too lazy to give an excuse too...so bleah!
But I have felt a sudden inspiration to blog again, but this post might end up being another one of those pointless rants or whatever. So what's been happening in the universe (Phoebe ishtyle) for the last one year? As I sit and think, the one thing that comes all screaming back to me (again Phoebe ishtyle, sorry..I am a big fan!) is the reservation brouhaha that caused a stir for quite sometime. Much has been said and written about this over the last one year and I am not going to write anything that has not been already written, but still this is always and I fear will remain for a long time - a burning issue.
The concept of reservation has been in vouge in our country since the pre-independence days. (It's true! I read up on it sometime back) Sixty years have come to pass and the practice has not been made redundant yet! While the Indian democracy prohibits any discrimination based on caste, creed or religion, the fact that people are clamouring for reservation still is ridicoulous. Narayan Murthy rightly said "We are the only nation in the world where people fight to be called backward rather than forward."
The major pitfall of our democracy is the diversity of the people that make up this democracy, a democracy that is home to a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-religious society. A politician in such case is forced to view the different ethnic communities primarily as just voting banks. Going on another line of thought, the whole of purpose of reservation when it came into practice was to give a chance to the backward castes - the scheduled caste/tribe - to come forward and be part of a growing and developing nation. Does the responsibility of the government stop with just getting them into a premier educational institution? Should it not also be the responsibility of the institution in such a case to make sure such an under-represented group become competitive? Is it too much to ask to put the institutes themselves under scrutiny? To question them about their role in the upgradation of such backward castes? Or is there a basic flaw with the concept as such? The country's premier institutes like the IITs or the IIMs are accessible predomonantly to the urban and well-educated families, those that have had a good basic primary and secondary education. That should have the place to start with respect to the backward classes. Make good primary education available to them first! And make sure the next generation would be educated and better off that the previous. Such a progressive practice would have yielded better results over time, and the whole reservation concept could have been done away with! But I am sure, somebody must have thought of it, and since that somebody must not have a key player in the Indian political scene, would not have even had a chance to speak out! Whatever!
Just before I left the country to do my masters at the USA, I had an interesting conversation with my Project Manager at Wipro over lunch. The whole team had come for lunch and as usual we were complaining about the bitchy Hosur road traffic and how Bangalore had changed in the past 2-3 years since most of us had first come to the place. To put it simply, the city lacks planning. Again, either that or the crores of rupee that is budgeted to be used for the city goes into the politician's pockets. Or the oppositon party somehow does not allow the ruling party to go ahead with their schemes for fear that people would remember that such development was done by the ruling party and not the others. This inevitable politicization of fundamental needs of the country and the nation's inherent diversity are some of the major drawbacks of our nation and as we cross our 60 years of independence, we need to address these issues if we have to come anywhere close to being a developed nation!
Belated Happy Independance Day everyone!
