Caste is supreme today

The strike against reservations has come to an end, and it revealed
interesting insights. Here are some of them:


Caste still divides India like nothing else. How else can you explain who so
many disparate groups got together to suddenly discover the concept of merit
and how letting in OBC students in would lower standards?

On the other side, caste also unites: it is amazing how all the so-called forward castes (this is a better word than the misplaced upper caste; I mean, how can some say they are above others!) got together to fight the OBCs. Not sure if anyone
noticed, but around the same time, one newspaper (or was it a website)
carried an ad for a matchmaking seminar for Brahmins, regardless of
subcaste.
Clearly, the times are a changing. Brahmins are ignoring subcastes
to marry within castes. But then, the more things change, the more they
remain the same too. Which means Brahmins are only marrying fellow Brahmins!

While the protesting medical students accuse Arjun Singh of being casteist,
they showed they are just as casteist (at least Arjun is on the side of the
dispossessed).
Or else why would the students insist on carrying on with the
strike after the PM assured them that the number of general seats would not
be reduced and also promised many more colleges? At this point the students
began demanding an end to ALL reservations.
But is that right? Can such
decisions be made on the streets and in the heat of a dispute? Worse, it
gave the impression that the forward caste students were not just against
quotas, but against the very rise of the backwards.
And in case students want us to believe that the reason they are protesting
against reservations per se is because they believe in merit, that has been
effectively answered by Udit Raj and his friends.

Because if you really believe in merit, then what about the private colleges that admit students with far lower marks and far more money to spend? What about NRI students who put in dollars where their marks should be? Is it because most
protesting students probably have a relative or a friend who has availed of
the private colleges after paying a handsome capitation fee (or horribly
high fees year after year).
After all, private colleges have actually benefited the paying middle class, most of who are from the forward castes.
There is another loophole in this merit-will-be-affected claim. Every Indian
is clearly aware that south India is far better off than north India on
almost all parameters of human development. Yet, south India has far more
reservations than north and has had them for years altogether. So clearly
reservations does not affect merit but actually helps a region prosper.
Infact, one can argue that if north India had put in better policies to help
its dispossessed (including reservations) earlier, it would not be the
blighted region that it currently is. And Bihar would not have had the
negative connotations it currently does!

This sounds like a Ripley's Believe it or not, but India with a population
of 1 billion, a majority of them young, is facing a shortage of manpower to
fuel its growth. Almost every sector is struggling to find people and this
shortage is raising costs, hurting India's core advantage (cheap labour). On
the other side, there are millions of uneducated (or little educated)
youngsters struggling to find decent jobs that can give them and their
families two square meals.
Why the paradox? Because our education system churns out only a few highly educated people; 90 per cent of the students enrolled at primary drop out, and end up with little skill to offer the marketplace.
Now, can India ever become a great power if so many Indians are not even decently educated to be a part of our booming economy? More important, do we deserve to be a great power when the nation's greatness benefits a few while millions languish?