Split down the middle

The other day as I was passing through Secunderabad, a guy in a nice shirt handed me an anti reservation pamphlet. It had a graphic of India split down the middle, half general, half reserved. Pretty strong stuff, I thought.

When the Mandal Commission fracas erupted all those years back, I was just a kid. My elder brother was one of the protesters. To me, he typified the sense of disenfranchisement the youth felt at the time. I could see in him a sense of powerlessness, of being unable to determine your own future against the heavy handedness of the government. Times were changing. A young, dynamic and modernizing Rajiv Gandhi was gone, and power seemed restored to the Old Guard. An Old Old Guard.

When school was closed due to the rioting, I suddenly aware of how vulnerable we all were. I realized my brother was gone all day, and would come back late at night, carrying anti-reservation material. He never talked about what exactly he was doing, and I never asked. My parents weren't thrilled, but they felt the students had no other choice. I still remember the sheer desperation everybody around me felt. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out what the big deal was about. Being bought up in the Indian ethos of looking up to authority, I always assumed they knew best. But why were my brother and his friends so worked up? In school I thought we all got along. So why can't people in the outside world? Were they worried about seats in colleges? SO worried that they were setting themselves on fire? I just didn't understand.

As I moved out of Delhi, I came to realize how the rest of India looks at caste. But it was only when I moved to the South that I truly began to understand what caste means.

Caste is everything. It is your identity and your currency. It is your past, and your future. It determines who you marry, who you work for, and who'll employ you. It determines how you see the world, and how the world sees you. Caste is something that you wear on your sleeve, proudly or like a Star of David. That is the reality in India today.

My caste has determined what Institutes will take me. It has determined how much I pay for fees, and what benefits I was eligible for (in my case, zero). As a member of a 'forward caste', I was not allowed to take formal responsibility for my lab, a position the state government dictated could only be held by an 'Adi Dravid'. Proactive SC teachers cut my marks, while SC/BC/OBC/MBC students did suspiciously well in their classes. I know it sounds like circumstantial. Perhaps I was being paranoid. Or perhaps my paranoia stemmed from the university granting a special scholarship to students who were "SC converted to Christianity".

67% of my classmates were on reserved seats. They were bright, no doubt. I knew enough to understand that if it wasn't for reservation most of them wouldn't have gotten as far as they had. It's a shame, because they were indeed deserving and hard working. Most of them came
from relatively modest background, and state reservation allowed them to join a Centrally funded postgrad programme that otherwise might be outside their grasp. The Centre coughed up a LOT of money to establish a setup in a cutting edge research area, and to equip future
researchers with these modern tools. Sure, I can see no harm in ensuring social representation among future scientists. Perhaps there is indeed a dilution of overall quality, and perhaps that is
acceptable. To an extent.

An accreditation commission member was taken aback when I appraised him of the caste situation in the university. It was pretty funny, actually. I met him after a general student interaction with the commission. I knew I could never raise the issue in public and escape unscathed. I didn't have the balls to do that. Scratch that. I WON'T have any balls left. To scratch or anything. When I mentioned the level of reservation, the guy was genuinely shocked. Seeing me talking to him seemed enough to spook a professor who immediately shooed him
into a waiting car, while the guy stammered to me he'll look into it. Yeah, sure. Good luck with that! I won't hold my breath.

The last batch to be inducted had only 1 general category student. The remaining 3 seats were given to category students, without going through the general category wait list. Fair minded professors protested, while the proactive chairman of the school went ahead and authorized it when the others were out of town.

I honestly don't know where I stand on reservations. I'd like to think India will someday be a meritocracy, because that I've always been told is the eventual goal. But the idea of merit is inherently biased. Every merit exam has an upper caste bias. I come from a family that always encouraged me to read, where the pursuit of knowledge was seen as a goal in itself. My family's financial status allowed me access to resources others did not, and enabled me to develop abstract and random notions of intellectual pish-posh. What if my family background was different? How different would my childhood have been? Probably a lot. It'll have been all Campa, not Kafka.