Sunday, May 28, 2006

To reserve or not to !!

There has been so much talk on the proposed reservation for the OBCs of late everywhere right from the print media , the television, among people..etc. The whole issue has been debated so much that even if I tell someone that I would like to reserve a few seats for a train journey , i might as well be mistaken for being "pro reservation".
Well, I don't want to say anything on whether reservation is right or wrong. I actually don't even know these statistics which the pro and anti reservationists are bringing up to justify their cause. Moreover, there are a lot of schemes for the poor and the OBCs that created as much if not more hype when being introduced, but which then sank without a trace and are just limited to the policy papers. So how this scheme would be implemented amidst so much opposition is also in question.
But amongst all this hype and drama surrounding this issue , one thing has intrigued me. One of the or should we say the main reason the anti reservation group is crying itself hoarse, is that if OBCs are allowed to come into mainstream or the so called elite IITs and IIMs and the AIIMS, there would be complete mediocrity all around.
Now I really wonder how much of quality is available in the products of IITs and IIMs as of now. If the quality was anywhere near as is being told to us repeatedly, then we should have been a nation of powerful CEOs , brilliant engineers and our healthcare system should have been among the best in the world.
But we are nowhere near it. Our engineers nowadays be it mechanical, civil, electrical or any branch want to be in the sofware industry. They don't care if they sit all night and do some junk production support work which is equivalent to a call centre job.There are very few who will actually venture into research or innovating something worthwhile.
Our IIM graduates latch at the first oppurtunity they get to work abroad and don't mind settling there. Again there are very few who would want to turn into employers.
And finally our doctors who are leading the anti reservation protests steal the show with their fantastic sense of responsibilty and duty.
There are so many doctors passing out of our medical colleges.But how many of them are working in the rural areas. The government hospitals are always a picture of neglect, with the doctors there spending more time in their own private clinics. The less said about our rural health care the better it is. There have been so many reports of malnutrition among children and I wonder where the doctors are at that time.
So my point is there is already so much mediocrity among our students and the reservation for the OBCs is actually not going to introduce it. But as I said earlier it remains to be seen if the OBCs and the poor ones at that will benefit from this.

I wonder how the students would have reacted if the government had announced that there are going to be separate engineering ,medical and management institutions for OBCs . I can swear that nobody would have bothered to raise a whisper because their seats are now untouched and their elite and holy institutions will not be dirtied by the bad OBC blood.
In that case we would actually have more number of OBC doctors and engineers passing out. We would still have mediocre graduates right?? we would still have a divided society right??

But then all this talk of mediocrity would have been thrown out of the window.
So I think the struggle now is not so much for saving India out of mediocrity or creating a caste less society. It is more about cementing the position the other castes have been holding for centuries. The message I'm getting out of all this anti reservation protests is " Get lost you OBCs and SC/STs, don't even dare to venture into our territory. If you really want to come up in your life, we will not care to give you a helping hand , rather we would push aside someone trying to do so".

And finally, if they do not want reservation so badly, how many of them would actually promise that each one would help one OBC or SC/ST student reach to the level of writing a JEE or a CAT.
Sadly the honour of cracking the joke of the century goes to me ...

4 comments:

Hameeduddin said...

hmmm..u might wanna chk out http://what-joy.blogspot.com/2006/05/phir-wahi-baat.html

my frnds and me blog here

Niranjani said...

Yeah I did check out what you've blogged. Still I stick to what I say. Think you have to read my blog again. I'm not pro or anti reservation. I'm just saying that we should not be protesting against reservation because it will bring in mediocrity.We can as well say that we don't want to lose our seats for no mistake of ours.
Let's just be fair even in our struggle against injustice.

Hameeduddin said...

fair and square. But i am anti reservation. Let everyone compete for seats equally. Two generations have recieved benifit, now no more.

If at all reservation shd be there, it should now be based on annual income of the family.

After some time even that should be unnecessary.

Niranjani said...

Shhhh...Don't ever say this. Then we might end up having 20 % more reservation for the poor.