My Reservations

Fifty nine years ago a few good men decided that the great caste divide deserved to be erased. While at it, they thought that the great communal divide also should go. All held in good faith, it should have yielded fabulous results. The problem is just that today, so many years later, the wise men seem to have lost the plot.
Fifty nine years is not a small amount of time by any means. Why is it that after all these years reservations for various castes and communities (minorities) are still holding this country’s future hostage? Which civilized country can afford to say that their best brains are in some other country because they could not give them enough attention or encouragement? Why should it be that the mediocre go to the best schools at the expense of the rest? Fifty years should be more than enough for a surgical removal of the “downtrodden caste” bug. Any more than that and you are bound to believe that some people just don’t want to come out the crap-hole they are in. An objective view of the whole situation convinces us that no backward community was actually encouraged to do well for themselves. The people from minority classes/creeds who did well for themselves were self motivated people. What reservation did Dr. B.R. Ambedkar get? The entire focus in the past fifty nine years had been to completely cripple minority communities (caste/creed …actually I am ashamed of using the caste word so many times) in a fashion that they would never be independent of the politicians - Hence the security of the vote bank.
The worst insult you can heap on a people is labeling them “Backward” as part of OBC. It is the biggest failure of the quota/reservation scheme that 59 years post independence the concept of backward classes still exists. The very existence of a political party based on class lines belies any progress in the direction of an uplifted tomorrow. What has any government done to ensure that “backward” classes get better basic schooling? Why is it, then, suddenly their business to ensure that people from a certain community went to the best colleges in the country? What is this if not political melodrama?
And what the hell do they mean by the word “General”? Who is general? Generally speaking would that be a Malayalee Christian or a Gujrati Brahmin? Would that be a Bengali Muslim or a Ladhaki Buddhist? Is it our fault that some of our forefathers broke the chains of the caste system and made education the foundation stone of our lives? Do we have to suffer because our forefathers foresaw progress fifty years ago? For most of these questions our esteemed leaders won’t have answers or they will supply us with some punitive underdeveloped argument. Either way, in the wake of passionate arguments for and against reservations I hope our national leaders see sense and build the nation with the best available human resources and not shallow dreams and empty promises.