Re-served...Are we!!

Trrrrrrrriiiiinnggg…………Goes my alarm clock, kicking me out of my bed, to start another exhausting day.
Well, then there we go trudging our feet to the office to churn out new ideas for the consumers in the so called developed nations.

“Developing nations”, this term is a dark spot on the face of countries like India which it is fazt trying to get rid of & rightly so. One look at the figures on the boards, the GDP flying at 8%, the Sensex beating the Dow Jones Index, the FII’s all the major ones bullish on India & new ones ready to pump in billions on the bullion, all these are proof enough that India is on its way to India shining. The India shining campaign might be used by the BJP for their election campaign, but today’s India is shining due to the shining entrepreneurs, whiz kidz in the IT & ITES industries & the industrial prowess that we have achieved in due course of time.
What with the whole of France government in arms against Mittal’s Arcelor bid, & the American auto parts industries bowing before their Indian counterparts & Detroit going down to Indian auto industries, Bush taking the Indian nuclear bid on the congress floor, all signs that India has arrived.

Now it is all up to the Indian government not to screw up the track to glory for the students & industrialists who are the major stakeholders of this success story. The British Raj taught the Indian kings “Divide & Rule” & today’s politicians are perfecting it!
Mr. Arjun Singh’s recommendation to implement the Mandal bill is a step in this direction.
After 60 years of reservation politics, bringing in such a bill is literally a holocaust of the morality of providing education to the meritorious & righteously selected students. When a child puts his first step in the temple of education he does not expect that on the grounds of reservation he is not entitled to a certain course or college just because his ancestors had deprived some people in his era.
This is an absurdity which is implicit in the reservation bills which India has passed over the years. Now this is about to hit the premier institutes like the IIM’s & IIT’s. IIM’s which holds an exam like CAT which is tougher than any exam of its kind, is a good filter enough to allow only the right candidates to the privilege of studying in these institutes. Now with the quota systems to bring in up to 49.5% reservations, the general category students have to fight for fewer seats just to allow the so-called “deprived” students being offered the seats on a platter. These so-called “deprived” students flaunt their caste certificates like a rich brat showing off his dad’s Merc or a Bentley for that matter. In the wake of these quotas, it is the general category students who feel deprived or more so ripped off the seats which they meritoriously deserve. But as usual the government is fast asleep with its eyes shut. The same bill in the 1990’s had created very bloody agitations leading to a self immolation by Mr. Rajiv Goswami. But then too, governments as is their nature do not learn from history, let alone base a decision judiciously on facts & figures. If the bill is passed this time around, India will again bear the brunt of agitations & brain drain, which I think; India would not like to see.

Solution: “Reservation”- the very word has cut across the social fabric of our democratic country.
The FM on one hand wants to improve the countries GDP, but Mr. Chidambaram, if you do not have a pool of efficient & talented engineers, doctors & managers, who is going to run tomorrow’s industries & offices which are mushrooming today in the wake of the markets blooming. It is said that instead of giving alms to the poor & adding to unemployment, give them work, make them self sufficient so they can stand on their own feet & earn their daily bread. But the govt. is negating this very fact & reserving seats for students. Now be it SC’s, ST’s or OBC’s or any other class, what the govt. needs to do is provide proper schooling, primary education & rural education. If you do not have the foundation of a building ready, how do you expect the upper storey’s to stand. If the quota students do not have a basic education in place, how do you expect them to learn the nuances of surgery or engineering? In today’s dynamically changing business scene how do you expect them to tackle the markets without basic education? The need of the hour is a robust primary education system in place. Get the kids out of sweat shops & into schools sweating it out to fight for seats & not getting it easy, much to the hatred of their general category counterparts. It is a fact that even after the students of reserved category gets into the premier institutes; they cannot cope up with the speed at which the curriculum goes. This is reason enough to take a step back & look at what a mess the reservation politics has created in this country. The other solution to this botched up issue is that only one person from a family should be allowed to avail of the reservation system. I guess that if one person takes up a place in a premier institute, he can easily help in the decent upbringing of the family. More so then the other members can rightly fight for their seats in a meritocracy based democracy & we can get rid of the reservation demon once & for all.

Now when I put forth my ideas, the critics would argue that go on the road & you will find millions hungry & deprived of the basic necessities, but they are oblivious to the fact that a larger faction of the lower middle class society has silently & gradually moved out of the “lower” to the “upper” segment of the society. They can afford to go to the hotels of which they would dream of, buy a decent enough accommodation & their kids do go to the private schools. Then who are the people still in the lower class, well they are the replacements which are driven in the metros to earn their livelihoods away from their hometowns to flood the cities.
The chains of Mc Donald’s & Big Bazaars are evident of the fact that the middle class is finally recognized as a powerful consumer segment in its own right. When the industries, domestic & foreign alike, are so bullish, how can our own government tie us with the shackles of reservations & quotas.
I am against biasing whether it is for the lower classes or for the upper classes like Brahmins, or Thakurs & the ilk.
The very basis of the reservation system when introduced was to shun the caste system from the society. But, if we see the state of the reservation politics played in the name of “deprivation”, I think it has defeated the existence of such a system.

Bottom line: - Mr. Arjun Singh What were you thinking??!! Any type of reservation for the lower or upper caste is a big NO…NO!!

In today’s global village we should not have any reservations based on caste, creed, gender or race. Only then can we have a boundary less economy & attract talent & economies to invest in this country which was once known as “the Golden sparrow”.

Trrrrrrrriiiiinnggg…………I think that's the wake up call for the politicians to take account of the growth of India's GenNext!! Get out of the bed of reservation politics!