By Reservations only!

Reading the news these days depresses me. People shooting their own family, so called crusaders beheading people for belonging to a different religion, communal violence, more deaths… But what has bothered me the most has been the issue of reservations. I always believed that I would go back to my country in a few years raise my kids there, send them to school there. But now I wonder. I have never been brought up in the shadows of caste or religion. Infact up until the time I was in my 11th grade where I had to fill out certain forms, I didn’t even know what my caste was. But now I wonder…How do you talk to kids about tolerance and equality on one hand and then tell them to forfeit what is rightfully theirs to someone completely undeserving on the other? I would like to ask the government. They seem to have an excellent plan to take care of the people who were supposedly minority since their ancestors had been treated wrongly 50 years ago. I ask them what about us. What is happening now is wrong. Does that mean our children and their children will receive concessions for what we and people after us are going through to receive a good education? And why the kid gloves? Why are the people from the reservation quotas being handed things that we are made to work our asses off for?? When did the definition of lower caste change to economically challenged? Or is it another definition for mentally challenged? And since when did 50% become a minority?

I don’t think the country would be in such a frenzy if seats were reserved for people who couldn’t afford to go to school and worked and went to night schools to complete their education. But when seats are given to people who score a meager 60% to the normally 99% cutoff, it is pathetic. Especially when you know 50% of those seats will be vacant in the second year and no one will look at the futility or the lost opportunity to some brilliant student who scored 98.9% and who would have made a brilliant surgeon someday but couldn’t get into medical school because his grandfather wasn’t victimized by a Brahmin!

In a country where an entire identity can be changed if you can feed the right people a little money what it a little SC/ST certificate? Not only is this issue grossly unfair (not to mention a complete political move) it is also an invitation for more corruption. Maybe ranting won't help(Signing a petition against this fiasco definitely didn't!) But somehow there is still a little hope that maybe if there are enough voices this won't go through and the future of the country will be spared!