With reservation percentages going as high as 73% in the state there is a strong chance that India will become the first country to have a minority called ‘Open Category’ maybe then they might just consider giving these people some dignity.
Think about it, aren’t reservations ensuring that people don’t climb up the social ladder and widening the pre-historic caste divide that has gripped India from developing since forever?
Respect for all and secularism is something we have been taught since childhood, India is a nation where whatever your religion be I shall wish you Happy Diwali or Eid Mubarak with the same warmth of heart and soul. Where you visit the Ganpati Pooja at your driver’s place with the same reverence as you did for the Pooja at your neighbor’s home and where on seeing a beggar we are told not to give him our stale fish to fill his stomach, but to teach him to fish and fend for himself.
So then why this system of reservation? I ask. There definitely has been a class divide as a part of this nation’s past but aren’t all of us trying to come together and fight it? and if there are people ignorant to the suffering of this lowest rung of the society shouldn’t all of us come together and teach them to value these people because of no other reason but the sole fact that he is a fellow Indian.
The thought process behind reservations however noble, is in turn ensuring that those whose forefathers at some point of time might have faced discrimination will claim remuneration today as well, after sitting in the plush comforts of their latest residential complexes, with swimming pools and luxury car’s oops did I forget to mention wardrobe of designer handbags?
This is like my great grand child suing Sajid Khan for he inflicted Humshakals on me? Yep as bizzare as that! When my neighbor steppes out of her luxury sedan and claims her seat to the top B-School in my state with far less efforts and scores than the rest, just because she’s born with it, I get a similar feeling.
Having what I or millions like me didn’t, she had the privilege of being from a family who had a difficult past in the caste system and although many needed the seat a lot more because of their financial woes, she was the one to get it. Now tell me whose the one born with a silver spoon?
Discriminating on the basis of caste is like ensuring you humiliate the visually challenged in front of the whole country by calling them blind left, right and center and then go up and say I’ll give your ‘BLIND’ community 2 seats more for college admissions because my forefathers started the ritual of insulting you. (Not that I ‘ll teach my child not to insult you!)
Why are we ensuring that we humiliate people by openly calling them of the lower strata of society and then offering remuneration for it and doing it in a way that I willingly accept your humiliation and go ahead and get it written down and attested by the government stating it as the proof to my insult!
If there is someone facing destitution, poverty, lacking the means to live a healthy and safe life; then we should give them reservation because they are the one’s who need it! But by giving reservation on the basis of caste all we are doing is ensuring a divided nation, where we won’t value somebody’s success, on the contrary we pull them down and drag them as low as we can, because that is what we have been taught to do since childhood. After all isn’t that the RESERVATION we have for our countrymen in our heart!
*I do not intend to humiliate the community of visually challenged people by taking their example, it has been used to showcase the dept of the issue and for no other purpose.
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