Renewed Propagation of Racism?

I never believed it when my parents/grand-parents used to say that the whole world is going astray with the new ways and all that. I refuted their sayings with indignation. But the present elite democratic representatives in the parliament are making alarming progress towards shaking up this faith.

I'm talking about the 49.5% reservation quota for "backward" classes. How much more ridiculous can that get? You want to give your "backward" classes 50% reservation? I have a better idea - why don't just feed them free for the rest of their lives with, say, 10 lakhs per annum? Or is that too low - you say some "upper-caste"s are earning more? Ok what is holding you from raising the figure then? After all - the others are there to pay it off from their taxes, right? Surely, if they don't pay off for the atrocities done by their forefathers, who will?

Ok, on more rational terms, if you are really bent upon providing some infrastructure to pull up or motivate these groups, give them some extra facilities at the ground level - the primary and secondary levels maybe. How can you attribute a person's not making to graduate and PG courses, after 12 years of schooling in same institutions, to his "class" being a backward one!! If they cant make it, they simply don't deserve it. His efforts during the schooling, and his abilities decide how he performs among others, and his rank amongst others is what he deserves.

And honestly, how this move will help neutralising the racial barriers, is a total mystery to me. In fact, what it has surely spurned off, and which will only increase if this bill comes to pass, is a new segregation mentality among students (and others too) - between the ones who get through using reservations and the ones who wrestle it out fairly (yes, I use the term 'fairly' since I believe the other is definitely unjust). The latter group will look down upon the former - and quiet rightly so - because it will remain as a glaring fact that the non-reservation candidates are intellectually superior and better performers than the ones using quotas. What will follow next is that institutions and companies will start to scan candidates to identify who might be a "reservation" class candidate and who not - thereby advocating a new era of racism in this century. (Or would the government then move to enforce that all companies too have a reservation in their employee system? I would love to see that day though!) It follows that, for their own benefits, candidates should not opt to use quotas even if they can, and get themselves placed where they rightly deserve by merit.

If something must be done for the "backward" classes, one better option would be providing them who gets through with merit, a 100% sponsorship from the government. That would be a motivator and would not undermine standards either. In fact, the most prominent discrimination now in India after 60 years of independence is the one arising out of financial status, and not out of discriminations practised 100 years ago.

I never used to pay any attention to the last name of people, like the way perhaps my previous generation do. However, I always asked them out - since they were part of their names - and only the first name I considered to be an incomplete information about the person's identity. The last name was nothing more than a part of the name. But if this bill comes to pass, I know I'll become conscious of the last name denoting the class - and I'll be trying to figure if that is a "quota" class - effectively myself judging whether the person is 'good-enough' or below standards. I hope this situation doesn't come to pass.