Unreserved

Just today, I was walking down the road i saw these street boys walking, no sliding down the road on these transparency sheets.. and they were just having the time of their life.. they looked so happy! As I walked down the road I stepped over around 20 more of these transparency sheets and I looked at them in wonder.. what ingenuity must have possessed these young boys to use the transparency sheets for such a frivolous but enjoyable task!

And then I thought - would I or my 8 year old brother have EVER thought of using those sheets in any other way? All we might have done would be to pick them up and throw them!

The lateral thinking that those children displayed is not very easy to find.. and to think that 20 years down the line those boys will probably be owning a vegetable cart or at best bus drivers breaks my heart. So many brilliant minds with such great potential are probably out there tilling fields or cooking for a family of 10. Its the complete lack of opportunity that so many could-be Amartya Sens or C.V Ramans are being lost in the web of poverty..

The government is obviously trying, or making a fancy show of it. The heavy caste-based reservations made sense in the early years of independence when the maximum population below poverty line were in these SCs or STs or OBCS.. but now, most of the population who belong to the SCs and STs and are using the reservation to enter the colleges, are from as good a background as the non-SC an non-ST population. In fact, one of my batch mates who is an SC is now going to IIT though his classmates who went to the same coaching classes isn't despite him being much higher in terms of merit.

Does it really make sense to give away to students the seats that they could have earned through the general category.. Would it not be much more beneficial for the aid or special help to be given to those students who cannot afford the education? deserving students who cannot pay the comedk fees? or maybe income based reservation?

If its not blatantly obvious by now that the system is unfair at best, Its got to be worth considering atleast to make some basic amends to the current education system!