OBCs should throw away the demeaning crutches offered
Dear Friends,
As concerned citizens of this nation, you might have tried all possible means to save your country from this SELF-DESTRUCTIVE RESERVATION SYSTEM. This article by Prof. M.S. Gopinathan, an OBC himself has the potential to save this great nation from a possible division. Understand this article & explain it to all, irrespective of caste.
OBCs should throw away the demeaning crutches offered
Prof M S Gopinathan
June 09, 2006
I am by brand an 'Other Backward Class'. I did my PhD at an IIT and taught at another IIT for 27 years before retiring. It is to the credit of the IIT system that it never asked me my caste brand, neither when I entered as a student or faculty nor when I was promoted. It is sad that these things are going to change. It may not be irrelevant to note that they didn't ask my caste or religion at Oxford University in the UK, McGill University in Canada or the German Universities where I went to work.
If you are socially disadvantaged, you must strive to overcome that disadvantage and the only way to do that is to educate yourself and your children. Ask for good schools, good teachers and scholarships. If you opt for charity and crutches, you will always remain for generations to come, a receiver of charity limping on borrowed crutches. Charity demeans both the giver and the receiver.
If you haven't had proper schooling and if you are just airlifted into an IIT by virtue of your scheduled or backward caste, you will be a miserable misfit in the intellectually and socially elite IIT atmosphere. You cannot cope with the courses; you cannot speak the campus lingo. You feel ostracized, intellectually and socially. I am saying this based on my decades of long experience with such students at IIT. Even after special coaching for a year at IIT and being exempted from the dreaded Entrance Examination, the SC/ST reserved students cannot perform. Often they require further academic concessions, albeit unethical, to barely pass the courses. It helps nobody, least of all them. I do not know what happens to them in their post-IIT life; some commission should study it. But I doubt whether many second generation SC/ST IITians make it to the IIT directly through the JEE.
It takes enormous, dedicated, and sincere effort for decades on the part of the government if quality universal school education is to be provided to all, as decreed by the Constitution and as Independent India has miserably failed to deliver in over 50 years. But it is far easier to shortchange and hoodwink the SC/STs and OBCs by making a legislative flourish of the pen offering useless, humiliating backdoor entry to them in the Institutes of higher learning. This political gimmick even distorts the meaning of 'higher' learning.
Even the sanctioned SC/ST quota in IITs today goes unfilled to a large extent (50 per cent?).
IITs cannot attract quality faculty (current vacancy is probably 20 per cent or more). Imagine the scenario when 49 per cent admission is reserved on the basis of caste and not on the basis of the academic potential of the students. IITs will be shunned as Paraya or Backward Class Institutes by serious academicians of all castes and by the international academic community.
So what should the OBC students, for whom the politician's heart has suddenly started bleeding, do? They should join the anti-reservation agitation and agitate for decent schools, good teachers and scholarships and refuse to be taken for an easy ride by the vote seekers. They should maintain their dignity and refuse the segregating ignominy of backdoor entries into institutions of higher learning. They should ask for better training, better running shoes, better coaches and show that they too can race with the others.
They should throw away the demeaning crutches offered.
I know this will not come to pass. The IIT campuses will be made 50-50, 50 backward and 50 forward, splitting it in the middle along the caste divide, the handicapped and the non-handicapped crowding, jostling on the same race track, nobody going anywhere.
Swami Vivekananda was shocked by the horrendous caste divisions in Kerala and called it a mad house. We now have a whole mad nation!
As concerned citizens of this nation, you might have tried all possible means to save your country from this SELF-DESTRUCTIVE RESERVATION SYSTEM. This article by Prof. M.S. Gopinathan, an OBC himself has the potential to save this great nation from a possible division. Understand this article & explain it to all, irrespective of caste.
OBCs should throw away the demeaning crutches offered
Prof M S Gopinathan
June 09, 2006
I am by brand an 'Other Backward Class'. I did my PhD at an IIT and taught at another IIT for 27 years before retiring. It is to the credit of the IIT system that it never asked me my caste brand, neither when I entered as a student or faculty nor when I was promoted. It is sad that these things are going to change. It may not be irrelevant to note that they didn't ask my caste or religion at Oxford University in the UK, McGill University in Canada or the German Universities where I went to work.
If you are socially disadvantaged, you must strive to overcome that disadvantage and the only way to do that is to educate yourself and your children. Ask for good schools, good teachers and scholarships. If you opt for charity and crutches, you will always remain for generations to come, a receiver of charity limping on borrowed crutches. Charity demeans both the giver and the receiver.
If you haven't had proper schooling and if you are just airlifted into an IIT by virtue of your scheduled or backward caste, you will be a miserable misfit in the intellectually and socially elite IIT atmosphere. You cannot cope with the courses; you cannot speak the campus lingo. You feel ostracized, intellectually and socially. I am saying this based on my decades of long experience with such students at IIT. Even after special coaching for a year at IIT and being exempted from the dreaded Entrance Examination, the SC/ST reserved students cannot perform. Often they require further academic concessions, albeit unethical, to barely pass the courses. It helps nobody, least of all them. I do not know what happens to them in their post-IIT life; some commission should study it. But I doubt whether many second generation SC/ST IITians make it to the IIT directly through the JEE.
It takes enormous, dedicated, and sincere effort for decades on the part of the government if quality universal school education is to be provided to all, as decreed by the Constitution and as Independent India has miserably failed to deliver in over 50 years. But it is far easier to shortchange and hoodwink the SC/STs and OBCs by making a legislative flourish of the pen offering useless, humiliating backdoor entry to them in the Institutes of higher learning. This political gimmick even distorts the meaning of 'higher' learning.
Even the sanctioned SC/ST quota in IITs today goes unfilled to a large extent (50 per cent?).
IITs cannot attract quality faculty (current vacancy is probably 20 per cent or more). Imagine the scenario when 49 per cent admission is reserved on the basis of caste and not on the basis of the academic potential of the students. IITs will be shunned as Paraya or Backward Class Institutes by serious academicians of all castes and by the international academic community.
So what should the OBC students, for whom the politician's heart has suddenly started bleeding, do? They should join the anti-reservation agitation and agitate for decent schools, good teachers and scholarships and refuse to be taken for an easy ride by the vote seekers. They should maintain their dignity and refuse the segregating ignominy of backdoor entries into institutions of higher learning. They should ask for better training, better running shoes, better coaches and show that they too can race with the others.
They should throw away the demeaning crutches offered.
I know this will not come to pass. The IIT campuses will be made 50-50, 50 backward and 50 forward, splitting it in the middle along the caste divide, the handicapped and the non-handicapped crowding, jostling on the same race track, nobody going anywhere.
Swami Vivekananda was shocked by the horrendous caste divisions in Kerala and called it a mad house. We now have a whole mad nation!
posted by Cliff | 2:59 AM
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