This TOI article covers a story of a coaching/ preperatory group called Super 30 in Patna, Bihar, which had sucessfully to put 28 out of 30 students belonging exclusively to to OBC and SC categories through IIT JEE.

One of the justifications offered by the supporters of giving 27% reservation for OBCs at IITs and IIMs is the inequity in access to coaching that is a required or key component in cracking the IIT JEE, faced by many students who belong to the rural, and usually economically weaker, sections of the Indian society. In this I agree with their diagnosis but not the cure they suggest.

IITs, in my personal experience, when compared to vast swathes of other professional colleges at regional levels, remain of the most caste (and religion) blind places in India. I have heard stories and narratives from cousins and friend who had attened local engineering colleges in South India that operate under the caste based reservation schemes, and most these stories uniformly highlight the fact how divisive caste remains after the admissions end.

Caste in their stories acts as a litmus test for association and friendships they seek at the college level. Some of these cousins wouldn't even talk to/ or associate with other students who were admitted under the general category, much less OBC or SC/ST categories, because they belonged to a different caste. In many cases, these narratives are taken to the extreme, and caste based politics and conflicts break out in these college campuses.

Also it takes but a minute to look up the origins of the Indian politicians to realise that a significant number of them were forged in these politicized campuses, where the main business of the day was not education but power struggles. A simple visual contrast that I could always see was the political slogans graffitied all over the Osmania University's campus in Hyderabad where I wandered around in the summer breaks vis-a-vis the clean slate of the IIT Kgp campus, with sole exception of Gymkhana election period. A great description of the desolation wrecked by caste and religious power struggles on what was once great Benaras Hindu University can be read in Pankhaj Mishra's novel 'The Romantics'.

So when well meaning people suggest OBC reservations at IITs, they forget the potential fallouts of taking such a step on the subsequent intellectual and social cultures that form the true markers of IITs. What then is the solution to address the problem of access to elite and elite making places such as IITs?

I would argue for steps that would increase the prevelance of groups Super 30. These may include requiring exsisiting coaching institutes to take on economically disadvantaged but brilliant students to educated people taking initiative to start up coaching institues such as Super 30 that focus exlusively on the disadvantaged. I suppose my argument is similar to those proponents who argue for increased and better governmental focus on school education as a better policy to raise the boats vs. simply lowering the bar based on caste.

You ask for a poem. I offer you a blade of grass. You say it is not good enough. You ask for a poem. - Brian Patten

Let this be the geography of your marriage: a rain drenched summer medow in which the soul meets solitude.

Let the lay of this land slope towards a creek over which hover cardioid damselflies as they do here now.

Let the rooms of your twilights be lit by laughter that signals like a lighthouse or a firefly.

Let lines on your palm wander into the lines of the other's, where they may encounter both poems and grass.

For N & V, in lieu of a blade of grass for their wedding, this delayed poem.

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Also this and this are two other wedding (pre & post) poems I wrote.

  
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My Poems