a mARTIAN dIARY

Currently the Indian academia seems to be split into two camps – the pro-reservation junta or the anti-reservation junta. And as a person who is now confirmed of stepping back into the academic world in a few months, I move around people and places where this discussion happens in a very heated manner. As such I have been quizzed many time by both camps – are you with us or against us?

Few months ago my response would be “If I get my seat, I don’t care much about how the others get in” but then I realised that it was not me talking but the tension of being on 3 waiting lists and the prospect of a future so cloudy taking its toll on me. Now that its clear that, barring unforeseen circumstances, I will very much be spending the next two years of my life at Delhi University South Campus studying MBA(MS) from Faculty of Management Studies (FMS) Delhi, I have had time to reflect upon this issue more closely. Having been in both the camps at different times in my life, instead of justifying my current stand I would like to trace my relation with reservation.

My first tryst with reservation came when I was trying to get into first standard. Since my father was a transferable bank employee, it seemed a logical step for my family to try and get me into a “central” school or KV which followed a “central” syllabus so that changes in school would affect only the social-politic environment rather than the curriculum making the inevitable adjustment less difficult. You could say that I was at the “wrong end” of the reservation since I was neither a defence personnel’s ward nor a central govt employee’s ward, which constituted the first two levels of priority on the basis of which the admissions were granted in a KV. I was a level III person or in human understandable terms - “Ward of transferable employee under the state government”, which was pretty low considering that even that time KV’s usually used to get filled by the time the applications from the first two categories were done with. As luck would have it a new division started that year, the now notorious (in my mind and our batch-folklore for all the beating me and my friends got from the “D” people) “D” division. But anyway I was in the “C” division list and was able to get into KVCPT.

Thinking about its right now, even though it was reservation per say, it was a very logical system since it was in the order of people who were mostly likely to get transferred and in hindsight (and more importantly having got my seat ) , it does not make any sense for me to have any kind of grudge towards it.

My next recollect-able memory of reservation is from my 8th or 9th standard civics class where I learned that some constituencies are reserved for SC/ST. it is something that I believe that I don’t have enough knowledge to make a stand on right even now though I really hated the idea at that time, but it’s a memory none-the-less.

Then came the engineering entrance “nonsense”. ( I call it nonsense now because I find people attaching so much value to it that after having done engineering from one my the best colleges in my state, I still feel the hue and cry is a bit too much, ESPECIALLY for people to REPEAT year ( plz guys unless your would die for engineering and for you believe its your true calling, your time is better spent doing something else…something you like. This does not include repeating for the IIT’s cuz I don’t have enough input to take a stand on that yet)

This is the stage where it dawned upon me that if there are 100 seats in a college, I am eligible only for less that 50 seats and some people, who studied along with me, came to the same tuition class, got the same books, bunked the same classes (more or less); had a special inheritance to the seats. Looking at the sheer numbers (less than 300-400 good seats and more than 50k people writing) I was convinced that it was injustice and hence was a fierce anti reservation guy, ready to air my view anywhere with supreme conviction. But once I got into the college I drew solace from the fact that these people would not get any reservation at the placement time. But only time will tell me that these “Reserved” people walked away with some of the better paying jobs, for which I can hold no grudge as I felt they deserved it.

But during my four years, I interacted with many people including people who came thru reservation and one of my closest friends, Miss R, was the daughter of a daily wage labourer. She was the person from whom I and my best friend in class S used to copy all our notes from. She was in most of my practical lab groups owing to our close roll numbers and without her I don’t think I would have passed my engineering labs. (Special mention to Miss C &N who were the people who I am eternally indebted to, for proving me with the rest of the notes :P) I think she , Miss R, would be the first person to agree to the fact that she was not good in our class subject as some of us. But that did not deter her from working hard, and now after my engineering even though there are people who got in with a “merit” seat who haven’t cleared all their papers, she cleared all of them and is working in a good job earning for her family. I am not trying to say “ See she did it, other merit students didn’t do it…so reservation is justified” but what I am trying to question is a question whose answer that most people take for granted.

What is Merit?

Is it my marks in the different exams I have taken? Is it the percentile I get in a hugely random exam like CAT, which depends, much more than my liking, to the taker’s luck on that that day? Frankly to me that’s not merit, nor can I define merit. But of course one thing I accept is that we don’t have seats for everybody and hence some people need to be selected or in other words others need to be eliminated. So its more a process of elimination than selection and a good academic profile would mean that there are better chances of a person putting the opportunity to study at an IIM or an IIT or an FMS to better use, but we have to understand that the selection or elimination process is flawed, it is not ideal, but close enough to idea and close enough to practical for us to make do.

Now that’s one way to measure merit. But that’s not the only merit. In the case of Miss R, given the resources she had, her output efficiency was probably at least equal if not much better to many of us ours. Which means that she also, in this definition of merit “Deserves” the seat. Why I use the word “deserves” the seat is because I see lots of anti-reservation people say that “deserving” candidates are loosing seats. But to them the word deserving is a 1 dimensional word without any meaning beyond the percentile obtained in cat or marks obtained in IIT-JEE. I again point out, they are a good measure of merit, but they are not without flaws.

So if entrance exams are a practical approximation to selection and elimination so are reservations a practical approximation to social justice. Both are not without flaws, but close enough to the ideal to be implemented.

Having said that I do not say that reservation is the only solution or the main solution for social justice, on the contrary it is just a stop gap solution. The thing to be emphasised most in my opinion is primary education that is the mail solution to social justice in education. More should be done at the grass roots level, which will unfortunately take too much time for it to have relevance in a vote-bank dominated politics. But I guess that’s for NGO’s and similar organisations to take up. My previous company MindTree used to do some work in this area and is something other organisations can also cue up on. And reservation can be phased out, once primary level education standards are reached.

But also having quoted this example, it is only prudent that I let out another fact about my college. Some of the people who got in through reservation, where some of the richest guys in my college which does make a mockery of the system, but since I know that more than 1 deserving candidate got thru reservation, I think the system has worked. And the creamy layer, if implemented properly will go a long way in helping the system match the ideal curve.

As a product of the Indian KV schooling system, some of my earliest memories date back to my English classes where spelling tests used to be the stuff my nightmares were made of. Having been constantly fed on 2nd hand DC comics that my father used to get me, “Color” is one of the first words that helped me realize that all English is not “good” English. I still remember the red marks (although I have to confess that a recent viewing of Tare Zameen Par refreshed those memories) in my English notebook with ‘color’ being one of the words prominently getting colored.

It’s been over 60 years since the Union Jack was taken off and replaced by our Tricolour at Red Fort. But even with a history spanning more than thousands of years, the 200 odd years that the British ruled us left a huge impact on us, nothing more profound than the popularization of (British) English as a means of communication. 60 years is of course too close to call, but at the dawn of the information age, the English legacy can be said to have had a positive impact on our economy. The availability of so many employable English-speaking youth is the single most important factor that has helped us emerge from our slumber in this age where English is the sickle which is helping us reap as the knowledge industry sun shines brightly

But gone are the colonial days when the sun never set in the British Empire and now the US of A has taken over as the dominant economy of the world and with the end of the cold war, its position as the first among equals has only gotten more and more concrete. The fact that most countries hold their foreign reserves in American dollars is perhaps the best testament to the fact that they drive the world economy.

Now in this uni-polar world it’s only natural that a doubt arises in our mind as to whether we should tow the line of our former masters or cede our “English freedom” to the Americans. This is more relevant for us as we are a rapidly growing “developing economy” with services exports as one of the major propellants of our growth. America is an important market for the skills of millions of Indians and if you go by the cliché “any money is good money” it won’t be hard to predict how the winner of the British vs. American English tussle is. Not only is a large chunk of our exports going to the America, of that a good chunk of the business goes into transcription and voice/text based support where the subtle differences in the different avatars of English will stand out.

But in a recent study in India, for the book English in India: Loyalty and Attitudes by Hohenthal, Annika., we were still able to see the ghosts of our colonial past. In the study the majority of the respondents (70%) felt that RP (Received Pronunciation: BBC English; Standard English in Britain) would serve as the best model for Indian English, 10% thought General American English would be better, and 17% preferred the Indian variety of English. This is of course due to some important fallacies in our earlier analysis, the most important being the question of teaching resources. For a country that has a history of teaching a different flavor of English , which is now entranced in all its English teaching resources, both human and material, it can be a humongous task to chance and there is no switch button solution to move to American English and the as simple business rules go, the cost must be justified by the advantage.

Also its is not just a matter of teaching resources but also some of the words are so ingrained into our culture that a change would require a change in our social mindset. Think of confused driver having to put “gas” into their cars instead of petrol or of the devout vegetarian wife going aghast at the prospect of having to put ‘egg’plant ( brinjal) into the “otherwise” fully vegetarian dish or The disgust of the Indian who is happy when he can pay bills with bills, only to later find out the truth. And in a different view, this can be seen as an open invasion of our culture which we ourselves are promoting
Another important factor that must be given its due is the origin of the so called Indian English which comprises several dialects or varieties of English spoken primarily in India, and by first-generation members of the Indian Diaspora. This dialect evolved during and after the British colonial rule of India for nearly two hundred years. English is the co-official language of India, with about 100 million speakers. And looking at the activity in the Indian English Literature arena, which is only rising year by year, we can see that we taking our rightful place in the history of evolution of English by contributing to it, as much as, if not more than what we take from it.

At the end of the day if we are to move to American English , which, as we saw, warrants a lot of social and financial costs, it has to be justified by the advantages gained Also we must be convinced that such a path is the only path for us. But this is not the case as the success story of the our services industry in itself points to the fact that the differences between the various dialects of English are not very high and that they can be compensated by an intelligent mind or in the worst case scenario by a job specific “finishing” training.

To conclude I feel that for us to move to American would not only be a step backwards in social terms but also it would be a great insult to the English language itself, as we would be discounting its resilience and universality which made it popular in the first place. And as for the huge influence that British English already enjoys in our English, only time can tell whether this impact is good or bad. As Angus Wilson once said, contemporaries are too close to the event to be good judges. And contributing and developing our own Indian English would be the best step forward.