India supports reserved rather than deserved!!

Hi Everyone, The title is just a click bait and the content of the article is nowhere related to the title.

I woke up today morning(19th June 2020) and glanced through LinkedIn for any updates and posts. There was one post in my feed which had a whopping 7.7k likes,600+ comments till then and I thought I would take a look.

Here’s the gist of the LinkedIn post “I got 99.46 percentile in CAT, I have 10 CGPA in 10th, 97.9 in 12th but I did not get called for interviews for top-6 IIMs (BLACKI for those who know the lingo) due to a plethora of criteria(such as gender/academic diversity) and reservations(same old thing)“.

Before we dive into this article let me give you a brief history about me: My grades so far 10th – 10 CGPA in CBSE, 12th – 93 percent ,College – 7.98 CGPA out of 10, CAT 2020 – 99.57 percentile.

I graduated from NIT Trichy CSE in 2018 (got my seat under OBC-NCL criteria) and I am joining a B-School this year (2020) under general category.

Coming back to the LinkedIn article, the arguments of the guy seem reasonable to you? He has excellent 10th,12th grades and has an excellent CAT score (99.46 which roughly translates to rank 1350 out of 2,50,000). You might be thinking he should at-least get a chance to interview for the top 6 IIMs right?
On top of this the Dude was from a reputed engineering college from North-West India

Here’s where you are wrong:
1)The Dude has posted all his 10th,12th grades but hasn’t posted his college grades.
2)He seems to be a 2019 passout from his LinkedIn profile (which means he had 1 month work-ex when he applied for CAT 2019)
3)He hasn’t achieved any academic scholarships from his school (NTSE/KVPY) or college(SN Bose/MITACS/DAAD).

So what do these things show? This dude has nothing to differentiate him from the crowd of people applying for CAT. For those who know me, I have been trying to get into an Indian B-School since 2018 and got an admit in NITIE,MDI this year. Like the person who wrote the LinkedIn post I did not get called from IIMs A,B,C,I,K (Lucknow called me for interviews).

Let me tell you that I do not sympathise/support the post even a little bit. This Dude is part of the lakhs and lakhs of privileged people who do not understand the concept of reservation,gender diversity and academic diversity. Any university/college will be rated based on not only the scores of the students in the college but also about the background of the students,ratio of male-female students in the college, quality of research being done etc.

If you take a look at the ratings of B-Schools in India you would find that none of them feature in top-10 schools in the world. Every B-School in this regard has introduced the system of awarding extra marks for academic diversity(Non-Engineering students),gender diversity to ensure that the college has a good mix of students. Please note that in spite of introducing these measures, B-Schools in India have more than 95 percent of students coming from Engineering background.

The main anger that I have against the post is that he has no idea about reservation,gender diversity and academic diversity. It angers me so much that a graduate from one of the most coveted colleges in India does not think reservation is correct.

Take a look at this Instagram post:

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A post shared by I AM AN NITIAN (@i_am_an_nitian)

To just give a very high level logic for reservation from my understanding:

• Reservation is about social equality and not financial equality.
• It gives opportunity to the children in oppressed castes which have been denied education on the basis of their birth.
• Reservation is not a poverty alleviation program(read this as many times as possible).

Saying reservation should be done based on your economic status is laughable for many reasons:

• A child from an oppressed caste will forever be discriminated based on his/her caste irrespective of his/her education(I have seen and read about Doctors/IAS officers being discriminated based on caste).
• Irrespective of your economic status, the oppressor will not consider you an equal.
• Economy is not something which is set in stone. The concept of being economically well-off is very vague.

I will give a personal example where my family faced discrimination: We have a family friend(my dad’s friend and ex-colleague) who belongs to an upper caste. Once we went to a temple near his house and visited him. The uncle’s mother used to stay in their home. We chatted with them for sometime and left his house. My dad forgot the car keys and we went back to get it from their house. The uncle’s mother was cleaning the place where we had been sitting.

It angers me when people are so naive about what is the ground reality and think the problem has been solved. There was a recent interview where a popular actor told that the walls of caste discrimination have been broken and only a few bricks remain. I am afraid that the wall being broken is something else and not the wall of discrimination. Watch Article-15(Netflix) and Pariyerum Perumal(Amazon Prime) if you are still not convinced.

Coming back to my education, I feel happy that I applied under the General category. I am from an upper middle class family now,have a strong undergraduate degree and resources to get into BLACKI IIMs. Do I feel cheated that I could not get into IIMs B,A,C,K,I? The answer is a big NO. I feel I had everything that I needed to get into those IIMs and I could not get in because I was simply not good enough, end of story.

I would be happy if all these privileged kids(that includes me) stop cribbing about reservation and learn more about the ground reality.

JAI BHIM!!

Note: My political views are still evolving. This article is an outlet to all the anger I had over the years. I will develop more and more in the coming years to better the lives of the people around me.

Please reach out to me on email (dhananjai.nitt@gmail.com) if you want to further discuss about this article.