Reservations for equal access to education and jobs is destroying Indian society

 

India’s education sector has always had serious issues. From poorly maintained to dilapidated government schools and exorbitantly expensive private schools, good education is still a luxury for many, especially in the rural areas. But pushing for education for all blindly has only ended up creating more problems.

India has had a robust societal structure for thousands of years. Society was broadly divided into 4 categories based on profession – 1) Scholars 2) Warriors 3) Traders and 4) All other Professionals. Every profession was integral to maintaining the balance and needs of the society. This was why it was essential that each profession be handed over to the next generation along with the vast array of knowledge accumulated over the years. In times of wars, people from other categories also used to join the warriors. This is shown beautifully in the movie 300 where the Greek army is shown as a group of soldiers banded together from all professions whereas Spartan soldiers knew nothing else to do other than to fight.

According to ancient Indian texts, till the end of the Dwapar Yug or 3rd Age, there were only scholars and sages who used to advise kings and give knowledge to people. Then society changed drastically with the advent of Kali Yug or 4th Age and the beginning of idol worship. Heroes became Gods and started getting worshipped in temples. Scholars attached their knowledge to Gods, gave it divinity and declared themselves superior to all other categories. They usurped knowledge by creating Gods out of everyone who had superior knowledge and skills. Warriors Ram & Krishna, Vishwakarma, an architect and Dhanwantari who had the knowledge of medicines and treating diseases were all made Gods. The scholars started serving only in temples thereby creating a new profession. With knowledge in their grasp, they started looking down on the dark skinned professionals who used to do all the manual labour. This is how India’s caste system was born and the society got divided into 1) Brahmins 2) Kshatriyas 3) Vaishyas and 4) Shudras. Through the centuries, each caste got further divided into numerous sub castes making Indian society how it is today.

Knowledge of the Gods Brahmins possessed were denied to other castes. Shudras were the ones who were most affected as they were denied access to all knowledge and languished under caste based oppression. When the British introduced their form of education in India and built schools, the upper caste usurped even those and denied education to the lower caste people. It was to compensate for all the oppression they suffered for centuries that caste based reservation was made part of the Constitution for their upliftment.

But caste based oppression and humiliation continues to this day. Caste based reservation has not served to erase the caste based divide in the society. People of the lower castes have chased educational courses aspiring for professions traditionally being done by the upper caste people. They seem to be in the false belief that achieving academic and economic equality with upper class people will erase caste based inequality.

In India, anyone who is good in science and math in school is a potential candidate to become an engineer or a doctor now. The mad race to engineering and medical courses repeats every year. I am an engineer partly because of this reason. The demand for engineering and medical courses are so high that numerous private colleges have sprung up to accommodate candidates who do not qualify the entrance exams for getting admitted in government colleges. Is it because the demand for engineers and doctors is so high in India? On the contrary, both are languishing and engineers are even taking up the jobs of clerks. Then why such madness? Because Vishwakarma and Dhanwantari are Gods of engineering and medicine respectively and upper castes have traditionally had their hegemony over jobs in these fields. People of the lower castes are simply chasing the life of the upper caste devoid of comprehension and logic.

Caste based discrimination reported and exposed recently in Cisco in the US shows how this curse tags along with Hindus wherever they go and how prophetic were the words of Bhim Rao Ambedkar, one of the architects of Indian Constitution. Reservations in education and public sector jobs have only served to increase the animosity of upper castes towards the lower ones because different rules for different castes has made the field of competition uneven.

To compound the woes, people from rural areas are leaving behind agriculture and their traditional occupation and flocking to cities in search of education, blue and white collar jobs and the fancy urban life. The problem with this came to the fore when COVID-19 struck the crowded cities, state governments were unable to provide even food for the migrants during lock down period, they started returning to their homes by whatever means of transport and many died on the way due to exhaustion, starvation and accidents. This is a systemic rather than a governance and administration problem.

Reservations and access to education and jobs to all is not going to solve what is ailing India’s society. When I was in the Netherlands I have overheard people talking proudly about family members who are bus drivers. In India, bus drivers are looked down upon and even more when it comes to bus cleaners. Why? Because these jobs are usually done by people from the lower castes and if these jobs are done by upper caste people then they are academically poor. India’s problem is with lack of equal respectability for all jobs and occupations. Discrimination is 3 fold now, based on caste, education and economic status. A sewage cleaner’s job is as important in society as that of any other professional, but he will always be discriminated based on these 3 factors and will be associated with all the filth of the sewage. A goldsmith might be rich but will still be sneered upon behind his back based on his caste and education.

While I am happy to read and hear about children of people doing the lowly jobs performing well in school exams, it saddens me to hear them say they want to become engineers and doctors and scientists. They are the few who have access to higher education and can go back and improve the working conditions of the jobs of their parents. When I read about a group of engineers who had created a robot to clean sewage in my home state, what I first searched for was whether anyone in the team came from the background of sewage cleaners. A sewage cleaner’s son or daughter coming up with such a creation would have been the perfect situation.

With access to advance technology, anything is possible now. Someone whose father or ancestors were blacksmiths can get educated and still become a blacksmith with cutting edge techniques and machines. People of lower castes should just forget about respectability and equality for now, focus on getting education and reviving and improving the occupations of their ancestors. Respect will come when a blacksmith starts selling his skills and products through mobile apps. A truck driver’s daughter should use her education to improve the design of trucks and making truck driving more comfortable. Erasing caste based discriminatory mindset will take time but restoring equal respect for all professionals in society will be the stepping stone and will happen only when the next generations start making informed choices.

4 years on, was demonetization a scam as it is still believed to be?

India’s economy has been on a downward slide from the time the knife of demonetization was struck deep into it’s heart in 2016. Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong from that time. 4 years on, majority of the people were struggling to get back on their feet when COVID-19 decided to make an uninvited visit. In Kerala, the Indian state where I come from, there is a saying about a man struck by lightning getting bitten by a snake. It is exactly such a double whammy that India has been subjected to. I still see people on social media cursing PM Modi for the demonetization fiasco and calling it the biggest ever scam in India.

Even I believed so for more than a couple of years till I started connecting the dots. I am admittedly not much of a finance guy because I believe businesses are run more by human needs and emotions than by numbers. But the aftermath and fallout of demonetization forced me to look under the hood. First of all, back in 2016 when I was in Bangalore, I had befriended a birder at a park. He was a retired bank officer with good knowledge about birds. One day, during a casual conversation he said government should demonetize its high value currencies. I was taken aback. I wasn’t able to wrap my brain around what he said at that time. I remembered this when demonetization happened but because of government’s constantly changing narratives about it I wasn’t able to do my own analysis clearly.

In order to understand demonetization it is necessary to understand the situation of the country’s banking system at that time. NPAs on every type of loans were mounting and banks had no option but to liquidate assets of borrowers to recover at least the principal amount of loans. The fallout of the financial meltdown of 2008 was simply not going away. Banks got pushed to the corner with the NPAs of corporate loans. When Kingfisher reported losses and Vijay Mallya told the banking consortium that things were spiraling out of his hands, they decided to top up on the existing loans expecting the airline to make a belated turnaround from its beleaguered situation. What the banks got in return was Kingfisher’s assets – office buildings, airplanes, etc. Banks are not in the business of selling buildings and airplanes. This is just one example. Essentially banks got stuck with a pile of assets they couldn’t liquidate.

But banks were already under the pump for a bigger reason. India’s economy is firmly divided into organized and unorganized sectors. The greatest challenge of successive Indian governments has been to rein in and control the unorganized sector and convert as much of it as possible into organized sector because of an important reason. I take money from my bank account, buy from a local grocery vendor and that money flows into the local market where it goes into circulation most probably without ever going back into the banking system. I have even heard of professionally employed people who refuse any large deposits into their bank accounts. People were using innumerable & innovative methods to evade taxes they are entitled to pay without realizing that they were inadvertently gnawing away at the banking system.

Trampled from two sides and cash strapped, banks needed an urgent ventilator. The problem was too big for the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to solve. Government had to step in and the only way to let off the steam albeit temporarily was to pull back all the high currency notes from the unorganized sector. Demonetization was probably seen as the only solution. The bank officer had told me about demonetizing high value currency notes in 2015 when he was already retired. This means demonetization was being discussed for the past several years from the time of the previous UPA government.

The biggest giveaway about demonetization was the government’s changing narratives about it’s purpose. It initially said demonetization will stop black money hoarding and neutralize counterfeit money rackets. But then 97% of notes recovered by banks were found to be legitimate. Then they changed their narrative to terror funding. In this case it was not enough to demonetize only high value currencies. In both cases it made no sense to demonetize existing high value currencies and then introduce a currency of even higher value. To tackle terror funding, all currencies had to be demonetized in a phased manner and new currency notes introduced to replace the old ones. Then the government said it was for digitizing the economy. In a country dominated by the unorganized sector and 90% transactions done through cash, a fully digital India is a remotely distant dream.

Demonetization in itself was not a scam but the way it was executed created many scams. Banks knew about it in advance as did everyone with power and influence. They all legalized their black money well in advance. After demonetization was implemented, bank managers were openly helping people make their unaccounted money legal for a fee and made a windfall out of it. None of the currency notes were demonetized from the time of India’s independence after which they were introduced so it is scarcely believable that 97% of the currency deposited in the banks were clean.

With the government’s close proximity to some corporate groups, I assumed for a long time that demonetization was a direct offensive against the unorganized sector to diminish it’s control over the country’s economy. They may have had thought that this would be an outcome of demonetization. But demonetization was not an outright scam as many assume it was even now. Banks had to be rescued in one way or the other or the economy could have collapsed. The execution of demonetization was what turned out to be a complete disaster, why I call it DEMONetization & DeMo, the Mo an indicator to Modi.

Was demonetization necessary? Was demonetization the only way to rescue banks? Did the government have to put the entire population of the country in duress for months to demonetize two high value currencies? New notes for lower value currencies were introduced and for those currencies, new and old notes coexist now. The government has since then introduced a new currency note of slightly higher value and reintroduced one of the demonetized high value currency note with a new design. The present currency system makes no sense to me. The colours and patterns of the newly introduced currency notes are confusing as well. Other than hurling a wrecking ball on an already limping economy, the government seems to have achieved nothing from demonetization.

It is insensible and needless to live in fear, even if it is of a disease

“Two fall outs of COVID-19 pandemic have become clear:
1) Creating medicines and vaccines for every known disease and consuming Vitamin tablets to boost immunity has rendered our immune system idle and useless. In antivirus systems, definitions of new viruses have to be constantly updated for the antivirus to keep our computers safe. Our immune system has to dissect new microorganisms, understand their genetic structure & then create antibodies to fight them. We cannot stay two steps ahead & have medicines & vaccines for every disease going to affect us in the future. Only a robust immune system can save us.
2) The fear of death among people is mind boggling. So much fear has been created over the virus that people are not even stepping out on to their house’s porch. Death is our constant companion from the time we were zygotes in our mother’s womb. Diseases are one way nature controls the population of all living beings in it’s ecosystem. Death is inevitable yet people fear it so much with the false pride of not admitting it. Incomprehensible.”

This innocuous post I put on my social media timeline drew the ire of a friend who messaged me saying “we have intelligence so it’s stupid not to use it and depend only on immune system”. Nothing wrong with what she said.  Why can’t we protect ourselves with medicines and vaccines?

COVID-19 is a mild virus with 99% survival chances as per reports. Then why the fear? Because it’s a new variant of Coronavirus. There are no medicines or vaccines for it yet. So we have no option but to fall back on our immune system. But it also doesn’t know this new microorganism. So it gets confused and puts its entire focus on eliminating the virus. This becomes problematic and even fatal for people already suffering from other life threatening diseases as the immune system gets overwhelmed.

My friend missed a very important point though. Survival is instinctive and has got nothing to do with intelligence. Every animal from the time it is born tries to survive as long as it can. What my friend cannot seem to accept is the fact that death is inevitable. Someone who could live for another 10 years may succumb now because of COVID-19. That’s how it has always been in nature. The weaker ones have to die. Nature needs only the strong ones to survive. Why such a rule?

Scientists and researchers believe life on Earth formed by a process called panspermia wherein asteroids carrying microorganisms from space travel, collide with planets and fall on them. If and when conditions become favorable for life to thrive, the microorganisms from the asteroid rocks will start replicating. Let’s take this situation and assume that no microorganisms die. They keep evolving into more complex organisms through billions of years but none of them die. What would have had happened to Earth? Overpopulated, overheated, resources exhausted & nature’s ecosystem could have had collapsed. This is exactly the situation now. We started making medicines to protect and cure us from diseases so our mortality rate dropped. Earth’s resources are rapidly receding and nature’s ecosystem is heading towards collapse.

This is why death is so important. In the Earth’s timeline, 99.99% of the living beings that existed have supposedly become extinct. Why is nature killing living beings in its ecosystem? Death is essentially the backbone of evolution.  Death is never the end of life. Best example of it is wildfire. When fire has done enough destruction then comes torrents of rain and kick starts life again. Nature is learning and evolving from the cycles of birth and death of living beings in it’s ecosystem. Universe in itself is supposed to have a lifespan at the end of which it self destructs and a new Universe is born and takes the older one’s place.

Take a look at the complexity and diversity of nature and then look up into the cosmos. How many planets have we discovered like ours till now? There could be planets harboring life elsewhere in the Universe but none in the near vicinity of ours. This is what makes our planet special. Nature has survived for billions of years because of its ability of self conservation by following the rule of ‘the sum is always greater than the individual parts’. This is why no animal has the ability to destroy nature for its own survival. This is the best proof of advanced human intelligence not being a product of natural evolution.

No matter how intelligent we become we cannot cheat death or prolong our life on Earth.  But there is something we can do. There is a process called terraforming (reference: Movie – The Man of Steel) by which we can create an environment that suits us and can possibly control. Mars seems to have all the qualities to harbor life so there is supposedly a plan underway to terraform Mars. It is somewhat like creating a planned city. This could be the way forward for our existence. What we are engaged in now is a fight to the death with nature for which there can be only one outcome. Our annihilation. Something that has been in existence for a few thousand years can never defeat something that has been here for billions of years. There is no version of the story in which we will ever come out on top of nature.

Death is the natural end of a life cycle so it is nothing to be feared. We all know death is inevitable but we still fear and fight it because we have found our purpose of existence in houses, cars and in the social life of status, wealth and fame. There is also the needless fear of the unknown of what lies on the other side of death. There are more laws of nature and forces of the Universe acting upon us than we know. I believe celebrating life and death equally is the best way to live a balanced life.