What a 10-year old held on to dearly in life

Sometime in 1990, a 10-year old picked up a newspaper and proceeded to read an article whose headline screamed about Mandal Commission. The boy, who until then had never gone past the sports page stood up and took notice. On asking what the entire controversy was all about, his dad dismissed it off as "Bandal Commission". His eyes opened and his morning newspaper reading habits were never the same again.

To be honest, the boy understood very little of politics or sociology. But, what he found disgusting was the caste card being flashed to move ahead in life. Later, the boy found that he himself belonged to the 'lower-caste'. Yet, the disgust lingered.

He performed below expectations in SSC. On the day of submitting application forms he mistakenly stood in the queue for SC/ST candidates and found 16-year olds dressed in Calvin Klein jeans and Polo T-shirts. He was asked to play the caste trick and gain admission into some respectable college. He refused and settled for a college that is more (in)famous for the brothels that surround it.

He ended up making a hash of HSC exams. Yet again he refused the SC/ST quota and gained admission into one of the lower-rung New Bombay engg colleges. That he went on to quit engg (after two years) is a different matter altogether.

He took the entrance exam for an undergraduate management course and ended up with a decent rank. On his first day in college, he met students who had scored less than 25% of what he had, proudly proclaiming their top-10 ranks. Students, whose sole claim to fame in life was their surname. The boy never discriminated against these free-riders, but somewhere at the back of the mind, his contempt for them remained.

Later, his attempt at belling the CAT proved successful. With his almost-99 percentile and decent GD/PI at IIM-L, all he needed was a caste certificate and he would have been duly inducted into the hallowed precincts of an IIM. He refused. He claimed, "I am a Narcissist. I like to watch my reflection, first thing in the morning."

He had to rest content with cracking CET and got admitted into a top-rung B-School. Managed to pass without any problems and is currently working at a private bank. A boy who always told himself, "If you are good, you will be successful." had finally got his due, without the help of artifical crutches like caste and quota.

Today, around 16 years after the day that shaped his belief, he read about the Govt's attempts (or is it arm-twisting) to introduce caste-based quota in private firms. He cried.