Reservation Blues

I had a dream recently – well probably more of a nightmare. I dreamt that 25 years from now, my son (let’s call him Junior for now) had given his high school exams and topped his school. (talk about great expectations even in dreams!)
Now he wanted to apply to a medical college to get an MBBS….and this was the conversation we had:

Me : Well done, my lad! So how many seats do we have for this course in your desired college?
Junior : Umm about 10 but I guess I’ll just about manage….

Me : Hmmm hold your horses for now! Let’s do some simple calculations first. It seems there are lots of other brilliant and deserving candidates vying for those coveted seats! Ah do you remember your schoolmates Bubloo and Dubloo? Yea those same fine prodigies of 3 generations of IAS officers, who even though they failed each year, your school principal had the privilege to forcefully promote to the next class for the greater benefit of mankind. (Son of an IAS destined to be an IAS you see!)
Ah, so what if they scored only 10% marks in the entrance exam, our law says that 2 of those 10 seats should definitely go to the Scheduled Castes, which their certificates rightly identify them as, and hence as deserving as anyone can be! (Not to mention once they complete their MBBS, they’d be fine deserving candidates for IAS too!)

Now how can you forget that bright child Abracadabra – whose dad is a surgeon and who has a certificate claiming his ancestors jhingalala’d in the jungles of Andamans. Surely we can oversee a minor issue like him not writing the exam….well at least he filled the form! Since as per our constitution 1 seat has to go to a member of a Scheduled Tribe.

And in May 2006, the then honorable government passed a bill that ensured a seat for Other Backward Castes(OBC) too. Of course, Tommy fits that bill, and it doesn’t matter that his school uniform was designed by Donatella Versace, according to his certificate he’s still backward!

The 5th seat of course has to be given to the highly athletic and competitive Milk-Kha Singh, who represented our country in the World kabaddi championship and got us a gold medal. Err so what if there was just 1 team participating, he surely deserves that 1 seat for Sports quota.

Another seat, my child, is undoubtedly deserved by your Italian Indian friend Rah-Hool Gandhi, whose surname is sufficient proof that his great grand daddy must’ve fought in our freedom struggle, enabling him to be eligible for the freedom fighter quota.

And how can we be so cruel as to deny the claim for the 7th seat by your schoolmate Free-thick Roshan – whose disformity of having 2 thumbs on a hand is indisputable proof of his crippling handicap – hence the rightful candidate for the Handicapped persons’ quota.

Darn, the 8th seat would have to be given to Arj – June singh, whose daddy is a professor in that college, putting him up for the management quota.

Of course no one dare deny admission to your friend Lux-Me Mittal, considering his dad is a rich NRI businessman and more than willing to shell out a lakh pounds for that NRI quota seat.

Whoa, there’s still 1 seat left! Go get it Tiger.

Junior : I just called up and they said that it’s been taken up under the “No Reservation” reservation.
Me : Uff, how did we forget to get this certificate made ! Don’t worry my child….better luck next time!



P.S. - I’m sorry if I’ve offended anyone but I’m really taken aback by this reservation issue right now. For those who are not in touch with the latest news here our government is going forward to pass a bill that would reserve 50% of seats in top educational institutes for people based solely on their castes.(irrespective of their scores in the entrance exams)
It’s common knowledge that India is one of the most competitive countries in the world when it comes to education, and the cut-off percentages for the premier institutes keep getting higher each year. Imagine the plight of students like those in the medical profession, where lakhs of people appear for exams each year for sometimes as few as 10-15 seats, and what would happen to their morale when they would see some people walk off with more than half those seats just because they belong to a certain “caste”, and irrespective of their scores.
Nobody denies that the caste system has been a bane of the Indian society, but surely this would be the worst possible way to try to “uplift” the downtrodden, since majority of these seats are enjoyed by children of SC/ST’s who’re already enjoying the spoils of reservation by being in the highest of public sector jobs, leaving the rest in a status quo.
Even when reservations were started by B.R Ambedkar after our independence, he had asked for them to continue only for 10 years. Still they have been continuing for more than 60 years after our independence, primarily due to the votebank politics being played by each major political party which is trying to appease the voting population belonging to these particular castes, and in the process only further deepening the caste divide in this country.
A sensible approach would’ve been giving scholarships, fee-waivers and study material to the deserving candidates in these classes, yet the government wants to take the easy way of total appeasement out.


As if this wasn’t enough, peacefully protesting medical students in Mumbai were brutally lathi-charged by the police as if they were gangsters, reminding one of a similar scene in the recent RDB, and this has further flared up the protests in the student community all across India.

Well if vote bank politics is what a democracy is all about, then perhaps an autocracy might suit us better.

(Thank God at least The DaVinci Code is finally getting released here next week .... with a disclaimer and an A certificate)

Guilty As Charged

YES your honour, I do plead guilty to the charge of taking up too many tags in recent times (* In Sunny Deol’s “Tareekh pe tareekh” ^4 dialogue’s tone *)
Now please allow the defendant to throw further light on some of the points mentioned by the public prosecutor-cum-tagger Ms. Ramblings :


Culinary Guilt:

Hmmm well yea kindof….though my entire khandaan is a vegetarian yet I’ve given in to the pleasures of the flesh on some occasions since last year, and yes I did find the “reshmi kababs” to taste better than anything I’d had in the vegetarian platter. Having said that, I still prefer vegetarian on 14 days in a fortnight, and my future culinary status would most probably depend on my partner, since I have no qualms about either foods right now.
Oh, and I still have to learn to cook stuff beyond Maggie noodles. I’ve promised my mom next time I visit home I’m gonna learn a minimum of ‘chapattis’, ‘paranthas’ and ‘pulao’ (a promise I’ve been making since the last 2 years).


Literary Guilt:
Well OF COURSE yes. I’m a self confessed bibliophile – all my friends would vouch for it. Whenever I visit any mall here the 1st shop I attack is the book store and normally my friends have to drag me out of it.
Such is the extent of this addiction that I’ve ended up buying at least 8 new books recently which have been piled up at home and I’m yet to start devouring them. Then there are some or the other amazing new titles I keep hearing about everyday….somehow I’ve managed to hold myself back till I finish the ones already pending.

Audiovisual Guilt:
Well this time I’m guilty of NOT seeing enough movies lately….even though I might’ve already seen enough for a lifetime (over 200 dvd-rips in my collection). Still I do manage 1 movie in a theatre per fortnight.
As for TV, I just hit 3 channels on my remote…. CNN-IBN for primetime news, VH1 for the classic videos, and History channel for the Biography show.

Musical Guilt:
Ummm nahh no guilts here. I know the kinda music I like(from almost all genres) and I have it both on my PC at home as well as at work. So no wonder I’m mostly found with my headphones on at work.
But yes, I do have to get myself either an IPod or an mp3 cellphone soon.

Celebrity Guilt:
Well I’m certainly not the kinds to go screaming if I see or meet any celebrity. Though I do look upto Mr. Amitabh Bachhan for his overpowering personality, his acting prowess and the way he speaks with his command over both English and Hindi.
In college I used to have only wallpapers of the supermodel Laetitia Casta on my desktop (around 200 of them!)…..and I’ve put up 1 of them here!

Shopping Guilt:
Hmmm well if I see something I like(and need), I don’t think too much about it and would go for it. But yes, I’m biased towards seasonal sales and discounts….and prefer to do most of my shopping during these times.

Clothes guilt:
Nahh….I’m satisfied with my wardrobe. Though I do feel guily that ever since I started working, I’ve been able to wear the ultra casuals only on weekends.


Is there more??...

Bad Critic Guilt:
I do find it hard to criticize anything/anyone…. And somehow always look for the good points even in the worst. I do realize that this is detrimental at times and sometimes you just have to be blunt with some people, but hey I’m working on it.

Procrastinating with job guilt:
YES. This is the single biggest guilt that I have right now - even though I know I have to switch my job, I don’t understand what is preventing me from applying to new companies, especially since the Indian IT sector is real Hot right now. On that note, I’ll go and at least update my CV right now.


Well with that I rest my case. I also refuse to divulge the names of other fellow bloggers who might be guilty of the same charge, and leave it to their conscience to surrender before the honourable court and declare their personal guilts.

The Motorcycle Diaries - Kudremukh Chapter

The heat is on but I’m on a roll right now…what with a 2nd trip within 2 weeks I guess I must’ve been in a real vacationing mood.
The real trigger again was the long weekend as this Monday was off for labour day (funny name) but the plan actually materialized at the very last moment on Friday night.
Initially there were 4 of us planning to go for a trek to the famed Kodachadri peak in west Karnataka, but as usual being the procrastinators that we are, we found all tickets to the place had been sold out.
Still not being the kinds to admit defeat so easily, me and my college buddy Prabudh were positive about not letting this 3 day break go wasted. So we did a quick search on google for hills in Karnataka, zeroed in on a place called Kudremukh national park, downloaded the road map and made a spur of the moment decision to make it a 2 day road trip on my Thunderbird.
So on Saturday morning we left Bangalore just at the crack of dawn at 5:30 am for this place which was supposed to be a good 360 kms away. So abrupt was the decision that we even forgot to carry a spare set of camera batteries, a blunder that made us miss a lot of good photo-ops later on.

As soon as we got out of the city limits I was surprised to find a smooth, wide and almost empty highway unlike the bumpy and traffic infested Bangalore roads, and I easily started zipping at almost 110 kmph, something this cruiser is specially designed for.

It’s a very different feeling zipping for a long stretch of time on a bike at this speed, with the trees and the vast open fields swooshing by when seen from the corner of your eyes. It’s almost as if your life’s running past by you, and at occasional times one can easily loose the sense of time and perhaps even switch to a philosophical mode. It’s something hard to explain and maybe only another rider can relate to it.
Another remarkable difference that one notices while riding a bike is that unlike in a car, where you’re in relative rest with respect to your immediate surroundings as you’re kind of boxed inside an enclosure, on a bike you’re no longer a passive observer of your surroundings, but become a part of it. With the wind slapping in your face you can actually “feel” the changing landscape around you, and when this threshold is crossed, the journey becomes more pleasurable than the destination.

Also, with the power of a 350cc engine producing the pull of 19 horses thundering under your legs, you simply feel like the king of the road.
For the uninitiated, the cc(cubic centimeters) refers to the displacement of an engine, that is the amount of fuel mixture that the piston can sweep through from the top to bottom. So obviously the more fuel the engine can burn up in a cycle, the more power it can pack to the wheels.

Anyways, we kept taking breaks for snacks and to ask directions, and as usual I found that the humble villagers or small town people are always more than eager to help. The bike and it’s unusual registration no (CH- Chandigarh) invited a lot of curious questions though, and people assumed I was driving it down from Punjab! One restaurant owner even identified Chandigarh as the hometown of Yuvraj Singh and started citing examples of the brilliance of his own Karnataka boy Dravid as the captain, though all with an innocent rustic charm.

By the time we hit the hills after riding for 250 kms, we were already a bit exhausted and the steep inclines had to be carefully negotiated, however the beautiful greenery around soon made us forget all the fatigue and we reached our destination at the base of Kudremukh peak’s trek around late noon.

We asked a local shopkeeper about taking the bike up the mud track to the top of the peak, but he warned us that we shouldn’t go without taking permission from the wildlife officials, since this area was being combed for the Naxalite(Maoist) militants taking shelter in these forests. We were warned that the security forces had a shoot at sight order for anyone seen inside the forest without permission, and this was enough to deter us from going for another misadventure. Permission not forthcoming due to a holiday, we were a little disappointed, but then another localite came to our rescue and suggested that we pitch our tents at the camping grounds of a deluxe resort nearby.
So we finally got the necessary space within the boundaries of the beautiful “Silent Valley Resort”, and had an awesome stay at the resort where they’d organized a flute music program in their open lawns amidst a bonfire. Eating a 10-course scrumptious buffet, especially when you’re dead tired and in the middle of a forest is also a uniquely gratifying experience.
Next morning the resort guide took us to a small trek in the hills around the area, and after absorbing all the natural beauty we decided to start back, since in any case the main purpose of the trip was the ride itself.


The return ride saw me zigzagging with a renewed passion along the sharp and dangerous turns of the hills, sometimes tilting the bike to almost 30 degrees to negotiate the deadly turns. It was again a smooth and enjoyable ride till the last hour when darkness fell, and I had to ride in the glare of the high beams of the incoming traffic, which makes one literally blind to the road ahead, and then losing your concentration for even a second can mean the difference between life and a painful end.

Anyhow thanks to our guardian angels, we reached Bangalore in the evening after having covered almost 800 within 48 hours, and spent the next day discussing the trip and tending to our sore backs and bottoms.

Trip Info:-

Route: Bangalore - Hassan - Mudigere - Kalasa - Kudremukh

Distance: 360 kms (1 way)

Road Condition: Excellent

Close Calls: 3