[Baypiggies] Ageism rehashed

[Venkatraman S]

On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 12:51 PM, ashish makani <ashish.makani at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> I think it's very brave of you to share this story & made us all aware of
> our rights & duties, as technology professionals.
> I have a romantic ideal notion that all fields should be
> meritocratic....where your knowledge is the most important critrion....not
> age, gender, formal degree, religion, national origin,political or other
> connections(called "approach" in india),  or any other factor which does not
> affect your ability.
> I am happy to see it in action today.
>
>
Just to add to that : in India, i am not sure how many of you know, casteism
is BIG in certain state(s) in India.
I hail from a state called Tamilnadu - which produces one of the largest
number of best engineering students in the country, the state is numero uno
in almost all aspects; but suffers from ONE BIG problem - caste based
politics; and this has repurcussions on everything, including education. 70%
of the seats are reserved for the so called 'underprivileged' and the
remaining 30% are in 'open' category - so the so called underprivileged can
apply for the 30% of the seats(i can go on and on, on how this is
detrimental). You will hear tales of information from people who have
extremely intelligent and got the required marked, but did not get a good
school just because of this reservation system. I tried explaining to my
American pal, but he wasnt able to understand how it worked; and i guess
penning it in an email is of no use either. India needs to avoid this caste
based politics for it to succeed.

Read this book called "Falling Over Backwards: An essay against Reservations
and against Judicial populism" by Arun
Shourie<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arun_Shourie>.
The world needs guys like him, but he is often pushed in the backseat.

-V
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