Skip to main content

Unequal Equality


I remember a story I heard during my young age where the ants worked extremely hard during the summer so that they had enormous stocks to feed upon during the winters. And when the winter came the grasshoppers, who had failed to be proactive enough, conducted a ‘satyagraha’ outside the ants’ colony demanding a share of the grains. The media created havoc with footage of lean grasshoppers fighting the cold around the world while the ants were cozy within their colonies with enough and more nutritional sources. The human rights activists rushed to the help of the grasshoppers. And I believe they were right to an extent. Weren’t the grasshoppers denied the opportunity to those particular grains because the ants had been smart enough to carry them to their colonies! The politicians grabbed the opportunity of a ‘bandh’ while the most intelligent of the lot happily queued for their share of nutrition from the beverages corporation! Nutrition surely is a fundamental right! Right?

Following the T20 world cup, one of the most extravagant events of recent times, I was struck with grief. Being brought up in a nation where people fight to be called ‘backward’, I was baffled by the fact that Afghanistan was not reserved a place in the final 8! Considering the turmoil the country has gone through, I think even reserving a cup would have been nothing far from social justice!

But then, wasn’t New Zealand and for that matter even Sri Lanka one of the oppressed teams when they came into the international cricketing arena. Didn’t they compete with countries who had dominated the sport for over a century? And did they not emerge as winners without any kind of life support system that ensured they got a berth in every quarter final and a cup reserved for them due to their so called ‘backwardness’ in the game! The positions these teams hold today and the respect they earn through their hard work makes me think beyond the principles of democracy and social justice that I have been brought up with.

It is not necessary that you fail if you are not given an unlevel playing field! It is not necessary that you under achieve if you are called a ‘third world’ nation rather than being positively stroked as ‘developing’! The respect, confidence and strength you earn when you win on a level playing ground cannot be replaced by any of the reservations that are made for you.

The recent enthusiasm to bring in reservations in promotions makes me think that we are yet to understand the essence of the ant-grasshopper conflict! It is high time we understand and accept our failure of trying to bring equality through a system that is fundamentally based on inequality! It is time we stop denying people the experience of true achievement!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bell the ‘Bell’

Recently I was reading a book about an Airbus 320 landing in the Hudson River. As a bird hit it, the plane lost both its engines and the pilot had to fly the plane like a glider. He had to break a few standard protocols. And he even communicated the wrong plane number back to the control tower! And during those critical seconds, while the pilot followed his instincts that came from his experience, the person at the control tower supported him by not asking too many questions as per protocol and not trying to give him more procedural insights! Though the control room offered him a few runways to land, the pilot chose to follow his instincts and glide a billion dollar plane into the Hudson River! I believe that every experience and learning we go through will have a residual effect on our next experience and the learning we have. There is rarely something we can call a ‘new experience’. Think about what actually happens in a vast majority of instances that you go through - the...
3 comments
Read more

The Gods of Compulsion

Around 3000 BC, in a place we today call India, the sages made two proclamations. ‘ Vasudaiva Kutumbakam’ – which means that t his world is one family and ‘ Ekam Sat Viprah Bahuda Vadanti’ –which implies that the universal reality is the same though wise people call it by different names. Putting to use the intelligence acquired over centuries, this simply means that we are a big world of enormous differences that ultimately bond into one single family. Isn’t it quite inspiring that over four thousand odd years before people thought of ‘the global village’, ‘we’ believed in tolerance and submission? That even before the world got ‘connected’, ‘we’ believed that however different we may be by gender, colour, philosophies, beliefs, language or location - we were all ‘one big family’! Fast forward to year 2015 - it has been close to 7 decades since over 14.5 million people crossed the Indian borders looking for a safe haven from the seething imbroglio of partition. I t is ov...
2 comments
Read more

The Professional Amateurs

“Just go for it and give it a try. You don’t have to be a professional to build a successful product. Amateurs started Google and Apple. Professionals built the Titanic.” I just happened to read these lines on the whatsapp profile of one of my best friends from college. And it struck me hard like a bolt from the blue. Being part of the academic domain by profession, it made me wonder how true this reality is and how far it stays from what we instil in our younger generations through the current system of education. Today’s education system stigmatizes failure and standardizes creativity. And that is one of the biggest reasons why our children feel so scared to try! That precisely is why our younger generation wants to be only engineers and doctors even though our land is filled with unemployed or ill employed people from these streams. Very few of our youngsters display the guts to follow their real dream especially if it is not the fad of their times. And ultimately we get...
2 comments
Read more