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

A Tale of Two Syllabus - Dasan and Vijayan

The Beginning   The biggest casualty of the Pandemic was the education sector, especially the K-12 schools and its children. What we saw in the initial days was localised fire fighting based on the logic and knowledge of individual educators. Even over a year down the line, the fact remains that we are still left with no standardised guidelines that could practically be followed by all schools.    As the health workers took the spotlight, fighting a collective battle mostly following standardised procedures to protect people from the virus, the academicians were left in the dark to fight a lonely battle to protect their children from learning gaps, anxiety and mental distress.    Governments across the world did their PR stunts in all possible ways to stay connected with its people in distress. Most IT firms, health equipment manufacturers and distributors were looking ahead to create a fortune in the new world order. In all this chaos, the only ones who did not really figure u
1 comment
Read more

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

Time to ‘Stan’d!

The Prelude Once upon a time... on a fine day in January 1818, the British East India Company and the Peshwa faction of the Maratha Confederacy fought a battle that would later come to be known as “The Battle of Koregaon” (a.k.a the Battle of Koregaon Bhima). As they fought for nearly 12 long hours, till the Peshwa's troops ultimately withdrew, Captain Francis ‘Staunton’, who led the Company troop in defending their position, didn’t have the faintest clue, that 200 years later, another man sharing the same letters of his surname, will stand murdered in the name of events that would be weaved out from this very battlefield – The Bhima Koregaon! Back in time Once upon another time... in a place called Jharkhand, there lived a man who documented the monstrous profits made by big corporations, and the price that poor people dependent on the land and forests had to pay for this to happen! He spoke of the manner in which land was acquired at dirt prices for power plants, and ho
1 comment
Read more