Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

Recently the MBBS Students in Delhi mounted a protest at India Gate against the Indian govt’s intention of increasing the reservations in the premier government educational institutions like the Indian Institute of Technologies (IITs) and Indian Institute of Managements and other institutions of higher learning to 49.5%.

These students were tear-gassed and sprayed with water cannons when they blocked traffic on Janpath, near Hotel Le Meridian crossing. Mild lathicharge was also resorted to in order to break the ‘rasta roko’, which lasted for more than one-and-a-half hours. Below is an awesome pic that someone took that can be termed as ‘Face of the Protest’. Whoever took the photo should be given an award.

More pics and writeup’s are available at Face of Delhi MBBS Students Protest

Increasing the quota is a sucidal move, do you really want to have a person who barely managed to pass his highschool exams to become a doctor because he is from a ‘backward’ class and operate on you. I certainly don’t, It would suck to find out half way into the operation that the ‘doctor’ had no clue what to do. Same thing for an engineer, do you want someone with no clue about structural integrity designing and building skyscapers? You do??? Then you must have a death wish, I certainly don’t.

If the gov’t wants to improve the lot of the backward classes it should make primary, secondary and highschool education free. Open more schools, give deserving students more scholarships. Teach the students to learn, make them work for it. Dont let them coast through school and then become a doctor without doing the hardwork during which they actually learn stuff.

So I think that this is not really a smart idea and it would be better to give financial aid to deserving students. Also instead of complaining about it I think we should do something about it. I take inspiration from people like Tarini (who sent me this) who also actually do stuff about the social situation instead of just complaining about it. So while I have been donating to charity organizations (Aryasamaj, Basera) that helps educate kids with potential, I haven’t been able to give time to actual volunteer work. However that is something which is going to change soon, (prob next year) as I will actually start volunteering in various organizations (not just national but international). Lets see how that works out.

What are your thoughts on reservation? Do you think its a good idea, or a really bad one that will come back and bite us in the backside in a couple of years? Let me know.

Thanks,
Suramya

A really good article that talks about profiling and generalizations. It takes a case about generalizations regarding Pit Bulls and compares them to terrorist/smugler profiling and how thats not such a good idea.

Profiling is never a good idea, if I know that there’s a profile for a particular kind of person then when I am trying to do something unnoticed as that person I would deviate as much as possible from that profile. I think thats a logical/intelligent response and while terrorists are acting on a false sense of right/wrong that doesn’t make them idiots and this is proved time and again when a bombing or terrorist act is carried out by someone completely unsuspected as they were completely outside the usual profile.

Another issue with generalization is that people tend to start focusing on them and ignore other vectors of threat. e.g. terrorists usually hijack planes right? So the reaction is that lots of money is spent on airport security etc. What is to stop them from taking a shopping mall/theator hostage? They can seal off the exit’s and threaten to blow it up. This is not a threat that is commonly recognized. There are hundred’s of other ways they can terrorize us.

So what do we do? Do we hide at home and refuse to comeout? Nope, we learn not to limit our responses to a list of threats, diversify and learn to counter/field unexpected threats.

Original Article: The New Yorker: Fact

Thanks to: Schneier on Security for the link.

– Suramya