T
his has reference to the article by Badri Raina (‘Anti-Reservation Protest: Shoring Up Privilege’, May 20, 2006). When I first read about the protests in The Times of India, I related the reservation issue to the allocation of scarce resources. As teachers, we are always excusing the need for tests and grades by pointing towards the limited educational resources of (any) society, and how some more or less “fair” system must be in place to distribute these scarce resources. This of course assumes that the educational resources in question are open for anyone to apply for and that the cost of being a student is not more than what “almost anyone” can afford to pay (cost of books and housing financed by a government study-loan with low interest).
Therefore, to reserve educational resources for groups in the population that have not been able to cope with the entrance requirements (relatively poor grades in relation to the cut-off point) would mean that we would be “cheating” those who have higher grades by accepting those with lower grades in the place, so to speak.
Raina’s article in EPW concerning this issue brought back memories of my childhood in North Carolina (early 1960s) during the Civil Rights Movement when apartheid was still as American as apple pie. Students from up north that came down to North Carolina were seen as “dirty commies” and “nigger-lovers” and were treated badly by the local population, i e, the people I grew up with. Rocks were thrown through the windows of hotels where those college kids stayed, and in one instance that I remember well, a “Molotov-cocktail” was thrown through a hotel window causing a fire and panic amongst the “God-damnYankee-dirty-commie-nigger-lovers” in the hotel. I was around 12 or 14 at the time, and remember it well as it contributed towards making me a lifelong (white) anti-racist and got me into all kinds of trouble before I finally left North Carolina for good.
The arguments against reserving educational resources for blacks (and other groups, such as the Hispanics) in the 1960s sounded a lot like what we are hearing now in India. Raina’s article was thus a refreshingly different perspective on the topic.
As an afterthought, I would add that I grew up in (relative) poverty myself, took a Swedish high school degree at night school in Stockholm (1970-75) and then spent many years (1975-91) at university in Sweden (free for everyone). Had I lived in India I would still be sweeping the streets of Mumbai today instead of being head of history at an international school in Mumbai.
LON W MCDANIEL
Mumbai
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his has reference to the articles published by EPW on ‘Suicides by Farmers’ on April 22, 2006. Has EPW collapsed academics and journalism borders? As a student of social science at Osmania University, I was introduced to the EPW as a journal having a long scholarly tradition of being fairly outspoken and a true index to know modern India’s past, present and future. Academics, policy-makers and activists of
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(Continued from p 2174)
all hues working in the remote inaccessible corners of India read it. The articles published enriched my understanding of the issues and enabled me to see what the dominant discourses of the day dismissed and ignored.
The recent special articles published under ‘Suicides by Farmers’ were simplistic in analysis, barring Surinder Jodhka’s article on Punjab. The print media had been regularly publishing forceful analysis of the agrarian crisis, in Andhra Pradesh since the early 1990s. For instance, substantial pre-election reporting by Telugu dailies, with few exceptions, on the distressing agrarian scenario and the associated decline of traditional occupations in the rural Andhra Pradesh is a case in point.
Being addicted to EPW’s incisive theoretical analysis, I find the causal relations brought out by the authors in the issue in question are no different from what is being published by the vernacular print media. They do not delve deep into the problem and as a result fail to capture the transformation of social relations and locate the problem on large canvas.
I consider EPW is the only window – for students like me who could not make it to academics due to various reasons – to serious academics and “another world”. If it publishes non-rigorous and journalistic articles where should the serious minds look for? This makes me feel that you have blurred the distinction between informative role of everyday journalism and serious scholarly analysis.
JAMEEL PASHA
Chennai
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