When Would We Stop Talking and Start Doing?

                                                  When Would We Stop Talking and Start Doing?

Demographic Dividend was the topic among the talking heads in the early noughties (as I remember it) and has since been the same. That payout is at the risk of becoming a lapsed cheque. Within the last month or so, I read an analysis item in my daily newspaper bemoaning why it has been so. Nothing new.

But, the old still has some lessons to teach us. This is an effort to tease them out.”We are preparing students for jobs that are that are rapidly disappearing or evolving.” OK, are we to prepare them for the current requirements of the job market? If that were so, how does a parent know that the current set of highly absorbent fields would stay the same in four years hence?

Now, data science, Artificial Intelligence (AI) are the “in” fields. As a parent, I am entitled to get an answer posed to college administrators, “Can you give me assurance that four years from now, my ward would be able to get a job in the field that she had chosen, which is in great demand now?” 

Is there any college administrator who would dare to respond? In a movie, a doctor says to a patient’s relative that no doctor can give any type of guarantee that his relative would come out alive from the operation theatre. It is the same with the college administrator!

Emerging technologies are being led by AI, is the voice from the echo chamber. AI is so destructive it is reshaping how we think and work. My simple question: did you see AI when it was below the horizon? I suppose not. Then, how do you know that a new technology that does not have a name yet and which is currently below the horizon would not be the fashion four years from now when my ward graduates? You are betting on AI, but do not put your lifesavings on that horse that might break a leg in mid-stride.

“A plethora of new jobs related to AI development are being created even as we speak.” The writers meant, “as we are writing”, and, “as you are reading”! Just a low-level dig, but not below the belt.

“This technological shift via AI is already changing the world…”. That is a scary thought. Our brains would become dormant and we could be back to climbing trees to escape from the AI monster! Do the writers think that such creative destruction has no end date? So did those who created steam engines. Just a reminder.

Let us talk about demographic dividend, already more than two decades old. How long would it hold out? So, the writers want you to get onto the AI wagon to escape the storm of demographic deficit that they espy in the horizon. They do care, don’t they?

Who is causing this mismatch – not preparing students for the future. Of course, the educational institutions. I am not going to argue this point though there is much to argue about. But, what do the writers not claim? They do not claim that the “industries” (mainly software, banking, and finance – leveraged buyout anyone?) should also pitch in. No, not a word on this from the pulpit.

The reality gap, the writers say is the“…worrying gap between academic institutions and industry requirements.” This is a self-own, brightly lit. Has industry done anything in this regard, even lift a finger? No. Therefore, the sole purpose of an educational institution is to prepare a student for the software, banking, and finance industries.  

“Over the past decade, data show that 40%-50% of engineering graduates from Indian universities have not been placed in jobs.” While parents demanding an immediate RoI could be taken up elsewhere, here let me ask, is there anything else that could be achieved through education. Here, the contrast between how the piece started with Rabindranath Tagore and what the writers focus on further is glaring.

“Don’t limit a child to your own learning, for she was born in another time.” The political correctness (“she” where the original quote says, “he”) grates here. For Tagore, in his time, the focus was not employment, but here it is. This is about a quote being used in a most inappropriate setting. Tagore was most probably talking about all round development, which, of course, would include employment.

The writers take a wrecking ball to how syllabuses are changed, the procedure being uncoordinated with industry demands that is so fluid, besides being archaic. The only solution to this, in my humble opinion, is to let industry prepare the syllabus, not in a three year cycle, but every semester, speeded up by a factor of six! Such courses in a dynamic syllabus could be taught only by industry experts. And, no Ph.Ds!

The Delphic Oracle, as delivered by the writers is the following: “What India needs is a cohesive strategy that aligns education and skill demand with industry demands (my emphasis).” Let the industry roll in its wealth, underwritten by high school and college education.

Yes, we should stop talking and start deciding what should be talked about and how. The statistics of demography, let everyone recognize, spans, going beyond all large cities, be they Tier I, II, or III, all the towns and villages; indeed rural population in India is 63.13% and not a word was written on how to tap that resource. Without that, the demographic dividend is a mirage and the country will be beyond the hot sands of the desert that creates the mirage and it soon would be the dark chilly night.

Raghuram Ekambaram

 

The Only Fair Entrance Examination

                                                        The Only Fair Entrance Examination

A few days ago I was reading an opinion piece in a newspaper about “Detoxifying” the Indian entrance examination system. What is the result of ingesting the system as is? The writers are immediately forthcoming: intense competition (dog-eat-dog, my understanding). Students, as a result, suffer from stressed life, depression and alienation. I found the article well argued; yet, some of the solutions offered are not without negatives. I will get to them later.

If students suffer from alienation, the writers do not specify from what. Bring in the undefined, formulaic and almost meaningless term, holistic development of students. In my opinion, people develop holistic perspectives only as they mature and spend time on looking at society; definitely not in their student days (there could be exceptions, though). The lack of even a wide-angle view by students was mentioned in the newspaper article as an unintended and unidentified sacrifice by students and their parents

The “intense competition” is a ratchet wheel. How does the wheel work? Every year and year-on-year, students have to be tested more and more severely and on more and more difficult questions that they would hardly ever meet in their UG syllabi. I agree with the writers.

I wrote the IIT Joint Entrance Examination (when it must not have gained the acronym, IIT JEE) and I remembered a few questions, wholly conceptual (in geometry and physics), and reasonably simple for me, who was about to pass, not with any high marks/grades, the Madras University Pre-University Course. So, readers, when I joined IIT, I was bottom crawling! I sought and got asylum in Civil Engineering.

During my teaching the first year course on mechanics at a private university I threw in a few of these questions and the students, who failed to get into any of the IITs, could not answer.Then, why demand higher standards? This is why the writers bemoan students trying to solve, “complex problems from …Irodov (?) and Krotov (?), which go far beyond B.Tech requirements.” I am with the writers on this.

Next comes reification to the second/third decimal place. I have heard that parents are not beyond asking, “Where did you lose that 0.05? The cut-off mark was 97.73 and you got 97.68. You lost the opportunity for a good college education. Go hide your face in the garbage dump outside.”   

The above is nothing but mistaking precision for accuracy. In assessing suitability to learn, both these are irrelevant. It can be truthfully measured only through, let me say it, holistic assessment. The writers mention this; I wish they had given a lot more stress to the issue, as it has to reach the parents. They need to be detoxified, or their brains dewormed! Yet, I am thankful.

What do coaching institutes do to be successful? First, they favour city students (more resourceful?) over town students and much more so over down-market places, such as villages. Then, life is like that in an army, such strict regimens. The enemy is sitting just in the next bench in the class! 

A shadow of caste must be falling on this issue. But, the writers have not gone there and so I too would not. I know a student who spent two years in Kota, the Indian capital of IIT JEE coaching institutes, got into an IIT, doing, you would not guess, Civil Engineering, that most loathed discipline among the aspirants. Intensive coaching such as I have discussed create “illusory meritocracy”. The writers hit the nail on the head and hard!

Yet, that fellow went to the US, to University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (one of the top universities in the world in Civil Engineering), and finished his doctorate in the much-in-demand transportation engineering and is enjoying life. He sure must have worked very hard. How did that happen? His father knew how to do things, like making his son miss regular growing-up. The son lapped up the opportunity, and skipped normal growing up. I am not blaming anyone. The system of entrance exams reaches deep into the psyche of the aspirants, and more importantly, their parents.

The obsession with the perceived individual superiority through IIT JEE and other such examinations leads to obfuscating lives of the aspiring candidates at home, monetary capabilities, luck, and the in-built biases of society.  This is not something a rational human would approve. 

Now, to a brief discussion on where the writers had gone wrong. The first example they offer for emulation is The Netherlands. Yes, ratio of the area of India to The Netherlands is about 78, and the ratio between the populations of the two countries is about 81. These ratios are comparable, so, OK. Or, are they?

Mathematically OK, but mathematical ratios should not be the metric in comparisons relating to education. Look at their per capita incomes. The Netherlands beats India by a whopping factor of 29! Does the comparison look OK? NO! The writers tried to pull the wool over eyes of their readers, but failed with me. 

The Netherlands uses a weighted lottery system for medical school admissions. What I understand is if your body weight is high, your odds for success in the lottery are high.

Just kidding. Do the writers think that such lotteries could not be corrupted, when corruption has been woven into the fabric of Indian society? Don’t answer that. Even Gods are corrupt/corruptible in India

Next up in the comparison with China. Adopt its methods that could help check “excessive and disorderly growth of coaching centres and their impact on youth”. To my mind, we already have rules and regulations regarding many things in our lives including education, but they are followed more in the breach. Compared to China, The Netherlands looks doable!

The writers state that if authorities trusted the school system, everything would be hunky dory. Dream on.

They advocate 50% of IIT seats to rural students from government schools. Please, someone, pinch me hard to wake up from an afternoon reverie. This suggestion dovetails nicely when the government is getting out of social governance in a hurry!

Well, whereas the diagnosis was good, the prescription would kill the patients.

There can never be a holistic solution in a nation that boasts of Gini coefficient hovering around 61-62 (World Inequality Database, 2023). It was found that based on income, the top 1% of the adult Indian population holds over 40% of the total national wealth.

To be fair, if the metric is Consumption expenditure, the coefficient is 25.5. As a casual observer of society, this number is hard to digest for me. The point is, the richer one is, more would be their savings and further investments (for profits), abroad. That is, the rich are likely to find opportunities for splurging flatten out in India; explains the low coefficient. Tell me, isn’t this why Elon Musk is spending on Mars instead of on the earth?

Coming to education, it is a public good and cannot be tied down to how rich one’s parents are. The threshold level of quality education is a right of every child. If government schools are not providing the required quality, the corrective measures have to be taken there. This applies to rural schools and education also.

Any entrance examination can be only as fair as students and their parents want it to be.

Raghuram Ekambaram

Claude Shannon and AI

                                                               Claude Shannon and AI

The reason I am so suspicious of Artificial Intelligence is what I heard from one of my friend who was doing a course on Electronic Communication at IIT Kanpur in 1976-1977. He was taking a course on probability which underpinned what he was being taught in his discipline.Do students of AI learn even the fundamentals of probability? I don’t know. If they do, more power to them. From what I remember, after more than four decades, is that the slower one transmits a message, more is the fidelity that can be achieved, but never less than significant. 

It seems that this did not sit well with Claude Shannon of Bell Laboratories. This too came to me courtesy my friend. Shannon, working on his own time gave the world the bit, the fundamental unit of information that underlies all digital gizmos. I had heard this earlier, but a friend telling me this in a voice resembling authority made me feel small.

In the heading of this blog I did not couple Shannon and AI as a fancy. Shannon showed that “[I]nformation sent from Point A could be received with perfection at Point B, not just often but essentially always.” That “essentially” is the allowance for “arbitrarily small amount of error”; essentially, playing with Limits that we learn in calculus. This too I received at the feet of my friend!

Shannon showed through a demonstration (he worked on it in his house, with the help of his wife) that a mechanical mouse could “learn” from prior experience. If that is not intelligence, what is? If a mechanical mouse is not artificial, then is there anything that can be called artificial? Ergo, any behaviour that exhibits learning, and that too by a mechanical mouse, then artificial intelligence has dawned. This is what Claude E. Shannon did while he was at MIT as an endowment chair professor.

Every college in town, indeed in a village, boasts of courses in AI. Would any student be interested in learning what a humble beginning their field had? Is he or she as intelligent as a mouse scurrying to find morsels of food in hostel garbage cans? Yes, artificial intelligence demands humility as well as intelligence. Neither one is sufficient by itself.

Raghuram Ekambaram 

 

Why did Lord Shiva Let His Hair Become Matted?

                                            Why did Lord Shiva Let His Hair Become Matted?

Lord Shiva depicted anthropomorphically always has His hair matted and with a top knot.How to do a topr know with matted hair, I need to consult a hair stylist! No barette seen.

 

The almost invisible torrent descending from the top on to Lord Shiva’s head is the Akash Ganga that He catches in His matted hair. I trust this picture explains the myth sufficiently and leads you directly to understanding the question.

Did Lord Shiva refuse a haircut knowing a priori that He would be called on to stem the ferocity of Akash Ganga which He could do most effectively by catching the torrent in His matted hair tied into a layered top knot? Or, was He both lazy and a miser to spend the little cash He had on a haircut? His matted hair then merely became a handy coincidence in the myth.  

Which one of the above two scenarios is the mythical truth (?) is the question I am going to speculate on as an exercise in understanding evolution of life on earth. Let me begin. 

There are two distinctly different schools of thought. We may call one of them Lamarckian and the other Darwinian. Lamarck said, at the level I understand, that the reason a giraffe has a long neck was that was where it can find the food that is tasteful. It was perhaps purpose directed. 

In the state of Kentucky in the US, I visited the Mammoth Cave National Park. In there and in the natural water course that flows through it, the tour guide told us that the fish in those waters (called blind cave fish) do not have eyes. This is where Lamarck could be brought in. His idea was that for some reason (that he could not put his finger on) a fish lost its sight, but perhaps gained in acuity of its other senses that helped it find the prey in the pitch black caves and survived. It thus produced an offspring who also did not have sight but had the capability of survival in dark caves built into it – no eyes but could still hunt down its prey.

The above is pure Lamarckian. Its counterpart, the Darwinian, sets store by a random mutation (Darwin was not privy to the later discovery about genes) that provided the differential success that built up over generations to allow the blind cave fish to survive. Both these guys had no clue how the change they pegged their theories on happened. They just happened, by making a species suited to the environment, or by a random change that enabled it to survive.

It so happened that Darwin could tentatively explain under an overarching umbrella the variety of life found on the earth. Lamarck, on the other hand, needed to find an individual,and site and time specific modification in the species that enabled it to survive, like the neck of the giraffe.

Now, knowing the above, if I posed the two alternatives as regards how it came to be that Lord Shiva caught the raging torrent of Akash Ganga in his matted hair, their choices would be evident. Lamarck would choose that Lord Shiva deliberately put His hair in a fashion that could catch Akash Ganga.

Darwin? Lord Shiva wanted to save cash and was wandering in the Himalayas when AkashGanga fell into his hair and was tamed.

I go with, based on my comparison above, Lamarck. But, ignoring the myth, I am with Darwin.

On the one hand, and, on the other!

Raghuram Ekambaram

Responses to a Death

                                                                   Responses to a Death

Many years ago, at least two decades, I remember reading an opinion piece by a socialite-cum-celebrity-cum-writer (she became a celebrity because she was a socialite, and became a writer because she was a celebrity, and I read her piece because she was all three!) bemoaning that funeral processions in India of political leaders were so unseemly (her perspective); all that breast beating (as in Tamil Nadu) was not befitting the final send-off. It brings the dignity the dead deserves on his death down, way down. It must be a sombre and silent affair. She must have called it all faux emotions and compared it to the essentially anodyne process (she must have seen or heard of) in western countries, and cast her lot with the latter.

Basically, faux emotions or anodyne proceedings, which do you prefer?

I am giving my readers a few photographs of the death of two different leaders within five years of each other, one in the then Madras, India and the other in Washington D.C., USA. These show the manifestation of culture in two different societies, one Western and the other, in a significant corner of India, Tamil Nadu. The Western one is from 1963, and the other wasC N Annadurai’s in Chennai. Without further ado, I offer the pictures below.

 Take a look at the mere size of the crowds. Understand that in the 1960s, India’s population was at least three times that of US’s. The area of India is one third of that of the US (including Alaska and Hawaii). 

Now, try taking in a more reasoned look at the same photographs. The distance covered by the funeral procession of C N Annadurai was 6 km, and it was much greater than that of John F. Kennedy, 10 km.

The density of the crowd in Madras is definitely greater than ten times that in Washington D.C. Accounting for the factor of 5/3 for the distance, the total crowd estimated at the final resting place of C N Annadurai was (as per the caption on one of the photos) 15 million, and in Washington D.C., the total along the route was 800,000. I will bring one more fact to your attention. C N Annadurai was the Chief Minister of the state of Tamil Nadu and John F. Kennedy was the president of the whole country, the US.

Ignore all those numbers and facts that do nothing but lie. One must make informed judgements; in this case it would include social importance of observances, including that of at funerals.

I would like to ask why she did not compare one of the other western funeral observances with her standard candela of Anglo-American observances. Here, I have in mind the Irish Wake that is quite celebratory of a well-lived life. 

The lives of both C N Annadurai and John F. Kennedy were not fully lived. But, even as merely the chief minister of a state of India, he made a mark that has benefitted and continue to benefit everyone, millions more, including the subalterns. One cannot claim the same for John F. Kennedy. Indeed, he ignored Blacks as they received zero candela of light. It was left to Lyndon B. Johnson to direct the torch towards Blacks and the poor.

Does the socialite-cum-celebrity-cum-writer not know that one can compare only the comparables? C N Anandurai’s death brought forth such emotions in people, more than a dozen people (I am sure I remember it right) lost their lives travelling on train tops despite repeated attempts by the engine driver and the guard to get them off. They merely wanted to see their beloved Anna (elder brother) one last time. They were, instead, mashed/guillotined by the top steel members of the through-type truss bridge that crossed River Cauvery in Tiruchirappalli. Has the socialite-cum-celebrity-cum-writer hear of such gruesome incidents elsewhere during a Western funeral? This never happened for John F. Kennedy, James E. Carter, and even Ronald Reagan. I did not think so.

I am not going to claim that Americans did not feel for any of their presidents as much as what people of Tamil Nadu felt for their chief minister, C N Annadurai. But, Western societies seem to think that wearing your emotions on your sleeves makes you week. I have nothing to say on that.

I can give you one instance that could etch in your mind the indelible image of Anna. One of my former colleagues was named Kanchidurai, where “Kanchi” refers to the place of birth of C N Annadurai (Kanchipuram). It must have been one of his father’s ways of remembering his beloved late leader.

Another instance popped into my mind just as I was finalizing this write-up. One of my classmates in my Ph.D programme named his first born Ronald, after President Ronald Reagan. Such memorializing cuts across societies, maybe.

Yet, one cannot take incidences under different individual ethos and social mores and compare those using raw data, information, what have you. The writer is a socialite but is not competent enough to comment on the sociology of any particular society−which, by default is not the one in which she floats−that abrades her sense of the right response to a situationsteered by the unaffordable fashions of her mind.    

Raghuram Ekambaram

The Definitive Infinity beyond All Other Infinities

                                                   The Definitive Infinity beyond All Other Infinities

My first interaction with infinity came very late in my life despite, in my chosen profession I have used the symbol, not infinite number of times, but millions of times.

I was in the tenth standard I think and my cousin who was in IIT Bombay (who was then in his second year and was a show-off, much later) then posed the question, how many particles of sand are there in the expanse of Marina Beach in Madras (now Chennai). I said a large number and he asked how large. I was in 10th standard and I knew what he was getting at, I cried instantaneously and loudly, “INFINITY!” Well, I later learned that that was not the correct answer. 

Once I read how Richard Feynman sort of played with the three or four year old son of Hans Bethe at Cornell University. Feynman asked the toddler to give him the largest number the child knew. Pat came the answer, thousand! Feynman challenged this answer and gave his number 1,001, which even the child acknowledged as larger than 1,000. So, he said, 1,002. Feynman responded, 1,003. This went on for a few series of “I’ve got the highest number” before the kid caught on to the truth that infinity is merely a concept. As an aside, isn’t that a terrific way to teach?

Where does the series of bigger and bigger numbers end? At infinity? No, it appears not. What Feynman showed was only one kind of infinity. There are at least six kinds of infinity.There was a time when I bought many layman books on topics of interest in science, math included. One such book was The Infinite Book by John D. Barrow. I dug in and could understand much in it and was at sea on much other; as it was a book on infinity!

I give here the conclusion of a logical argument given as a brain-teaser: The curious feature of infinity is that it can be put in direct correspondence with a part of itself (Albert of Saxony’s Paradox). This appeared on page 53 of a total of 274 pages (with extensive notes and index) in the book, and I was hooked. I learned that there are at least six different kinds of infinities!

Here, I am going to add one more, the seventh, theological infinity. Hinduism appears not to have a unique and uniform theology; it rather abounds in philosophies, traditions and religions, each espoused through sacerdotal observations that do not accord with each other.

But when Lord Krishna (Vishnu) shows Himself as Infinite to Arjuna in the battlefield, I do not know whether Lord Vishnu was within Himself in as Lord Krishna and Lord Vishnu simultaneously (both ever smaller but equally large) in that revelation, like nested (yes, that is the right word here, the Russian nested dolls!), maybe. 

I say this because, if this was really so, then Hinduism offers clear, non-contradictory explanation to the supposed paradox mentioned above, and this is important, eons before Albert of Saxony did! Each vision of the Lord “can be put in direct correspondence” with a part of itself!

This is well within, indeed endorses Hindus’ claim, “Been there; done that!” Of course it includes plastic surgery (Lord Vigneshwara), and airplane (Ravan abducts Sita Devi on Pushpak Vimana) too, as our much beloved Prime Minster of India said.

But the most revealing and engrossing thing I came across in the book is the following: one infinity can be bigger than another! In fact, “there is no end to the ascending hierarchies of infinities.” So, no infinity is the biggest infinity! We have graduated from integers stopping at an infinity to nonstop infinities themselves.

That is, if Lord Vishnu is an infinity, so are Yahweh, Allah, Shiva, Mahavir Jain, Buddha, and even every one of the 0.33 billion Devas (in the Hindu pantheon) and every other divinity conjured by any number (definitely a large number, yet not quite infinite) of civilizationsindividually an infinity! No wonder religious wars (at least wars fought in the name of religion) are infinite.

If you would like such wars to vanish, I offer you the following: abolish all the religions. This could take infinitely long. I have infinite time on my hand, just being reborn infinite times!

Raghuram Ekambaram

To Know Oneself

To Know Oneself

To know oneself is not like spot welding, choose an instant of time, and presto, you have learned about yourself.  In my humble opinion, it is a continuing process. When the process starts one does not know when it would stop, if ever. This was brought in clear relief in the movie Conclave by the character Cardinal Bellini when he lamented ‘To be this age and still not know yourself’” (The Guardian, Nesrine Malik, September 29, 2025). 

I have searched the Net to find out what was the age of this fictional character in the movie; no success. But, knowing that none of the Cardinals of the Conclave could have aged beyond 80 years, I know I am not too far from that age to regret, a la Cardinal Bellini! I do not want to, though.

I am a candidate, not for the pope-electing Conclave, but for drawing the parallel between my age, my maturity, and when I came to a definitive level of knowing myself.

I wish to define, for myself, what it is, “to know oneself”.

It is like coming to a fork in one’s life, and take one path without looking back to see if anyone else is taking the other path(s). Is it like the Buddha, coming out from under the Bodhi tree not looking back to see, not only to know whether anyone else is coming after him but also if others are following the other path(s)?

That was “knowing oneself”, with others and their choices not making any dents in his/her choice. Could I say this about Emperor Asoka, after the Kalinga war? I would only imagine so, definitely far from being certain.

For me, the above happened, not once, but many times since I was 27 or 28 years old. Travelling along the path I took at the first fork, I came across, successively, multiple forks each offering different paths to follow. And, I believe I am telling the truth when I say that not once, not along the multiple paths I took, I violated the principle that guided me on that first path. Likewise, upon encountering another fork, I have not violated any of or all the principles, one each at each fork, at which I had already taken a decision.

I have been a staunch non-believer in God and religion; though I have argued vigorously with religious people, I have not assailed them; I have a set of morals and I try my best not to infract them internally; I try to avoid situations in which my personal morals go against community ethics (sometimes by ignoring them or showing superficial agreement); I have not discriminated against anyone on the basis of caste, colour (I am in between fair and brownish), social status; against the rich or poor; against people who act in ways that could rub me the wrong way; any disability including deafness (very difficult to discern) and any other disability. It is not impossible that I am lacking in other things. But, I am confident I would correct myself if I realized it myself or someone showed me.

The above, I feel, is my knowing myself.

Raghuram Ekambaram

I Got into IITM through Reservation

                                                      I Got into IITM through Reservation

It is, of course, true that I secured a rank in IIT JEE that allowed me to get into IITM by scraping the bottom. Then, what am I talking about reservation helping me enter the portals of an IIT? Listen to me patiently.

The trend setter in my family was my paternal grandmother’s younger brother. He became an engineer and was placed in the Madras Municipal Corporation during the years of my father’s childhood. The die was cast. The next one was my mother’s elder brother, the younger of the two, though he studied only for a diploma and not a degree. Yet, he was a true engineer. Then came my generation.

Here it got interesting. My mother’s elder sister’s son became an electrical engineer, much before IITs became the rage among Tamil Brahmins. Then, my father’s elder (younger of the two) brother’s eldest son got into an IIT and became a mechanical engineer. My mother’s elder brother’s (the younger of the two mentioned above) son entered an IIT and became a mechanical engineer. My father’s eldest brother’s son did so, along with me in 1971. So, I had engineer’s blood mixed with IIT blood running in my veins. This tradition was carried on by my youngest male cousin, and it continues in the next generation.

I am a Smartha Brahmin by birth and to be educated beyond high school is the minimum qualification for this community, preferably an engineer or a doctor. My younger brother is an engineer, though not an IITan, but a true hands-on engineer. When I entered IIT through JEE, I came in scraping the bottom, rank of 1493 out of about 25,000 who wrote the exam, top 6%.

This community along with its cohorts like Vaishnavites and others, by their unshakeable understanding that professional education is the definitive pathway to climb the social ladder, had delivered to itself education in and had enjoyed (and continue to enjoy) the fruits of such reservation (to be understood in a comparative sense at the level of being aware) in these fields. I am talking about 1960s and ‘70s. 

The other down market communities were not even aware of such opportunities and/or did not have the wherewithal to invest time, money and energy in higher education of their youngsters, so stringent were the unsaid reservations.

OK, even talking about myself, I have reasons to be proud of entering IIT Madras, reservation or not. My cousins who entered IITs, all of them, attended coaching classes (Agrawal Classes in the then Bombay was perhaps the trend setter; in the then Madras Vivekananda and Jain Colleges were offering evening tutorial classes tuned to cracking JEE). What did I have? A guide that my father gave me money and told me to buy from Madras when we were in Kancheepuram (I was doing my Pre-University Course from Pachaiyappa’sCollege, Kancheepuram), any guide that I found easy to understand. I did and after making the payment (Rs. 60/−, a princely sum for my family), I found a glaring error in it, in ray optics in physics. I almost did not study from it with any seriousness. Still, I entered IIT Madras, but in a down market field, Civil Engineering.

Perhaps my brief history given above muted the benefit of reservation I did enjoy.

The way I understand reservation may be distinctly different than what it is taken to be in general discussions. Reservation is not about percentages, however measured. It is about what one carries due to historical circumstances/accidents. It is such a way of reckoning reservations, I wrote the above.

Raghuram Ekambaram