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