We Need More Reservations

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There’s been a lot of brouhaha over reservations ever since the British got fed up of us and left. First it was the Dalits. Quite logical, since after being oppressed for centuries they do need affirmative action. Then, of course, some 50 years later Arjun Singh informed us that even the OBCs needed help with their ABCs. So seats were reserved for them in our education system.

So far so good.

But I ask of you, aren’t we missing out a vital part of our population that needs help from the State? Yes, dear reader, I’m talking about our children (by ‘our’, I mean children generally. I myself have no children...seriously). They need all the help they can get from the State, simply because they are, in one word, dumb.

Think about it. Do you know anyone dumber that, say, a five-year old? Other than a four-year old, that is. And I’ve seen it myself. My two-year old cousin can hardly recite four-line nursery rhymes and her parents have such low expectations from her that they go into raptures every time she crosses ‘P’ when reciting the alphabet.

And this isn’t just a problem with children related to me, mind you. It’s all pervading. At a neighbour’s kid’s birthday party, one child had a hard time grasping the concept of the game, 'Passing the Pillow'. The idiot would refuse to pass the pillow, while playing ‘Passing the Pillow’. Needless to say, Musical Chairs was completely beyond him.

People who oppose reservations for children do, of course, try and make up a million excuses in order to explain this remarkable lack of intelligence visible among non-adults

Some people blame the parents. However, more often than not the parents are helpless in the face of such massive obtuseness. One couple bought their one-year old bundle of joy to the theatre to watch ‘Body of Lies’. I’m sure they expected their kid to learn much from Ridley Scott’s indictment of American foreign policy in the Middle-East. But alas, it was not to be. The kid just cried throughout the whole movie, in spite of his parent’s grim determination to not take him out of the theatre.

Of course, people also say, “let things like growing-up work and the children will get smarter. Give it time, baba”.

Bullshit.

To disprove this naïve assumption, all I have to do is to take Raj Thackeray as an example. He’s grown up, hasn’t he? But has he become any clever? Nope. In fact, I bet, Raj, as a kid, refused to pass the pillow at birthday parties. Or maybe he only passed it to the Marathi kids.

Now tell me, don’t these kids, disadvantaged as they are by nature, need our help? Shouldn’t we, as responsible citizens of this country fight for what’s right? Can we afford to deny our little ignoramuses reservations in our educational institutes and in our workplaces?

So do the right thing and support reservations for children in our institutions. Do it for a stronger India, if nothing else.