DC++

Like i said in my last post there was a lot of stuff pending from my last reading rush. So with this post i want to finish vomiting all that on my blog so that i can take a break from blogging for some weeks now.

Yes.. this is one last longgg post and i take a blog break after this for some time :).

Customary Recruiter Alert# The erstwhile congress during freedom struggle had socialists.. communists.. capitalists.. fundamentalists .. so on under one umbrella and these differences were considered  to be one of the assets of the party. It was this diversity of thought that led to rich policy discussions debates etc. So today’s B-Schools also need to have multiple voices on multiple things i think ;). Jus becoz i seem to be depressed by what is business-as-usual doesn’t mean that i make a bad employee :P .. like i said in my last post.. i have a split personality. Trust me ! :D

I had taken note of some stuff from newspapers/movies/books in the past few weeks .. so here i go one by one.

The Union Sports minister’s tryst with F1

The Hindu today said that the Union sports minister has not been invited for the International F1 sports event at Delhi. Now.. isn’t that funny ;). The minister claims that since he is neither a star nor an item girl hence he didn’t expect a invitation. The fineprint ofcourse explains the probable reasons .. some issue over income tax exemption for organising the event. Apparently they did send some two passes to the minster’s residence, but like the authorities say .. that is not the right way to invite a minister ;). Interesting :) . I am waiting for the next P.Sainath article on the F1 mania ;). Talking of P.Sainath, this is an old gem (Mar 2011) by him on this very issue of tax exemptions titled Corporate Socialism’s 2G orgy. The comments on this article also make an interesting read.

Tamilnadu’s RADMS software

This was another piece in Indian express some 3-4 days back about how IT was used in Tamilnadu to combat the traffic management issues. The software package is titled Road Accident Data Management System. Very nice to see IT in action ;). Despite all the cribbing that we software engineers do IT does matter ;).

ToI on Intelligent Toilets

There was this piece in today’s TOI about intelligent toilets. Obvly such items can grab your attention only on TOI website :D. Anyway.. the article says the future toilets will have “shower curtains showing TV or the internet ” and that “People will be able to make phone calls from under the shower and an interactive mirror – connected to the internet – might offer tips on what accessories to wear with what dress”. I hope that this technology shall not see light .. even if it does it should be super costly that barely 0.01% of population should use it :P. That is atleast one part of our life that technology hasn’t touched yet. Let fb-twitter not ruin this part of our lives too :D

The Occupy wall street stuff

Of late, newspapers publish editorials/opinions on the OWS thing every once in a while. Sometimes atleast once in two days. So this article on friday’s Indian express impressed me. Like i mentioned in my last post it is about the cronyism in capitalism. The author says that “while alarmists seem to think that the movement is a “mob” trying to overthrow capitalism, one can make a case that, on the contrary, it highlights the need to restore basic capitalist principles like accountability”

Mr.Shanti Bhushan and his heart

Here goes another on tax exemptions. This was one piece of news that reminded me of the “legal aspects of management” course i had in first year. The news is about Shanti Bhushan’s claim  that his heart is like a “plant” (as in steel plant ;)) and he needs Income tax waiver for the expenses he incurred for his bypass surgery. His argument is on the lines that as per law plant is “any article or object fixed or movable, live or dead, used by a businessman for carrying on his business and it is not necessarily confined to an apparatus which is used for mechanical operations or processes or is employed in mechanical or industrial business” . So his heart problem has caused him loss of business and the bypass surgery was like a plant repair hence he can claim exemption for the same.

The Delhi HC had originally dismissed the plea before the SC accepted it.. one of the arguments of the HC was that if you say that your heart is a plant and hence an asset then it should be in your balance sheet :D. Very interesting thought.. So the assesse balance sheet will now read .. 2 Kidneys 1 Brain 1 Heart 2 Eyes so on. Wonder how the valuation would be performed then ! ;). Bhushan on the other hand refuted this claim saying “heart is not a purchased asset .. i got it for free” :D. More on this here. I think lawyers have a lot of entertainment in their lives. They experience “navarasas” i think :)

The Manhole cover case-study

This was again a chance discovery while reading the Krugman International economics textbook on a case-study about Manhole cover manufacturers. The end case question for this one page case was very troubling .. “So was the production of manhole covers by barefoot workers something to be condemned or praised ? Are demands for higher safety standards humane, or would they have the effect of denying desperately poor people the oppurtunities, merely to satisfy our own fastidousness” . A similar case was discussed in our business sustainability class in term4 about how strict regulation against labour malpractices resulted in loss of employment and they had to take to prostitution in some cases.

Vandana Shiva, Satish Kumar etc

So my reading of the stuff i wrote about in my last posts does continue. Last week i saw some videos and read up a bit on the work done by Vandana Shiva‘s Navdhanya and Satish Kumar and his work at Schumacher College. Infact, that India had a initiative similar to the Schumacher college in the form of Bija Vidyapeeth – Earth University made me happy :).

This 27min video of Vandana Shiva titled “Lunacy of economic growth” makes some very valid arguments. Apart from the content of the video what impressed me was the audience numbers (should be about a 1000) and their discipline. I doubt if she comes to IIM-L lets say today.. if even 10% of the junta would turn up ;).

There are generally two arguments about such alternative theories/methodologies of development that they are “anti-growth” or that they are “unrealistic/utopian”. Vandana Shiva’s video touches upon the “anti-growth” aspect and this 2008 interview of Satishkumar has this classic on the “unrealistic” part.

“Is my approach unrealistic?” he asks. “Look at what realists have done for us. They have led us to war and climate change, poverty on an unimaginable scale, and wholesale ecological destruction. Half of humanity goes to bed hungry because of all the realistic leaders in the world. I tell people who call me ‘unrealistic’ to show me what their realism has done. Realism is an outdated, overplayed and wholly exaggerated concept”

On the two documentaries

I also saw a couple of documentaries. The first one is Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story which was on my to-watch list from a long time. Its a pretty neatly made documentary. But like all documentaries sometimes it may seem way too biased.. selective distortion+selective attention+selective retention ? :P

Food Inc ofcourse is a far more depressing documentary. Some of it has got parallels with the Percy Schmeiser vs Monsanto case. This part of the story infact matches with what Vandana Shiva etc advocate too. Its a bit of a complex problem really which in laymen terms is as follows.. if you are growing cotton using your own seed (i.e., seed that you have saved which is indigineous to your farming techniques) and if pollen for a neighbourhood field having a proprietary seed based crop falls on yours and due to which slowly your crop may show traces of the proprietary gene… then the company owning the proprietary crop can sue you for patent infringement. Strange as it may seem the farmer then loses independence over his own seed. And that is something that is so fundamental to farming i.e., ownership over the seed. The issue is a lot more complex than this ofcourse .. but somehow it did trouble me a lot :( . This was one of the reasons for the birth of Vandana Shiva’s Navdhanya movement.

Some credit to Monsanto though. All this research partly was triggered by an ad of Monsanto i saw on Frontline which claimed that it was a Green company helping the farmers of the world get better yields .. address hunger and poverty etc.

Well.. who am i to judge really ! :)

DC++ bit

DC++ in this context actually means .. Democratic Companies++  :D. This was mentioned in the Michael moore documentary about why companies don’t seem to have more democracy these days and questioning if democracy and capitalism are two different things. He talks about two worker co-operatives in his documentary (i) Isthmus Engineering and manufacturing (ii) Alvarado street bakery. Now, for the last few posts i have been writing a lot about how co-operatives have interested me a lot. So, the mention of co-operatives in the documenatry made me happy.  This nytimes article by an economics prof from UMAS also talks about the same. I sort of liked the concluding paragraphs of that article:

Frankly, the main reason I like worker-owned and -managed companies is largely ignored in the economics literature.They could help develop the democratic institutions and collaborative skills we need to manage our planet better, along with the plants we grow and build on it.

I agree. People seem to have a notion that this is a tried and tested and long dead thing. But i think ideas like this never die :) . My stand is vindicated by the fact that in the last few years .. after 2008 .. a lot of talk on this has gathered mileage again. I myself am a proof for this. Why would i be blogging about this if it was a long-dead thing ;)

PS: With that i signoff from my blog. Am not going to blog for a month or two now.

 

Diwali Post

Firstly .. I wish you all a happy diwali and i hope you have seen Ra.One! .. :D

This post has  nothing to do with Diwali except for the fact the date seems to match. So i finished another set of exams yesterday and like it happens .. happened to read so much yesterday that i had my own “aaha” moment. So this post is just to remind myself of the good stuff i read and also spam the internet about it.This “good” stuff might induce sleep in some of you.. some of you might have slept already ! .. That’s the way the world is sadly .. every damn thing is subject to the variation in the likes and dislikes of people ;) .

#Reader Alert: This is a very very information heavy post ! :)

Though by now a lot of people who know me have stopped asking me this question .. some still do, so for the benifit of them i think i should post this confession up here.. “Why do i read all this? What do i hope to do by reading all this stuff?” . I read this stuff because i get a lot of questions about socio-economic systems and inequality around me :P … and unless i find answers i get restless. So to find answers i read books. That may not be the best possible way to go about it .. but saves both time and money for me ;) . So that is it .. read  such books if you have questions .. by reading relevant books a lot of times you would find answers or paths towards answers. If you do not have any questions at all.. then go watch Ra.One :P (Okie this will be the last Ra.One joke! ) .

#Recruiter Alert: Oo and btw if any prospective recruiter is reading this .. “Don’t worry i have a split personality who doesn’t philosophise over the rights and wrongs of things and can slog like anything for whatever my master commands!” .

So all confessions done .. let me finally start with the post :).

The thing about “Trade”:

So it was in this post last month that i spoke about Distributism first. Now i am sort of trying to understand the model better.

Before that i wanted to write about something i read for the “Global Political Economy” course which was some sort of a trigger for all this reading. I happened to read this part of the “International Economics” textbook by Paul Krugman and Maurice obstfeld about “The gains from trade”. This part of the book talks about Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson‘s theory about “how international trade makes a society potentially better off than it would be if restricted to autarky“ (“potentially” was kept in italics deliberately) . Btw as per wiki Paul Samuelson was instrumental in setting up IIM-C .. very interesting piece of info this ;)

Now, i am not an economist.. so obvly i didn’t understand the whole thing (Actually MBAs are just supposed to act like they know everything ..  they need not necessarily know… when challenged .. we delegate :D ) .. but i sort of got the essence of what he was trying to say. The only reservation i had was that .. all this was some sort of an anti-thesis to what i spoke of in the last post .. the stuff spoken by E.F.Schumacher about Local production-Local consumption .. the stuff spoken by Gandhi or JP about Village-Economy or Tagore’s whole Samavaya Niti/Co-operative principle thing or the co-operative model proposed in M.N.Roy’s New Humanism. My only argument was that .. obvly these people are not fools .. they would have said what they said only based on some assumptions/logic. So i wanted to understand that stuff better. That is really when i sort of ended up with a small research on the whole “Distributivism” thing.

The third way: Distributivism/Distributism/Distributionism: (I dont care for semantics frankly speaking :P)

So this distributivist stuff as we know it today has been mainly proposed by Hillaire Belloc and G.K.Chesterton early in the 1900s. It has its roots in the Papal teachings before. But i think more or less this was  a practice at varying levels of intensities in many societies across the world prevly.

Anyway, so the whole funda is that … Socialism and Capitalism both suck in the sense that they end up creating what Belloc called as “The Servile State” .. the only way forward is to promote private property .. and by private property they do not mean the mercantilist capitalism mode that we see today but the ideal vision of private property for all. So the system is infact for much more “free” in freedom than the “free” in free markets.

Now there are enough criticisms which dismiss this whole thing as utopian/way-too-romantic. But i somehow find it logical and convincing enough.. and there are ofcourse some systems where the co-operative thing did work big time. So i refuse to accept that this idea is impractical. It is just the lack of intent that makes it less popular..

Anyway .. like someone once said.. no one can be against capitalism.. they can only be against Crony-capitalism.. similarly .. people do not like Crony-socialism.. as of now i am not sure if there is something called Crony-distributism.. so i am as of now okie with it :P. But like it happens i may soon start hating it .. you never know :P

So this was one post that did do rounds amongst the distributist society folks as i understand during the “Occupy wall street” times.The 12 point program suggested in the prev link has some real crazy and outright stupid things.. so no point debating about them. But some of the points do make sense. Like everything else in life .. it has to be read with a “pinch of salt”.. perhaps more ;).

So for a primer on distributism .. i think this  link is good .. the link by some course in Notredame university here is also good enough.

PS1: There is this article in one of the above mentioned links about how Adam Smith is very widely mis-understood by many. I sort of liked it. Partly because a lot of us like to quote Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” theory and other stuff for all the goods and bads of the economy  today in the world without actually reading his writings. I myself tried twice till now but never really could i make significant progress… mainly due to the heavy language i’d say. Anyway this article .. “The forgotten Agrarian: On re-reading Adam Smith” is very interesting. One of the profs here at IIM-L also spoke about this particular misinterpretation of Adam Smith so i am not doing any further research on the rights and wrongs of the author and accepting it on a as-is basis ;).

PS2: Another discovery that made me really happy was the stuff i read about Appropriate technology. This one again is pretty much what the Gandhian and Schumacherian school of thought says about “Technology”. Some of the examples quoted in the wiki link and plain mindblowing :).  There is a very interesting Lucknow link to this part of the research which is the work of Mansur Hoda and Surur Hoda ..and the establishment of Institute of Appropriate technology and Rurul Development near Lucknow. I am trying to find some whereabouts and contacts regarding this so that i could perhaps make a visit to that institute to understand what this is all about. Lets see.

PS3: Some more stuff i read was about the good work done by Schumacher Center, Delhi 

PS4: Interestingly there is a post on the blog of New Economics Foundation on October 19th i.e., 7 days ago titled “The strange rebirth of distributism” . So i think my very own small little research is very much in sync with times :P .So as much as some friends like to believe.. i am still not as ancient as i appear to be :D

PS5: More on the work done on the lines of appropriate technology can be found here. Again “Practical Action” also was founded by E.F.Schumacher .. simply amazing stuff being done there. Like they have written in the “History” page .. ” …  there should be a shift in emphasis towards ‘intermediate technologies’ based on the needs and skills possessed by the people of developing countries” . I like !

PS6: I stop here for now. So a lot of my questions about development-inequality-systems of production and consumption etc are being answered slowly like this. I hope all this learning can translate into action soon. Even if it doesn’t i am happy that i did search for answers. Ideally ofcourse if all this translates to action it would help. Like Vijay Mahajan says here.. “If the best management brains in the country only sell shampoos and soaps, there’s no way India can progress” . Very true Sir ! .. infact i can add a couple of other professions as well to that line :P .. but a lot of us B-School students are basically “timid” and “insecure” .. our 10lakh+ loans/invested money also is some botheration for most of us :(.. The article is a bit dated but has some very interesting stories :). Like the HUL CEO Nitin Paranjpe said the other day while addressing a gathering of students at IIM-L  .. “I can accept pessimism from any other group of students .. but not this one. You are India’s Tomorrow” . Indeed ! :P .. and on that hope i sign off hoping for a better tomorrow and hoping that a lot of us at some point of time in our careers work towards bettering it :)

PS7: I still have truck loads of information pending from my last reading rush .. that will be coming soon.. don’t go away ! :P .. thats pretty much like Don-2 coming after Ra.One :P (Did i say i will stop Ra.One jokes ? .. okie i think i did.. sorry :P)

 

Hamara Bajaj ! :)

This post is largely about this extremely well-written biography of Shri Jamnalal Bajaj “In Gandhi’s Footsteps – The Life and Times of Jamnalal Bajaj” by B.R.Nanda . The post may be a bit long .. but do exercise some patience and read through .. i am sure there will be some take aways :).

It was in August that i posted about my plan to read this book..

Before i started reading this book i really knew nothing about “Jamnalal Bajaj” beyond the fact that JBIMS was named after him. I think it was in my last visit to the library that i happened to see this one in one corner of the library and picked it up almost instantly. This book has a lot of gandhi . Like the author himself says .. it is very difficult to decouple Bajaj and Gandhi. Gandhi famously adopted Bajaj as his fifth son. The book makes a wonderful read especially because of the way it is narrated by building up the larger context beforehand. The intricacies of the freedom movement always intrigued me and this book proved no different.. except that the protagonists are Gandhi, Bajaj and his family mainly. I will not go deeper into the details of Bajaj’s history per se as that is more or less explained in the wiki link. I will only try to point out stuff that is relevant to today’s bschool students like me and youth in general :) .

Gandhiji’s concept of Trusteeship is one of the pillars of Gandhian economics as we know it today. As gandhi himself said .. Jamnalal Bajaj’s life was a live example for that concept. When he died he gave away his personal wealth and also his own share in joint family business to various public causes approved by Mahatma. Within a few minutes of his death his wife also surrendered her wealth to the “Go Seva (Go = Cow)” movement that occupied Jamnalal completely towards the ends of his life.

Btw his wife Jankidevi Bajaj‘s story is also equally inspirational. She was conferred “Padma Vibhushan” .. that itself should speak volumes about her work. Infact, the book talks about the husband and wife relationship at length. It is very fascinating to see how his wife supported him throughout his commitment to public life. This is not to say that they didn’t have any differences . There are enough instances in the book where the differences come out. But all in all i think the husband and wife both have dedicated their life to the service of the nation.

In the concluding portions of the book , the author also contrasts the love-hate relationship Gandhiji had with other Indian Capitalists of that era like G.D.Birla with the total devotion of Jamnalal Bajaj. Also the vested interests of some other capitalists and how they sided with the british instead of helping or supporting the congress has been discussed.

The story of how Jamnalal was in a dillemma when he was toying the idea of buying a cotton mill is very interesting. Like pointed out in the book .. Gandhian economics seemed utopian to a lot of people then (am sure it is now as well!) and Jamnalal’s decision of abandoning the cotton mill project may seem absurd to most indian industrialists. But for someone who spent a significant part of his life for the upliftment of the village industries and khadi movement .. buying a cotton mill would have been an anti-thesis of sorts. Like the author says .. he was the perhaps the only industrialist who chose to subject commercial operations to the constraints of Gandhian ethics and Gandhian politics. I think for this one reason this book is a must read for all Indian MBA students :)

Another such dillemma is as follows. Once when Jamnalal was in Jail Income Tax department sent him a notice for the payment of Rs.98,000 as income tax. Before going to jail he instructed his staff to seek only such tax rebates and concessions which were admissible under law. But his staff negotiated with income-tax officials for reduction of the tax to a nominal 9800/-. This deeply distressed Jamnalal and upon the advice of Gandhi.. after deducting the transaction costs and the tax alread paid .. he donated Rs.82,000 to charity. Gandhi reportedly told Jamnalal, “Your employees will clearly see that you have refused to pocket the wrongly saved money; they will not commit such a blunder again”. I today’s era where every other day we see a corporate scandal.. i think Jamnalal Bajaj and Gandhi did leave a message to the corporate.

Some stuff from Jamnalal’s presidential address to the Aggarwal Mahasabha conference in 1926 also is relevant to today’s context.

He expressed his concerns at certain disturbing trends in the Marwari society; on the one hand, unemployment was increasing, and on the other, there was a growing tendency towards extravagant living and dissipation among the wealthy. He deplored the vulgarity of the rich as well as the poverty of the poor. This is exactly what i was reading in the newspapers today .. regarding the “Occupy Wallstreet” protests. Though i sort of agree that the protesting group can’t claim to be as virtuous as they think they are .. i think Jamnalal Bajaj’s message still is relevant to today’s businesses.

Quoting him verbatim .. “Our complaint against the british is that they take away wealth from our country… A similar charge can be laid against us [the Marwaris]. We should, therefore, look to the interests of the province, region or society in the midst of which we earn our living and, whenever necessary, we should serve it with all our heart”. CSR summarised in 3 lines I’d say. Any business which thinks the business of business is to do business should read these 3 lines again :).

More on this topic of CSR .. He argued that Marwaris should only do such business as was in the interest of the country, and regretted that “most businessmen did not care for such considerations,” citing those who traded in foreign cloth. “They knew that this trade took away crores of rupees from India to other countries; they knew that hundreds of thousands of starving people in the country could be helped by hand-spinning and hand-weaving.But they could not resist“, Jamnalal said, “The temptation of making money through trade in foreign cloth”.  These ideas are again very relevant to the modern day businesses .. may not be foreign cloth (why not? :P) .. could be businesses affecting public health, environment etc etc .

The concluding lines on CSR .. “The reason for our fears and cowardice is our excessive greed; we do not realize the need for seeking the sympathy of the common people; we do not even try for it. If we do our business in accordance with an accepted code of ethics, we will win not only the sympathy, but the respect of the society and the country. The more we are with the people, the less afraid we will be of the officials” . Though the last part is related to the fear of the english officials.. nevertheless the core message remains relevant to our era.

There also interesting anecdotes of these aforementioned traits in his pre-gandhi days as well. When he was 17-18yrs old running his family business the following incident happened.

Cotton traders those days used to follow the practice of deliberately wetting cotton bales offered for sales. This was a common practice as the additional weight gained by wetting would yield a higher profit margin which was critical in a extremely competitive market. Jamnalal at that young age was against this unethical practice and issued instructions to do away with this practice and to stamp the bales of his firms as “Water Free”. The result was that buyers were happy and infact foreign firms were ready to pay slightly more than the market price for Jamnalal’s consignments. How many traders today would adopt such a stance .. the competition is all the more fierce  these days :).

Another interesting story involves the Tatas. Jamnalal Bajaj was offered five thousand shares of the Sassoon group of textiles by Tatas at the face value of Rs 10 when the market rate was Rs 14. The Tatas made this concessional offer as a part of their strategy to encourage Indian businessmen to invest in new enterprises. Jamnalal gratefully declined the offer on the grounds that he was not entitled to a special favour, and would prefer to purchase shares at the market rate. Exemplary commitment to principles again!

As i understand .. he was also an out and out philanthrope. Be it the schools he started or his donation to Madan Mohan Malviya’s BHU or the Monetary help to people like Ram Manohar Lohia/Rajendra Prasad/M.N.Roy/Jagdish Chandra Bose etc  or the various Khadi units he supported .. the intent to serve the country was writ large across his lifestyle. In his personal life i think he did take gandhism to its extremes especially considering the fact that he was a marwari industrialist. He was also a saint of sorts in his life especially in the later stages .. like Vinobha Bhave or Gandhi himself. (Infact he renounced all his wealth and inheritance at the age of 16 and left home due to a quarrel with his grandfather ! )

I am totally impressed with my reading of this book and i hope you are too.. if one day you get to read this book :) . Not that you and me will also become like him one day ( i don’t say that it can’t happen :P) .. but i think for people who work for large MNCs etc his life does leave some important lessons and some thoughts to ponder upon.

PS1: Lot of stuff taken Verbatim from the book .. hope the author or publisher doesn’t mind ;)

PS2: There was this thing i found funny in the book .. Jamnalal Bajaj called the vehicle he used to commute from Wardha and Sevagram as “Oxford” .. In reality it was a old ‘ford’ car which was drawn by a pair of ‘ox’en :D

PS3: A story depicting the sad situation in the Loknayak JP’s Village from where Advani’s Yatra was started off was there in today’s Indian Express.. Quite sad really :(

PS4: My next research topic is Migration and its discontents :P …

 

On the question of caste based reservations

Note: Neither you nor me have the legislative power(atleast as of now) to bring about changes(if any) .. so .. take lite and don’t write emotional comments (if there is an award for meaningless hyperlinking .. this one would win :P)

Of late i have been doing a bit of reading on “Sociology” and i came across some interesting stuff on reservations and caste in that process. So, i thought i’d rather blog about it so that atleast i’d have a record of what i am reading. Now, the choice of “Sociology” is a bit weird… the first question people ask me is .. Are you preparing for UPSC? . Well, fact is that at one point of time in 2010 that definitely did cross my mind. Now, i have given up on it due to paucity of time and lack of motivation lets say. But i do like to read sociology ..  this partly also is because of the fact that anything that is unrelated to course/academic work somehow always seems interesting. Infact in 2010 (again :P) i also considered joining the M.A.Sociology program in UoH or JNU .. i remember getting the application forms as well :P .. So i think i do have this thing for the subject anyway ;)

It is the stuff about the first commission on the question of backward castes.. The Kalelkar Commission that interested me. I had read a bit about the Mandal Commission when the reservation fiasco triggered by Arjun Singh some years ago was happening but don’t remember reading in detail about this one. What is interesting about the Kalelkar commission’s recommendations is that w.r.t representation in government and local body services the Commission recommended the reservation of 25% of Class I vacancies, 33% of Class II vacancies and 40% of Class III and IV vacancies for the OBCs. This was over and above that given for SCs and STs. In the case of Class I and Class II  it was recommended that “the backward classes will stand to gain both morally and materially, if they do not demand a reservation percentage in vacancies… They should demand greatest facilities for training and education in order to fit themselves for the highest jobs, as speedily as possible“ .

Very interesting to note that a government commission in the 1950s had the guts to say something against reservation at the highest level so openly.Personally i believe that reservations are necessary (atleast for the time being). But it should be a bottom up approach as mentioned above. It should get thinner and thinner as we go closer to the top. (Btw Kalelkar commission recommends a 70% reservation in professional colleges. So i am not entirely in agreement with all the numbers in the commission report ofcourse ;) )

What followed is even more interesting. Apparently the central government then initiated talks with some state governments  to identify the castes which could be included in the list of backward classes and below are snippets from that.

(i) Some states expressed the view that is better to identify “backward areas” rather than backward castes/classes.

(ii) Some states expressed the fear that the attempts to classify people either in the name of  caste or class would not only damage the unity of the nation but also encourage divisive forces sych as caste.

(iii) Some states felt that more than caste, economic factor should be the main criterion

(iv) Some expressed the view that the attempts to prepare such a list of backward classes is against the principles of secular,classless democratic socialist society. Hence, it must be dropped once and for all.

Again it is very interesting to see that there were some genuine concerns on the negative aspects of reservations. Roughly 50-60yrs after these comments were made by the states i think we can safely say that their concerns weren’t entirely misplaced… some damage did happen. Ofcourse, some good also did happen :) .

The central government apparently decided not to go ahead with the Kalelkar commission report on the OBC aspect specifically and much later another commission called the Mandal commission was formed for the same. This part is anyway far too well known. I think it was P.V.N.Rao government that  tried to include a 10% quota for the economically backward ones in the forward castes as well but this change apparently didn’t make the cut. One of the reasons for this as per my understanding is that a economically backward person from the forward caste is considered socially and educationally forward and hence as per this logic he doesn’t need reservation.Atleast that is what i understand by the weightage scheme followed by the Mandal commission ( this scheme makes a good read btw).

Also, another reason for writing this post on reservations now is .. i happened to read this recent frontline  (Sep 10-23 2011) article about “historic correction on the OBC reservations by the Supreme Court” . Secondly, i also happened to watch “Aarakshan” some weeks ago (I felt that it over simplified  the problem and the solution both). And finally, there was some discussion in one of the elective classes today on this topic. So i thought this is just about the right time to blog about this.

PS1: http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/newsletters.html This link has many interesting articles. Worth a bookmark i’d say.

PS2: Also happened to read about various famous sociologists from India and quite a lot of them had worked at Department of Sociology in  Lucknow University .. Interesting again :)

PS3: This piece about provincial government in Sindh, Pakistan making the teaching of mandarin compulsory is both scary and surprising at the same time.

PS4: Sir Charles Chaplin’s “The Circus” is a must watch !.. Ditto for “Fire in Babylon” and “The Lodger” by Alfred Hitchcock. Maheshbabu’s Dookudu isn’t worth the hype though… just another dinchak dinchak movie. Ofcourse, salman khan will make a remake anyway and i think mostly it will rake in 100+ crores yet again :P

PS5: The literature course made me read the following till now … “Siddartha” by Herman Hesse, Parts of Machiavelli’s “The Prince” and “Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho .. Not bad .. not bad :) . Particularly happy that i finally managed to finish Alchemist.. i tried to read through it  atleast thrice to date :).

PS6: I had put this up on fb as well.. M.N.Roy is one gem of a man. I fell in love with his “New Humanism”

PS7: Btw the Sociology text referred to here is “Sociology of Indian Society” by S.Chand Group ;)