I.I.T.s, the Mother of all exams and Manu Joseph

In the 1980s and ’90s, the migration of Indian scientific talent to the United States, deplored here as a “brain drain,” became a subject of intense debates in schools and colleges. Once, during the convocation ceremony at I.I.T.-Madras, the chief speaker received a standing ovation when he declared, “Brain drain is better than brain in the drain.” His words traveled with the speed of a rumor across Madras, also known as Chennai, through homes and schools, evoking laughter and applause, and delivering a bleak reminder to young boys that their lives depended on passing the J.E.E.

The glamour of the I.I.T.’s has always inspired parents to force their children to take the J.E.E. Increasingly, those parents are from modest educational and financial backgrounds. A few years ago, in Mumbai, I walked into a J.E.E. coaching class that conducted its own entrance exam to filter out 9 out of 10 applicants. An orientation program for parents was under way. A man who could not read English was sitting with brochures and study materials. He was disturbed that I was carrying a red book while he had not been given any such book. I told him that the book I was holding was a novel called “Love in the Time of Cholera.”

For a long time, the IITians were from urban, literate middle-class families, and it was inevitable that their success would inspire small-town Indians to prepare for the mother of all entrance exams.

I.I.T. professors and alumni have been mourning the falling quality of the students. Last October, Narayana Murthy, the co-founder of Infosys and an I.I.T. alumnus, told an audience in New York that the new IITians were substandard. “They somehow get through the Joint Entrance Examination. But their performance in I.I.T.’s, at jobs or when they come for higher education in institutes in the U.S. is not as good as it used to be.” It is improbable that the I.I.T.’s will ever regain their old glory. The circumstances of the nation have changed, and the smartest Indians do not need an engineering degree to find a place in the world or to make a decent living. Also, the government has not invested enough in the I.I.T.’s, and the most talented scientific minds have the option to enroll in genuinely outstanding centers of learning in the West instead of being stuck in a place that has derived its prestige largely from the fact that only one in 50 cracks its entrance exam
Manu Joseph in The New York Times. More Here.

Note: Manu Joseph failed to note the caste dimension. Earlier all the IITians used to be Brahmins. Now aspiring students from other lower castes and dalits have succeeded in cracking the test. The number of Brahmins have started dwindling. Suddenly IITs have lost their glory. (Note by T. Azeez Luthfullah)

India's bureaucracy is the worst!!

India's bureaucracy is the worst in Asia, according to a report.

The report by Hong Kong-based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy ranks bureaucracies across Asia on a scale from one to 10, with 10 being the worst possible score. India scored 9.21.

India fared worse than Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines and China.

The report said India's bureaucracy was responsible for many complaints businessmen had about India, like lack of infrastructure and corruption.

It also said that Indian bureaucrats were rarely held accountable for wrong decisions.

"This gives them [bureaucrats] terrific powers and could be one of the main reasons why average Indians as well as existing and would-be foreign investors perceive India's bureaucrats as negatively as they do," said the report, quoted by the Press Trust Of India news agency.

India's government has not reacted to the report.

Singapore remained the country with the best bureaucracy, with a rating of 2.25. It was followed by Hong Kong, Thailand, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Malaysia.

A report in BBC. Here and Here and Here

BJP is Brahmin Janata Party : Aakar Patel

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is sneeringly called the Brahmin-Baniya party, but this isn’t true. It is actually the party of Brahmins. BJP president Nitin Gadkari is Brahmin and so are the party’s leaders in both Lok Sabha (Sushma Swaraj) and Rajya Sabha (Arun Jaitley).

The BJP has always been a party of Brahmins. Founded in 1951 as Jana Sangh, the BJP’s first leader was Brahmin (Syama Prasad Mookerjee), its most important thinker was Brahmin (Deendayal Upadhyaya) and its most successful leader was Brahmin (Vajpayee).

The party’s top leadership is peppered with Brahmins (Murli Manohar Joshi, Ananth Kumar, Seshadri Chari, Kalraj Mishra, Bal Apte).
L.K. Advani is different, and from the Lohana caste.

The Brahmin gene is coded into the BJP by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), whose founder (Hedgewar), most important thinker (Golwalkar), current leader (Bhagwat), and previous leader (Sudarshan) were Brahmin, as was the author of Hindutva (Savarkar).
Except for one man (Rajendra Singh), every RSS sarsanghchalak since its formation in 1925 has been Brahmin.

The RSS’ Hindi weekly Panchjanya is run by a Brahmin (Baldev Sharma) while English weekly Organiser stars the Brahmin duo of Jay Dubashi and M.V. Kamath. The BJP newspaper Kamal Sandesh is also edited by a Brahmin (Prabhat Jha).

The Bajrang Dal’s warriors are led by a Brahmin (Prakash Sharma). Even Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh’s labourers are led by a Brahmin (Girish Awasthi). The Mazdoor Sangh’s leadership (see www.bms.org.in/representative.htm) is dominated by Brahmins, which is quite remarkable given India’s reality of caste in labour.

The RSS takes its Brahmins seriously and grooms them young. Student wing Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad is run by two Brahmins (Milind Marathe and Vishnudutt Sharma).

The organization’s female wing, Durga Vahini, is however run by a Brahmin (Mala Rawal).This concentration of Brahmins in central positions is for one reason: The Brahmin is the intellectual keeper of the Hindutva flame.


The Brahmin in caricature is wily when seen from the non-Brahmin perspective, and principled and uncompromising when seen from the Brahmin perspective. The Brahmin is also thought to be intellectual. But if intellectual means being open to ideas, he isn’t.

The word “ideologue” that our media uses for BJP leaders is correct. It must be understood in the narrow sense of holding a belief and not letting it go despite evidence. What is that belief? It is that India has one problem: Muslims.

The difference in orientation—Brahmin versus Baniya—shows in the priorities of the BJP and Congress.
The three big Congress ministers—Manmohan, Pranab and Chidambaram—are all economists. The three big BJP leaders—Advani, Swaraj and Jaitley—are none economically inclined.

We can read all 986 pages of Advani’s My Country, My Life and not encounter a thought or idea about his country’s illiteracy and poverty. Someone else will worry about them. Advani’s concerns are emotional—how Mother India is being ravaged by Muslims and Christians in Kashmir, Assam, North-East and so on.
The BJP isn’t interested in economics as a subject of politics, because Hindutva is not constructive but sullen. Though both Manu and Kautilya weigh in on it in their texts, economics has not been a Brahmin concern. The Brahmin’s concern has been keeping his identity pure.

The BJP’s electoral issues—Babri Masjid, Pakistan, uniform civil code and Article 370—are about identity. Specifically, about how Muslims must alter their behaviour. BJP social reform means demanding that others change.

The BJP’s ideology is not positive, in that it does not seek to create, but negative: Muslims should not keep that mosque, Muslims should not keep their civil law, Kashmir should not keep special status.

The BJP is the party of anger, and it represents our sentiment against Muslims, which is deep and universal. In that sense, the BJP has and will always have a larger constituency than the fifth it gets as its share of the vote.
The BJP represents Hindu chauvinism, which is quite ugly and which, as India grows muscular through the economy, the world will encounter with shock.

Like all parties in history that keep pointing to a minority as being the majority’s problem, the BJP’s leaders make their argument in reasonable terms.

The BJP’s rhetoric is calibrated and it always operates one notch below violence, though it understands what the consequences are. The BJP does the mischief and then steps back while violence visits Muslims and Christians.

In his autobiography Advani acquits himself of the murder of 3,000 Indians after his Rath Yatra by saying that the riots happened not along the Yatra’s trail, but elsewhere in India. The BJP sleeps comfortably with its actions, and the great Brahmin Kautilya teaches us in Arthashastra’s eighth chapter that citizens are expendable in the larger interest.

From Aakar Patel's analysis in livemint.com. More Here.

What if Rahul Gandhi marries a dalit girl?

Some times we ask to change only one part of our social machine. Parts have no independence actions; they are dependent on big Machines. Honor killing is just one bad product of that social machine of India. 

First abolish the unjust Caste system. If champions of social changes in our country start marrying Dalit families to break the taboos, picture will change. 

That is what Rahul Gandhi can not do. He can visit to condole every devastated family, he can distribute thousands of rupees, government jobs but he can not understand the social pressure under which Brahmin and Dalit families are living. Can Rahul Gandhi, Varun Gandhi, Son of Rajnath Singh, and sons and daughters of our political leaders and RSS leaders come to marry Dalit families? 

Many upper caste people are enjoying social celebrity status speaking for social problems on Televisions, writing in News Papers. This is like championing social reform from dead, burned and raped bodies of Dalits. They can not on Television after they break taboos in their own homes. They can not allow the change which they proclaim on television. 

No social reform can be delivered without recognizing Dalits as respectable Human beings. Give message to society from your homes first, not from TV Shows and New Papers. If people belonging to upper castes like Mishras, Sharmas, Bajpayees, Pathaks and so on start marrying Dalit families, it will be greater than what Raja Ram Mohan Roy had done in his period. Rahul Gandhi and Varun Gandhi and sons of Brahmin political leaders, media pundits, business tycoons and Bolywood set an example by marrying in Dalit familes. The change will happen across the society.

There are many bright matches from both sides but they are divided in two borders of social vertical and horizontal hierarchy. If common Brahmin families find heavy weight people of their society marrying Dalits and all castes without any castiest considerations, they will not fear to be condemned by their relatives. It is the fact that many Brahimn and upper caste families are willing to allow their children to marry whomever they wish to do regardless of caste and creed but they are under immense social pressure.

If heavy weight of Brahmins and other upper caste from politics, business, academics etc have Dalit spouses and brides in their homes, the social stigma will gradually go away. It is irony that people still love to tag their caste tags (Sharma, Warma, Pandaey, etc) with their names. Can they not get rid of it so that other persons of lower caste tags feel it easy to talk and interact with on equal basis? 

Why these people want to make them feel that he/she should take care of his/her caste tag. Once you tell him you are Sharma, the other person fells in inferiority complex. If we are any more civilized people we must throw out t these tags. Our degrees, talents, performance, social achievements are enough to be our identity. (see comments on Ashutosh Ashu's Face Book wall. below. courtesy to Ashu)

I agree with individual liberty. But how can you ensure individual liberty when individuals are chained in a rigid caste system? I am talking about why marrying a lower caste person is still an stigma. If champions of social changes in our society, who have large following across the caste do initiate, things will change. Parents of Nirupama would have allowed her, had they found it a 'common thing' which is being practiced people like like Ghandhis, Bajpyees, Sharmas, Pathakas and so on. To break the stereotypes, change will come from the society, not from the laws. If Brahimns do not feel it easy to marry in Dalits, no Dalit, however is he educated or wealthy, will remain untouchable.

From Omair Anas's thought provoking, amusing and interesting post in his blog

To read the full post click here.