Caste system

Many of those belonging to the "higher" castes often ridicule the reservation policy. According to them these "lower" caste people possess many bad qualities that makes them incapable of rising to the higher positions in our society. Despite the dramatic change in the performance of our "lower" caste brethren, many of the higher caste people still harbor deep resentment and aversion towards members of these lower castes. They are on the lookout at each stage for the lower caste person to fail somewhere so that they can point fingers at the entire community.

Throughout history, political oppression has created these segregated communities. Half a crore black slaves are estimated to have died in the process of being transported from Africa to the United States of yester-year. Even after their emancipation by the Mahatma Abraham Lincoln, they were segregated for a hundred years more. African slaves have been part of the culture of Europe since ancient times. It was only in India, however, that this political oppression of one group over the other was institutionalized, and made as hard as concrete.

Political oppressors have always tried to show that these political oppressed and segregated groups are inferior to them, at least intellectually. The great psychologists of the USA have never tired of trying to show that the blacks have a lower IQ than the whites. The blacks were not only oppressed physically but they were in effect being called morons by the whites. Today, the trend has started to change in the USA, even though it is almost imperceptible. Blacks are beginning to rise to many high positions, through sheer hard work and their own merit. Examples of entertainers and sports people such as Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, Michael Jackson, Michael Jordon, Whitney Houston, Tiger Woods, etc., each of whom earns at the top or close to the top in their profession, have shown that there is absolutely no ground for the bias of the pseudo-scientists who claim to be psychologists, against the black race.

The rise in the status of the blacks in the US has also been helped, in my opinion, by the fact that Asian Americans - once also clubbed as inferior by some of the whites - are earning much higher incomes than the whites do in the USA. In fact, as mentioned above, the median Asian Indian family earned about $60,000 in 1994, compared with $40,884 as earned by the white Americans in 1994 (see table 727 at page 471 of the US Statistical Abstract on the web for 1997. Also see report). The blacks have been so long oppressed that incomes of some of them are only now beginning to reach respectable proportions. Even today they are found in a disproportionately higher ratio among the poor.

The problem is that there is no reason whatsoever for nature to play this kind of game with the genes of the human species. There is no reason why some groups of people are in any way inferior to the others. Also, please remember the fundamental premise we made about God and the games that God plays. If all peoples of the world were at about the same level of income in 1750AD, then there is clear evidence that God created all people equal. Some people in all groups are going to be relatively of lower quality than others, but to generalize this kind of a thing to large groups is quite unsustainable. The key difference between human beings is in the way they were brought up. The ages between 6 and 16 are crucial for the intellectual development of a child. The child needs to build up not only knowledge but social skills such as manners, and personal skills such as self discipline and a strong character. The amount of time that parents from well-to-do families spend on their children's education, including social and personal education, is immense. This kind of input is not recorded in the statistics of the numbers of children going to school. Even if the lower caste children are sent to school, they do not receive the books at home, nor the exposure to the competitive world outside, nor to the kind of "lectures" that parents give to their children about personal manners and character. To expect the products of such a family to excel in life is outlandish. It is a miracle that some of these children are doing so well in life today despite these handicaps.

I do not see the children of any group as inherently inferior. I see them as deprived. And I am extremely concerned with wide and sweeping generalizations about their community. While agreeing in principle that those who have become rich among this group should not be made a part of the reservation system, I want to look for a way to raise the awareness level of the children of these parents. When we talk of competition, we must talk of a level playing field for all participants. There is no level playing field today, when the rich can send their children to Doon School and expose their children to computers and the internet, while the children of the poorer members of the lower castes languish in the backyard of a shabby house which is located in a segregated part of the village or town, perhaps in a "sweeper's colony."

That is why our legistatures did not want these children to be exposed to the vicious competition for jobs that others in India have to go through. It is a difficult judgment call, though, and all of us realize the problems here. Carrying these reservations too far can lower the incentives for other members of the population. A wise policy should have targeted to increase reservations at a gradual pace, to allow for a balance between high quality competence and the need to offset the disadvantages of the lower castes. For example, it would have been a good idea to have a 5% reservation till 1960, and to increase it by 2% every decade till it reached HALF the level of the lower castes in the population. To make a complete, 100% reservation of seats in colleges and jobs equal in proportion to the percentage of population of the lower castes in the general population was actually quite unjustified.

But I would like to put this social problem in perspective. Today, when we are so miserably poor on the world arena, so helpless, and so impotent, let us be very clear: it was not the lower castes who have brought us down; it is not the reservation policy that has led to our downfall. It is the bad economic policies set into place by the rulers of the post-independence era: and most of these people have been members of the "higher" castes. Let me emphasize that our best people would never have even cared for the various quotas and government jobs if we had allowed competition in the marketplace and in the education sector. The rich among all sections care little for these quotas or government jobs. They send their children abroad, just as the parents of M.K. Gandhi and J.L. Nehru sent these two persons abroad. The rich do not need quotas anywhere in the world. The solution therefore was to put economic policies in place so that there would be so many opportunities for the "better" students in private firms and multinational corporations that they would care little about these quotas. Quotas, according to me, or the relative merit of the "lower" castes, is a non-issue. The issue is competition of the marketplace.

When India is rich the people will not care for the caste of the other person. If India remains poor, these issues will remain the burning issues of our society. The cure for our social ills is economic change, and respect for our own countrymen.

The price of National Dishonesty

1.Give tax, not charity:

The human mind is an organ to create wealth. The entire technology and its use that we see around us has been spawned by the human mind. The human mind is the ultimate resource. But when a child is born, the mind is like an ore below the soil: it has to be processed and purified in order to be put to use. Similarly, our children need education - a high quality education, in order to start producing wealth. They also need an environment of good economic policy where they can do what they have been trained to do. Once these two ingredients are set into place, the human mind starts producing wealth at an unimaginable pace. This purification of the human mind is done through education. Education can best be funded by the government since the private resources in our society are best utilized to produce goods.

The Indian society has a strong tendency to avoid taxes; but we make a great fanfare and show about the charity that we give. On the one hand we run a massive "black" economy and on the other we have temples where gold and jewels are poured in. This is sheer dishonesty. This is not going to help our children get a good education, which has always to be heavily subsidized by the government, and for a good reason. A self-respecting person will like to contribute to the prosperity of the nation by fearlessly and boldly paying all the tax that he or she can.

The rich nations have honest citizens who pay tax. These nations have not produced their highways and high quality education systems from the charity of their citizens, but from the honest payment of taxes. Once we have been provided by the society a good education, and we are ready in our personal lives to produce this immense wealth, we must share it with the society, not as a charity, but by paying our taxes. We must be fair to the society. If it were not for the teachers, the public services and other facitlies provided to us by government we would have not been able to achieve the level of competence that we have today and which we utilize for creation of our own livelihood. We must therefore pay the tax which is due of us. It must be a matter of pride to have paid tax for one's entire lifetime. That is the best way to repay one's debt to society, since it will help the society to prepare the next generation of human minds which will produce even greater wealth. I do not care for those who cheat the society by not paying full taxes, but then go about getting prestige from priests by paying God some gold and jewels. We may think that the tax rate is high, or we may have ideological problems with taxes. But so long as we are benefitting in any way (such as the education we had, and the use of roads we make everyday) by government expenditure, we must pay taxes.

I believe that by paying our taxes we fulfil our obligations to the underprivileged as well as to the future generations. We also build social capital. Paying taxes in full is far superior to donating to charities alone. Of course if one can pay taxes in full as well as donate some money to worthwhile charities, that would be even better.

2.My head is worth more than your entire nation

Bill Gates has produced from his head a company which is worth more than all the 10,000 industries of India, combined, including all public sector companies. If he wanted, he could buy off Reliance from his droppings of shares, or simply from the value of the weekly fluctuations of the price of his stock.

One man's head can create more wealth than you can ever imagine. Actually, Bill Gates is nothing. His head has produced nothing compared to the heads of those thinkers who created the Western system of political economy. One man, Adam Smith, was instrumental in producing trillions of dollars of wealth by describing how and why a market system functions. He was the first major scientist of wealth. There were many others after him who learnt these lessons and produced immeasurable wealth. There was a young emperor in Japan, in 1870, who understood the basic principles of economics and with that simple understanding, started a process which took Japan out of its undeveloped state into a powerhouse which is a perennial producer of wealth. So also in South Korea one man understood this principle and diverged the ecnonomy from North Korea to such an extent that today a single company in South Korea could buy out the entire North Korea, lock, stock and barrel.

The head of a man can be worth billions and trillions of dollars. The value of a man is basically infinite. But in India we value the human mind like we value a pile of shit [Don't mind my language; I may be foul mouthed but I am talking sense, and I don't much care about mincing words]. Out of the 12,000 people employed by Microsoft, 7,000 are Indians [check]. Each of these Indians is paid an outlandish amount of money and each of these Indians is either a millionaire or close to becoming one. These people produce the software that drives our computers in India and elsewhere in the world. The value of the output of these few engineers is far more than the entire software exports of India [which we always boast about]. Why don't these engineers go back to India and produce the same wealth? The answer is obvious. Because Indians are thieves. We steal software. We do not pay its market value. If I was Bill Gateswamy, born in India, and wanted to produce MS-DOS 1.0 in 1979, I could be sure of only one thing: that I will be able to sell a maximum of one copy and that hundreds of thousands of pirated copies will quickly be found in all corners of the country. Where do I then have the money to expand and do greater research required to produce MS-DOS 2.0 and beyond? How will I ever have the incentive or money to produce Windows 98? My mind is worth nothing in India. I have no intellectual rights. Even cow shit gets better protection than that in India. I cannot take away the shit of the cow of a villager without taking permission since that shit has value. But my head has no value in India. Obviously there cannot ever be a Bill Gates in India.

We need to value intellectual property and ALL forms of private property. We have to stop being thieves. Buy what you need. Pay your taxes. How difficult this sounds to us, who are so used to cheating and being dishonest with everybody around! In the end who has got cheated? We! We lost hundreds of billions of dollars worth of software sales which our OWN people could have produced in India itself (in a company called MicroIndia, perhaps) and sold to the rest of the world.

Dowry and dowry deaths

Religious fundamentalism (including fundamentalism in what we eat)