To Ponder....

Vaibhav Wasnik

Dear friends, I have titled this email as “to ponder” and didn’t attach
a caste label to it because most of you people want to get away from the
label of being an SC/ST. i remember in IIT when all of us, were labelled as;
openly or otherwise, as being incompetent. I got in contact with you guys
after so many years on facebook. Had chatted with some of you at lengths on
the issue and others either appeared to not care or were just silent because,
sometimes ignoring troubling times in your past does work up as a coping
strategy for old wounds, however unwise it may be.
In life according to me, the thing that matters the most is respect. What
you learn from history is that great world movements that changed civi-
lization and served as a inspiration for generations of humans were always
motivated by a group of people who bonded on aspects related to common
identities fueled by a universal emotionalities of freedom, equality and re-
spect. The way we were treated in IIT went completely against the treatment
expected in a civilized society towards fellow human beings. Even though
most of us did excel throughout our lives in our studies before joining these
institutes, the label of being a good for nothing SC/ST did shattered our
confidence in something that every enterprising human holds dear. The abil-
ity to make most of whatever god given abilities we possess. Whenever the
label IITian being the cream of the country was ever attached to students
of the insitute it was always about ’them’. The glory, the respect as such
was never reserved for us. I did talk personally to a few of you guys and
was kind of surprised that the feeling of alienation or subjugation was quite
mutual. Each of us did carry the cross of being unwanted, of being someone
that deserved to be hated. Most of you all were strong minded I guess, but
then there were guys like me, who really weren’t, or who never took these
labeling lightly and what it did personally was eat me day in and day out.
Be it the grad lady in the physics department who questioned me as to why
I was paying lower fees and then who smiled before, but suddenly stopped
the gesture once she knew I was an SC/ST/st. When on birthday treats
a past senior from our wing had got in to IIMs was paraded as an SC/ST
”madar****” , but then another senior who could afford a costly seat in some
top management college was the wing hero (money reservation is always ok).
I am not sure about how things worked academically with you guys, but I
always had a feeling that even if my insights in to the working of physics or

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mathematical subtleties was better, I was somehow not good because I was
SC/ST. Well years later, during conversations with my fellow physics batch
mates I can clearly see my inbuilt advantages towards physics intuition. Am
not trying to put myself on a silver platter, that is not my aim. In science
everyone has their own unique perspective of approaching problems and am
definitely not saying that I am a hotshot who would come up with the next
big idea in the field of my PhD research-String Theory (The big ideas come
every 10-15 year, which are less than 10 page papers, but are profound intu-
itions). But, what I am trying to point out is the cross of emotional torture
that I did carry on my shoulders for 4 years of my young life, a time when
I was supposed to be growing as an individual and a time that actually did
a lot to lower my self esteem to crushing lows. I could confidently say, that
without the labeling, my GPA would easily differ by a point or more.
When the doubters try to flur the flames of illogical doubt that may be,
we did not deserve to be in these ’elite’ institutes to begin with, a bit of
logical thinking is all that it takes to realize that, the fact of the matter is
that compared to the rigorous coaching that general category students had
gone through to enter these institutes, was not a luxury with most of us.
But then with time, as we left that place (been about 10 years since that sad
story). Most of us are excelling in what we are doing. If we ever compare
the successes of the general category IITians to SC/ST/st IITians I feel that
frankly SC/ST IITians actually have shown ’an edge’. Where most IITians
didn’t think out of the box, SC/ST IITians generally (the reasons may be
guess work) thought out of the box. I guess, entering IIT with less than
adequate preparation and surviving through the time there, made most of
us ’out of the box’ thinkers, risk takers, etc compared to thinking in the
box that dominated a vast amount of general category students. If success
per community was measured as a percentage rather than absolute numbers,
I see SC/ST IITians from IIT Bombay out performing general category. I
hope you guys excuse me for not being anonymous in what i am going to say
next, but when I tell guys from engineering physics 97 batch about Kammo
cracking it in entrepreneurship, about himashu having his own company,
about gagan being a vice president of his company or naveens company hiring
a guy just because of naveens recommendation etc, they frankly kind of have
a mixed reaction of awe and/or disbelief. This is because most of them
have not done something super special like you guys in their lives and to
be quite honest place the tags of utter failures on your forehead. Might
be implicity/unconsciously, but the tag was still there. Well, giants like bill

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gates who have a better intuition as to what drives success in the marketplace
vouch by preferential hirings of minorities in their organizations, because
they believe that varied backgrounds, emotionalities, cultural differences etc
do add magnamously to success in a global marketplace, whose importance
or quantification cannot be done through standardized tests.
Which finally brings me to the question of why am I wasting your time
with stories of bad experiences. Because I feel that if no one does anything,
then ’they’ actually get what they want. In ’their’ mythology, eklavya gave
away his prized thumb. Todays dronacharyas are more clever. They want to
mess with, the minds of the today karnas or eklavya. Face it, why go through
all the trouble of separate rankings for SC/STs. How do rankings matter.
I mean, I have taught in America universities and it was illegal to publicly
display marks of students. If top institutes such as Harvard and Stanford
etc, can have preferential hiring of students from the minority pool, without
disclosing the grades or rankings of the students, why is it that the IITs want
to specifically give out the ranks of all students during the entrance exams.
How, does knowledge of these rankings help the performance of the students
in their choices of academic disciplines. And that too why do they have to
be so explicit about the rankings of the SC/ST candidates, when it is but
obvious that all they are doing is putting the cross hairs on the backs of the
SC/STs from day one for emotional and psychological abuse.
So, the deal is what can we do, or why should we do anything. I mean,
none of us are ever going to be students of that institute once again. Well, the
deal is to make sure that what we went through none of the SC/ST kids ever
go through. As I said its all about respect. The safety of young is always the
responsibility of the adults. Also in this specific case, this is not even such a
difficult thing to accomplish. This separate ranking of SC/St students goes
completely against the SC/ST prevention of atrocities act of 1989, Chapter
II, section 3,clause X, which considers it a crime if a person, ” intentionally
insults or intimidates with intent to humiliate a member of a Scheduled Caste
or a Scheduled Tribe in any place within public view”. As such what the
IITs are doing is a crime according to the India constitution. Taking this
situation to the highest courts, would atleast be the closest thing to a pay
back, but most importantly, we would save the new SC/ST kids (and their
families) that follow our path in these institutes, to fruitfully spend their
stay in a nurturing atmosphere. All it would take is a bit of organization of
SC/ST IITians and a bit of spending from each of our pockets. I am just
putting the idea out there. Hope something changes.