"I've been clicking pictures all week!" she informed me when I enquired about her field project. The IRMAns, as I predicted, have received their first exposure to life in rural Rajasthan with mixed feelings. Profound shock at the poverty in their own back yard, on the one hand, seems to have been matched by an intense appreciation of the beauty of its setting and the wholesomeness of country living.
For my own part, I have certainly relished a thoroughly urban couple of days. I spent yesterday back in the old town and renewed my acquaintance with the sleazy Hari, who waylaid me outside his shop for a lengthy chat over a glass of chai. Surprisingly he has actually heard from Intrepid Travel, the company whose application form I helped him fill in. They have so far merely informed him that they have received his application and have taken the opportunity to quiz him as to its authorship, for which he has of course claimed full responsibility! A stone's throw from Hari's shop I passed a breathtakingly beautiful young man sitting outside a tiny open-fronted shop selling decorated notebooks. He greeted me cheerily and subjected me to the usual litany of questions concerning my nationality, name, travel plans and marital status. In this case it developed into an entertaining conversation about foreign tourists, during which I found myself promising to teach him French in return for Hindi. His name is Jairam, but everyone calls him Bablu, so I shall do likewise.
Bablu (Jairam)
Yesterday evening was spent, strangely enough, at a roundabout. I imagine there can’t be many cities in the world where a trip to a roundabout could pass for a good night out, but Sukhadia Circle, with pleasure gardens, snack vendors and a boating lake is something a little out of the ordinary. Collective curiosity drove a large party of us - English volunteers and IRMAns included - down to investigate. In a fit of generosity, partly inspired by the memory that I owed the IRMAns for having treated me to a meal the week before, I hired pedaloes for the group. I accompanied Lalita on a two-seater shaped like a swan. She is hilarious and a Bombay girl to the core, speaking near-fluent but idiosyncratic English with that typical educated Indian accent that sounds so upper class to British ears. En route to the roundabout she asked me whether I knew why so many walls were painted with images of Hindu gods, and explained that this was a very successful method of preventing people from spitting and pissing against them. “You must find India so amusing,” she said. “Even I find it quite amusing!” Later on she delighted us all by saying “Oh no, I don’t really want an ice-cream, I’d prefer a fully-fledged meal”. After this, everything we talked about became “fully-fledged” to her disgust, and accordingly those of us with "fully-fledged appetites" went to eat in a surprisingly upmarket hotel close to Vikas Samiti.
Lalita
Here I made the acquaintance of another of the IRMAns, Deepak. He is a handsome 30-year old who, like Arun, is originally from Bihar. After the cheery banality of my conversations in old Udaipur earlier in the day, Deepak's words rained down like manna from an intelligent heaven as we discussed politics and poverty. The conversation became general, and everybody seemed to agree that the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, is little more than a stooge for Sonia Gandhi, the Italian widow of Rajiv Gandhi, former PM and scion of the indefatigable Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Lalita, characteristically, was particularly virulent on this point, deriding Singh as a "nonsense man".
Deepak surprised me later on in the evening by espousing the odd view that learning is a source of unhappiness. "Throughout childhood we're forced to learn so many things that we don't want to learn. I really believe that adulthood should involve a process of unlearning. That is the secret to happiness." Accordingly, he has progressively given up meat, alcohol and smoking, and has tried to shed himself of considerations of caste and arranged marriage.
It turned out to be quite a night for discussion, and walking back to the guesthouse I became engrossed in conversation with another volunteer called Yogesh, newly arrived from a college in Madurai in the south. He is a Brahmin from Orissa, another state in East India, and has yellowish skin and a face that reminds me of the bumbling heroes of the interminable Tamil films I saw on my previous trip to India. We began by talking about religion, but soon became absorbed by another topic: reservations.
The reservation system is a practice of setting aside a quota of jobs in various sectors for certain underprivileged caste groups. These sectors are primarily government and civil service, but also include some businesses and some educational institutions. The three main caste groupings with quotas reserved for them are the Scheduled Castes (SC), corresponding approximately to the Dalits, the lowest castes, traditionally considered untouchable; the Scheduled Tribes (ST), often called adivasi (literally “orginal inhabitants”) such as the Meena of Maal and the more famous Gonds and Bhils; and the unflatteringly-named Other Backward Castes (OBC), a mishmash of lower status castes, presumably correlating roughly to the Shudra, the lowest of the traditional four-tier classification (Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaisya, Shudra) of Brahmanic Hinduism called varna.
The quotas involved are actually quite high, and vary from state to state, although usually something like 7.5% of government jobs are reserved for STs, 15% for SCs and a whopping 27% or so for the OBCs. The SC/ST reservations date back to independence, while the OBC reservation were only introduced around two decades ago.
I suppose the main motivations behind this system are increasing the representation of these disadvantaged groups, fostering their development and providing compensation for centuries of oppression and neglect. I am personally ambivalent on this issue – yes, it could be a tremendously useful tool in development as Yogesh suggested, but it is massively open to abuse. People talk about the “creamy layer” phenomenon, which means that in whichever group you set aside a quota for, it is always the richest and most socially advantaged members of that group (the creamy layer) who are going to benefit. They will be the ones who can afford the training and education needed to apply for and succeed in a high powered civil service job. A tribal farmer living in deepest Madhya Pradesh, on the other hand, can reap no conceivable benefit from the fact that nearly a tenth of government jobs are set aside for members of his caste group. Yogesh suggested that restricting reservations to one generation per family would help combat this phenomenon. Thus if your father got into the Ministry of Fertilisers on a Scheduled Caste quota then you should not be allowed to benefit likewise, meaning in practice that you would have to apply as “General Caste” rather than SC.
While decrying the creamy layer, and ridiculing the idea of reservations for educational institutions, Yogesh defended the general concept of reservations by citing what he called a “Darwinian” theory that, viewed as a division of physical labour, the caste system results in social groups using some body parts a lot, but not others, which will have the eventual effect of rendering these unused body parts vestigial. The reservation system, therefore, by shaking up the caste system will ensure anatomical normality for generations of Indians to come! This bunkum aside, I suppose that a small proportion (maybe 20-30%) of single generation-only reservations that are accompanied by all sorts of development measures could be a useful way of making a deeply hierarchical society more fair. On the other hand, a system like the one in Tamil Nadu, where over 50% of government jobs are reserved for various lower castes, must do as much damage as good. I remember the Tamil Brahmin family I used to live with in Kovilpatti complaining that it would very difficult for their son to find a job in Tamil Nadu, so he would probably have to go to Bombay.
Next Post - Wednesday 18th October 2006:Maal (will be posted Tuesday 18th October 2011)
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