Stray Thoughts

 Yesterday evening I decided to take different route for my evening walk. I walked down a precipitous path deep into what is called a gadhera or gardh where a seasonal stream gurgles happily this time of the year. The landscape here is very different. Its quieter, the fields are broader and usually they are more lush because they are irrigated. I loved the multi-cropping on the fields. They were mostly filled with patta-gobhi ( cabbage) or maize. Some fields also had rajma or kidney beans and the local black soya bean which is known as bhat. There were some amaranth with their red flowing locks, vines of lauki (gourd) and kakri (cucumber) interspersed with some small stands of cannabis. A paste made of roasted cannabis seeds is used as a local spice or condiment. When we worked in these hills nearly 3 decades ago, we had also learnt that the cannabis stalks provided an excellent hemp like fibre as well. It was used to make ropes, sacking and also used it to make soles for their foo...

T he game of quotas has started once again in the Indian firmament. The government has introduced  a quota for Other Backward Caste (OBC) and Economic Weaker Sections (EWS) in the entrance examination to undergraduate and post graduate medical education. Its not surprising that this morning I received a meme which said ‘Now 27% OBC Quota in Medical. This is how we want to fight future viruses. By killing merit’. A couple of months ago the Supreme Court ruled that the reservation for Marathas introduced by the state of Maharashtra was unconstitutional as it breached the constitutional boundary of a maximum of 50% reservation what is part of Article 14 of the Constitution on the right to equality. Seventy years after the Constitution was framed, the push and pull of quotas or ‘reservation’ continues unabated. The framers of our Constitution had imagined that reservation would bring about equality in twenty-five years, but had they made a fatal miscalculation about Indian’s and thei...