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What can you be more proud of? Being very hardworking? Or being very intelligent?
Notice the question is not which is more important for success.(Intelligence most would agree).
What can you take more pride in? The fact that you put in 120% of your effort into whatever you do. Or the fact that you have a IQ rating of 150. I guess most would agree its hardwork. After all intelligence was what God gave you. Hardwork is what you bring to the party. In fact, I would go a step further and claim that hardwork is only thing for which you can be proud. You look better than Tom Cruise or are smarter than Einstein. I guess that is God’s handicraft.
So, I always wonder, what is with people always trying to prove that they did not have to work hard for what they had achieved.

Me: Hey congrats on your success in examination.
Other Guy: Oh! That is nothing. That is nothing. I really did not work hard for that.
(Implied: Oh I am better than Einstein. Its just that I do not have the time or could have Unified Field Theory tomorrow.)
Well I never claim that I am any different. It’s just that I always wonder.

Another loosely related question which I always grapple with is how do you define intelligence? And how do you define hardwork?
Hopefully most people would consider me reasonably intelligent. I am OK at studies. Can read complex tomes, understand huge mathematical formulae and even solve an occasional Sudoku. But go back a thousand years. The skills which make me intelligent today wouldn’t be of any help. Intelligence then would have been the ability to make tools, maybe to find the paths deer take and to predict if it would rain tomorrow. I guess I would be classified as pretty dumb then.
Hardwork, on the other hand, would be defined the same way now or a thousand years back. It is now, as it was then, the ability to put in your best. Every time.

Before you stop reading further and decide that I am opinionated, confused and ask my caste affiliations, let me tell you what this post tells.
I am not against reservations, per se, even caste based.
I am against this reservation policy (27% for OBC).

Why reservations, per se, even caste based are not wrong?
The most scathing and persistent attack against reservations has always been that it is against meritocracy. Respect to meritocracy is a worthy goal, which all of us should subscribe to. Yet there is one higher principle which I subscribe to Greatest good for the greatest numbers. Caste is a reality in India. Whether you believe it or refuse to see it backward castes are disadvantaged. Someone recently described India’s economy as an enclave economy, with 200 million marching towards globalization while 800 million get left behind. It is the responsibility of our government to see that it does not happen.
“Reservations do not work. They have failed to create an equitable society in last 50 years”, I hear you say. Reservations have not worked as nicely as we would have liked them to. Yet what other options do we have? Should we just sit back and and hope that social inequality goes away.

Why this reservation policy is a bad idea?
If you are reading this blog I am sure you would have read a million reasons why thy are wrong. Blogosphere is out and out against reservations. So I will not ramble much on that. Still.
22.5% for SC/ST + 27% for OBC+Other quotas. Means less than 50% for every one else. But more importantly, the government, and for that matter any one has no idea what is the percentage of OBCs in our country. And what is there demographic. I guess before this bill is put before public the it is the government’s responsibility to get the required data.