• Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right! - Isaac Asimov
  • World Fame takes a lifetime of effort. Though sometimes the fame preceeds the effort - Me
  • I cant understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm afraid of the old ones - John Cage
  • Nearly all men can stand adversity, if you want to test a man's character, give him power. - A. Lincoln

July 21, 2006

Backward Class

Einstien told us that everything is relative. When we say certain section of people are backward, they need to be backward in comparison to a control group. What is that control group ? Can people of another country be considered a control group, thereby declaring a whole country as backward ? Do people in Somalia (no offense to the country) need a reservation because everyone is backward ? Would it even make any sense reserving jobs in the country to the whole population of the country ?

Can a minority of one country be taken as a control group to declare the rest of the population as backward. If yes, do we need some minimum size of this forward minority ? Does one forward person make the whole country backward by comparison ?

I say NO. A group should be termed backward only when its backward in comparison to the majority of the population. So declaring that 75% of the population is backward is implicitly wrong. The number of backward people can never be more than 50%, otherwise that's how the country is, with only a minority group who are forward but no-one backward.

Reservation of any resource for the majority of a population is not actually reservation. It's simply apartheid. It means they are excluding one particular minority group from accessing the resource which is available to everyone else.