Campus of a premier national institute in India in the nineties. It was dark. Sounds of some people stomping next to the hostel building followed by glass shattering broke the eerie silence. There was a sudden surge of activity in the ground floor wing and everyone came out of their rooms. It was first year Science post-graduate students’ wing. Soon their seniors emerged from the upper floors. An extraordinary general meeting followed. It was a war-like situation. An Engineering graduate student had attacked the room of a Science post-graduate student.
It was not a personal feud. A full-blown inter-caste war it was. The echoes of which were felt decades later when the Engineering almuni left out the Science post-graduates from the celebration of 25 years of graduation. Such deep rooted was the strife.
Chevron fold at Ulverstone, Tasmania in December 2016
Superficial cause: Engineering students who held the majority decreed that a second year Engineering student was equivalent in ‘campus social status’ to a first year Science student. The right of ragging (hazing) a Science post-graduate fresher came with it.
Deep cause: An Engineering candidate was superior to a Science graduate because, ha, no brilliant student in his right senses would do a Science graduation ahead of Engineering and Medicine. So yeah, notwithstanding an altogether different discipline, Science graduates represented an inferior ‘caste’ and needed to be treated as such.
A classic case of conflict due to combined effects of majority-minority dichotomy and social stratification it was. One hopes the current generation is more sensible and that things are much better now.
Call it race, caste, tribe, religion, institutional loyalty, nationalistic pride, geographic superiority or “phylumbaazi” (a colloquial term frequently in use in the region) – excessive invocation by these groups of collective entitlement of their members render them nothing more than refuges of mediocrity. For people who do that are not contributors to the value of the group, but are exploiters of the current value. This applies as much to the “superior” group as to the “inferior” group. Fundamentally they are doing the same. One wants to continue to get the benefits by victimising others for the current perceived superiority of its group, and the other wants to continue to get the benefits of being the victim. None is bothered about the declining perceived value of their respective groups because of their frequent stake at entitlements.
True value-adders of either group do not need benefits of perception. On the other extreme, the bottom-dwellers of either group are content with what they have. It’s the mediocre people in the group who stake a claim to the cake without actually contributing to its making. Unfortunately, the statistical bell curve ensures that such mediocre people will be in the majority. So in the end whether this majority follow the value-adders or dictate their terms onto them determines the merits of the group. It’s not hard to see then why true value-adders sometime leave a group they naturally belong to.
We see people seeking entitlements for various reasons, often at the expense of true merit. One common scenario is: we stuffed it up and are now entitled to prevent others from stuffing it up further. Yet another: we once studied head-down-bum-up to acquire this highly coveted qualification or get into this universally revered institution and now will reap benefits for the rest of our lives. Or: we were treated unfairly when we were new and now that we have reached this position of dictating terms, why should the freshers have it easy? Or simply, we are the sons of the soil and therefore entitled to chew up all the resources here without being accountable to anyone. Whatever the cause, such claims of entitlements have one thing in common – the rhetoric usually comes from the mediocre in the business. And when they seek to extend such entitlements for their offspring, the caste comes in handy.
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