Enough has been said recently about how reservations based on caste are bad. And more so in Private institutions and companies.

Although a little late, let me put forth a few points.

I tried to look at how this problem was tackled since independence. There were some castes which were historically poor and backward because they were oppressed socially and economically by the rest of the society.

The government needed to do something to facilitate these castes to come out of their poverty and improve their social status.

To resolve this problem, the government started with reserving around 22.5% of seats for such castes in government and affiliated educational institutes and offices.

After about 30 years, the government felt that the above solution is doing no good. Hence they set up a commission to identify the actual backward classes and a solution to alleviate these castes of the backwardness. The commission reported (Mandal commission) that more than half of the population in India can be termed a backward. So the government increased these reservations even after a lot of opposition from the public to about 50% (Which is the limit set by the supreme court .. otherwise, it could have been anything) and increased the number of castes that could take advantage of these reservations.

After 20 more years, the government still feels that this solution hasn't worked. So they are now contemplating increasing these reservations in private companies and private educational institutes.

Successive governments have only been reinforcing reservations as a solution for this problem, even though it is a proven failure.

So, why is this government doing the same mistake again?

It is pretty clear that this is being done more as a populist measure to gain support of the backward castes, than for the larger good. What the government seems to be doing is reserving some votes for themselves in the next election.

Even if the law doesn't pass, they have the sympathy of the lower castes in backward areas.

The best way to tackle this problem is probably to increase scholarships for backward castes. There are so many scholars in our country who could suggest so many better ways to tackle this problem, but our politicians would agree only if these solutions would result in reserving some votes for them!!

Just read a story about a traffic cop in Bangalore breaking the rules and getting caught by a common man. Very interesting indeed.

But what this story is doing to the blogosphere is amazing. Already hundreds have left comments on this blog. I am sure thousands have read this story one way or another. And this is going to spread like wild fire. (Atleast I hope so)

Interesting points come up in my mind while reading this story and the comments later.

Almost all of the comments agree that what the cop did was wrong. Even though some of us jump traffic lights ourselves, we agree that a better discipline would be good. So I can assume that even the Cop himself knows he is wrong. He could not accept it in front of Swaroop for obvious reasons. So there’s always a hope that the situation will improve. But for that we need a society who WANTS change. All these politicians and Cops are after all a part of the society and also elected by us.

The system is too slow to adapt to the huge changes happening in information sharing these days with blogs and emails. I am sure when this cop starts getting phone calls he won't have a clue how so many people already know about this. I think we should take advantage of this fact

What we all can do is give this incident as much publicity as we can through whatever means and create a social pressure on the administrators to do something about such incidents.

I am sure that some person in the system above the level this concerned cop is going to know about this incident one way or another. Will he do anything about it? May be not. But he will definitely talk about this to his colleagues and maybe also to that cop.

A whole lot of other people – administrators and politicians will also know about this. When they know that people are starting to react to their behaviour, they will think twice before doing such things.

This change is going to happen. How fast this will happen depends on “YOU”. (I mean us).

Recently I came across something called as "Widgets". These are really nice little apps which run on your desktop without interfering with your work. Yet you can use these to track your mails, calendar, notes, weather, to-do list and lots more.

Here are some screenshots of widgets from Yahoo..





Google and Yahoo both have their own Widget engines. I personally liked Yahoo's (which was earlier called Konfabulator, now acquired by yahoo) more. Google's widgets are also great but more suitable to use on your Web pages instead of desktops.

These apps need a very little memory, they look slick and are very useful.

We have all heard about software templates? But here I see the concept being used everywhere. Be it the grocery stores or food chains like Mac Donald's, Taco Bells and Pizza Hut's or even the downtown's.

First time I got this feeling was when travelling to Niagara Falls a few months ago. We were travelling by a tour bus and it was a pretty long journey (10 hours). The bus would stop at "Service Areas" quite frequently (An area off the highway having food courts, rest rooms, travel information, gas stations, etc). I couldn't help but notice that all these service areas were exactly the same to look. They all had the same design. After a while one could blindly go in and know where the restrooms were.

How boring and effective at the same time :)

Watching Sachin Bat in the second innings of the first test against england reminds me of the sachin in his hey days. He used to terrorize bowlers all around then. He certainly is not as good now. But the man's cricketing intellect is still at his best. The way he is demoralizing Flintoff and co is fun to watch. I don't think he can pull off a win for India, and he also knows that. But by coming out to bat the way he has, playing cheeky and powerful shots alternatingly, he has kept england guessing. India at this stage need 9 runs per over. The last 2 overs just yeilded 25 runs. Even as I write this, Dhoni has just been dismissed. This probably means end of the fun as Sachin would also take it easy now, but he certainly has made a point here. He is surely coming back to his best. Amen!