Son of the soil

I chose to name the post with the cliched phrase purely to highlight how it has been misused today. Sometimes I cannot help wondering if I am incredibly intelligent or if our political representatives are incredibly obtuse.

• Education is in need of some serious reforms: accepted
• Quality of education, especially in government institutions needs to be improved: accepted
• So the logical thing to do is to fix what is not going well, right? But, no! I will go and meddle in the one thing in this entire blessed country that is running as smoothly as a well-oiled clock - the IIMs. To hell with primary education! To hell with producing employable graduates instead of those who have a namesake degree and are unemployable! Son of the soil indeed!!
• It also seems stupidly simple to me that apart from caste, economic status must also be considered before reserved seats are allotted, so that the truly needy benefit. But considering that the previous point has been completely missed, I should not be surprised that this point has been missed as well.
• I wonder about the long term repercussions of such reservations on the younger generation of OBCs. An OBC candidate gets an IIM seat because of his/her caste even though his/her CAT percentile was much lower than those of the GM category. And here I am talking about a student who is economically well-enough to be supported through private education in one of the premier engineering colleges in Karnataka. This has generated resentment amongst his classmates, who also worked just as hard (an in fact did better than him). In the long run, this can result in further ostracizing of OBCs from mainstream society.

I suppose that my views on politics may seem naive to some. After all, elections and votes are the ultimate leveller and if there is one thing that our politicians do not lack it is focus on this leveller. But I have never understood the reason for this complete apathy towards public interest just to get votes. Do you guys have a conscience or not??