Apples

Originally Posted: May 14, 2012

This blog has been so dormant of late, that I fear that no one might read this post… but sometimes, you have such a strong urge to express yourself that you don’t care if someone reads your blog or not… I am so confused about the title of this blog… I wish we could have two titles… the confusion is between ‘the world is so unfair’ and ‘levels of unfairness’. While the former will attract more readers, the latter is more apt. Let us start talking then.

This post has been borne out of recent discussions. I was talking to a friend who commented that IIT system is so unfair and then we had a discussion about how assignments are not graded fairly as there are scant measures to check plagiarism and how the students do not mind plagiarism and are open to it, how exams can be highly unfair and how the system has been unfair to her. I agreed with her on most of this. I agree that the system is unfair. The incentives mechanism is flawed and people do not always get their effort’s worth. Her was a different voice, different from the ones you regularly hear at IITD and that made me think. I started thinking about this unfairness and went on.

But then, how could thoughts be restricted. I moved from one level of unfairness to another. IIT system doesn’t do justice (in terms of grades) to students, but then is it fair to judge student’s efforts by his/her grade. And then how fair is it for people from certain departments (read ‘CS’) to get better jobs than others. And this is not it. The level of teaching and opportunities available at IITs  is a lot different from the other state and regional colleges. How is that justified? Just because you had better luck on a day and you could solve certain kinds of questions better than others, you get to have lot more opportunities, even if you don’t enjoy solving those questions anymore.

And there is more to it. These ‘question solving’ techniques were imparted by some coaching institute which not even 5% in India can afford or some ‘hi-fi’ school which limits its services to certain section of the society (exceptions exist). So, the life you will live is a function of, among other things,  how rich and/or influential your parents were.

And education is not the only thing unfairly distributed, let us get to other stuff. For instance, how unfair is it for a girl to be born poor? She has negligible chances of getting education and there are high chances that she will be working throughout her life, will  be abused at all levels, at all times and will not have two full meals on any day in her life(again, exceptions exist). You can easily see kids,at some signal close to DPS RK Puram, begging for food and this would be another example of unfairness. And yes, I have never been there, and I am still so sure about the kids because this is what the pattern is. With every well-fed establishment, there is a hungry hutment.

Finally, when I put all this in perspective, I find unfairness is inherent and there are levels of it. I cannot be angry with my life or be unhappy with it. I cannot be angry at getting 40% of the apple and the other guy getting 60% of it, when there were hundreds thousands waiting for the apple. I have had a bite of the apple. I don’t really know how big the bite was. But yes, the fact that I could have a bite should make me happy. There are people who couldn’t even see the apple, leave alone tasting it. This unfairness of 40-60 will be dealt with, when there are sufficient apples to be shared. Let us focus on getting those apples first.

P.S:

1.I found the idea of apples so interesting that I am changing the title.

2. I can visualize writing the entire post using the apple image, but read the title of the blog.. we are lazy folks.