Caste reservation is not a poverty alleviation scheme : last year I had a very heated argument with a NEET PG exam aspirant. He was smart and had gone to one of the best government colleges for his UG with a very good UG rank. He argued that if all the SC/ST reservation kids had all that money which they flaunted quite opulously, why do they need reservation at all. I remember thinking at the time if everybody had equal amount of resources why was reservation necessary, would income based reservation be better? My extent of understanding wrt reservation categories was very limited as I did not have these kinds of conversations at home (even though I was from a reservation category which my dad never used anywhere or brought up in the household). Cut to 2026 and all the protests, lots of very very good content being pumped to my feed by people who are much more educated on this and I saw this tweet "Caste based reservation is not a poverty alleviation scheme" and I was so confused, if not that then what? And then I had a flashback to my first blatant casteism experience. I was visiting a friend and her grandmother was visiting them. I saw the rules change around the house that day. I was made to sit in a plastic chair, I was not allowed to touch the couches and I became small and I felt weird. Her grandma asked if I want some ambode (its a very nice vada) and I said yes, she made it hot, I could tell it was hot. I reached out to get it from her hand and she backed off and I knew. I was not allowed to touch her the same way I wasn't allowed to touch the couch. I cupped both my hands to receive this and she dropped it in my hand from a distance. Brahmins don't want to touch us. In context of medicine that means a brahmin doctor wouldn't want to touch anybody considered lower caste. Reservation allows people to have these resources in the community so that skills are not concentrated in just UC communities, thereby only limiting these skills to be used by that community. F U C K. It was hard to grapple with this. I will be reading more and educating myself more. And I have a lot of empathy for young santa that didn't know any of this and was in spaces where they were constantly ostracised without knowing that the world around them had all these small small details other kids picked up on to place themselves in a hierarchy to know how to treat you.
Protesting culture is important, showing up to criticise the government is important. When something this large happens opposing a mega mammoth government that will take your tax money to loot you of the resources that is owed to you - you have to turn up no matter how small the flame is right now because to grow larger, it has to start somewhere. Especially if you're able bodied and privileged. I will keep turning upto protests whenever I can and voicing out things that matter and help spend on getting resources that protect the ones at the forefront of this change. Contesting people within your community to do better is also important, be it talking to people around you or criticising the movement itself that has been misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic & casteist. Nobody should be put on a pedestal so high that you can't tell them when they fuck up.
"During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night. The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for. It didn't look like we were going to win then and we did. It doesn't feel like we're going to win now but we could. Keep fighting, keep dancing."
I'm a product designer currently on the hunt for my next role. I've been interviewing and getting rejected. But there have been many many learnings. Here's some significant ones