A tale of hypocrisy: subsidy revolution!

By John Cheeran
I have a question for you.
Why do you work?
I work to earn money. I do not work to save the world. I work only to save my skin.
And that's not a politically correct statement in India now.
Why do you want to become a doctor or engineer , or in this techie age, a software professional? Why do you want to become a cricketer in India and a footballer in Europe and Latin America?
If you become a doctor or cricketer you can make big money. That's true for all the sought after professions in anywhere in the world. A young man or woman walks into a medical college not to cure the ills of this world but to ensure that he or she will have a legal opportunity to make big money. So that they can have a blast...
But few would be ready to admit it. There lies the hypocrisy of the Indians.
The southern tip of India is in ferment now. It is all because of the Malayalis' zeal to save the world by becoming and doctors and engineers. The youth want to save the world!
In Kerala, the Marxists are demanding that higher education should be affordable for all sections of the society. That's a noble aim, you must be ready to agree.
Education is business and the demand for doctors and engineers have created a slew of self-financing medical and engineering colleges in Kerala. The neigbouring states Karnataka and Tamil Nadu pioneered the trend much, much earlier. So far so good.
But then the Marxists want to subsidize higher education by slashing the course fees in the government as well as self-financing medical and engineering colleges.
College managements say they cannot afford to offer quality education on a low course fee. Marxists say they are fighting for the Dalits and the poor and they too have a right to become careerists in this world. I agree fully with them.
Everyone has a right to pursue whatever they wish for. But that does not mean that someone else should carry your burden.
If a brilliant student is cash-strapped, he should take a loan to study instead of asking for a cheap ticket to education. There are plenty of banks who offer educational loans but that should be linked to academic excellence.
Loans will, definitely, have strings attached to them and one should be ready to accept them. To militate against this reality by vandalizing public property and educational institutions, as the activists of the Students Federation of India, the dirty tricks department of the CPI (M), did last week in Kerala is highly deplorable.
And just consider what has happened in the case of those students (Dalits and OBCs and other minorities) who have enjoyed the benefits of reservation in higher education?
They have grabbed the first opportunity that came their way to leave India without paying back not even a single paisa to the government who gave them a free education.
Those who have benefited from the largesse of the Indian government, (read tax payers), do not want to contribute to the nation.
What they want is more quotas in medical colleges, IITs and IIMs. That's the idea of the 'deprived classes' to correct the historical imbalance in the Indian society.
Marxists and assorted left loonies want to save the deprived classes so that they can meet their political ends.
The time, indeed, has come for revolution.