Mayur Punekar

🎯 I entered IIT Delhi in General Category with high JEE rank, though I'm from Shudra/Dalit village (+ extreme poverty, hungry childhood). I topped my IIT batch. Went on to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning one of fastest PhD. Then entrepreneur, won numerous patents, etc. For me, "advanced studies" books were like novels. Most of it felt simple, obvious. One read, I was done, most of the time. @TrueIndology does not say that so-called OBC, SC or ST lack talent or cannot master a field. He says reservations can be cruel. That is true. The IITs and similar schools of India put every student in the same room with the professors, in the same labs, under the same exams and the same grades. That room is a mirror. Reservations were meant to give a nineteen-year-old a chance against 1000+ years of presumed and unverifiable discrimination. What they give instead is a daily accounting of what he or she cannot do. The misfits in an elite nest. A boy or girl who might have thrived in a skill school becomes a depressed and angry engineer who cannot engineer. India does not need caste reservations in a limited number of colleges. India needs to add colleges and vocational schools in every city, town, state and every territory—so many that any boy or girl can apply, get admission, learn, find the work that fits the hands and the mind, and grow to the full measure of what is in them.