This table is reserved Sir.

Reservations have become a very emotional issue among students and the population in general. However the whole matter now has turned into a black and white affair, of whether we need reservations and such. I would like to look into this standoff in shades of grey.

Reservations were mooted to provide an equality of opportunities to disadvantaged section of the national population. In a large country like our which had a huge machinery of inequities to keep people under control for a very long time, it is only natural that sections of the population go beyond the edge of society. We have a very interesting situation where an extremely large section amounting to a majority of the population being disadvantaged by this criteria. Distinctions can be made in terms of social and economic status.

Though it is not necessary that social and economic backwardness go together, they are usually found together. This leads us to believe that these two factors form a vicious circle which further compounds the inequities. In order to break the circle, strong and sustained measures need to be taken.

I believe that reservation is indeed a way to achieve this goal, though it might not be the only way. It does indeed have many short comings. However it does provide a good means of balancing the inequity. It has served us in the last 50 years, not without a fair amount of success - there are quite many families that have reached good economic and better social status solely because of this policy. Reservation is thus important in the absence of a better alternative.

What is a good reservation mechanism? In my view, it is one which identifies the best talent in the deprived communities which would have normally removed, and raise the hopes of those communities to work harder for a better statistical distribution. A better statistical distribution is one in which the average community representation roughly matches the demographic distribution. In more practical terms it should also be able to provide a healthy idea of society to students.

This brings to us the notions of amount of reservation and identitifcation of deprived people, which I would deal in the next post.

The eluding definition of God

In the previous post I had shared my opinions on futility of assigning attibutes to the phenomenon that we call God. However it is extremely unclear what this phenomenon is. I would like to share another negative feature, that the experience of God cannot be shared!

We all take pride in our abilities to reason, to argue out arguments, theorems lemmas and even the right to walk in the middle of the road. But arguments need to rest on a fundamental bedrock, which is usually the definition of the problem agreed upon by the arguing parties, if they are clever enough. Which is sadly not the case in many arguments. There must be always a certain amount of belief to even start an argument.

Consider the case of a formal proof, we would require a certain set of axioms/conditions that are necessary for the proof to be valid. These axiom sets are indeed different for different theorems, however we cannot do away without them. So axioms are a fundamental and basic necisity of any formal proof.

In case of passing knowledge to another person, we invariably need to believe in the meaning of words and usages and the fact that that the other person is able to understand what we intend to say at some level.

We can thus conclude that an axiom/belief is required to reason and a shared belief is required for communication.

The edifice of modern science is built upon these very foundations reasoning and repeatability of experiements. We thus have to believe that axioms are the essence of our understanding of the physical word, the rest is just built upon it. As Godel showed, we cannot have a complex enough system to completely explain the natural numbers and yet be without contraditions.

Therefore the we may define the phenomenon of God as a collections of axioms or beliefs. These sets differ for different people and different situations, thus God is indeed not one.

The non-commuicabilty of this particular phenomenon is what gives rise to the personal God, for the God is the sum-total of all your beliefs. Every person has their own beliefs, which many are shaped by unique experiences some shared. Only the shared part which I believe is small is capable of being communicated. The rest shall remain in you and die with you.

So the concept cannot be argued upon since we have agreed upon no axioms! We cannot expect ourseleves to communicate these beliefs, making any argument on God, including this superfluous.