Recently I was reading a beautiful interview of Amartya Sen done by The Harvard Gazette. You can read my higlights over at hypothes.is This reminded me of the first time I read a paper by Amartya Sen.
Back when I was in the ninth grade I was required to do a project for my Social Studies class. The topic allotted to me was “Should we have caste based reservation?” Heavy stuff 😩, especially for my 14-year-old ass.1
I did what every, I felt I needed to do. Read economics papers2 on caste-based economic inequality. Of those the most challenging one was a paper by Amartya Sen. (I tried to look it up, but I can’t find it anymore. From what I remember it was on social inequality and its economic consequences.) Athough I remember very little of the paper, it had a profound impact on me as a human being. In modern terminology it would probably be called intersectional social justice or something like that. I am not an expert.
Reading all the evidence I did, I came to the obvious conclusion that there is a genuine caste-based economic and social disparity. The caste based reservations don’t lead to much social progression for the SC and ST communities, but it does help some individuals from those communities to gain more social acceptance and economic. That’s something better than nothing. Don’t get me wrong, these reservations have lead to massive intra-caste inequalities within these castes. But that’s the story of modern capitalism. Capital begets capital in the modern world. Labour begets little if anything.
Back to my story. I submitted an early version of my project to my school teacher. The only suggestion he made was correcting a few typos I had. But I could see it in his eyes that this was not the conclusion he agreed with. Eventually, I got a B for the project. Because I stuck with my guns. I had read at least 5 papers. I had read some NSSO (National Sample Survey Organisation) data. After this incident, I decided never to study anything related to humanities and social sciences. I felt that the quality didn’t matter in these fields, only conclusions did. Math was so much better. If you can prove something it’s true, if you can disprove something it’s false. Some random person is not going to decide based on whatever random criteria they came up with.
For context, I used to read most of my social studies books in the summer break before the academic year started. I came third at the all-India level of the INCA National Map Quiz right about then. These tiny things matter so much to a young student. It’s frightening how deep our influences go. How many trivial actions lead to where we are at!
This was the time of discussion of creamy layer. The whole gujjar protest to be included into the OBCs was coming soon. The upper-cast Hindus were starting to align against caset-bsed reservation. ↩︎
I found one of the papers I read. It’s this(link to pdf) one on The Effectiveness of Jobs Reservation. I did not understand the math in this paper so largely ignored the numbers this paper. I did not understand anything beyond mean, mode, and median in statistic at this point of time. ↩︎