The garib Brahmin and the Ivy League.

One of many such posts flooding social media.

Did you know American universities, especially the ones targeted by the Indian elites & privileged (read: Brahmins), don’t just take you if you pass their entrance exam? Yes. That’s common knowledge. Most people know that you need to prove that you are more than mere academically brilliant to get admission into these top schools.

But did you also know that they ‘construct’ a class? What does that mean? It means that they aim to consciously create a diverse and international environment by taking an eclectic mix of people.

What does that mean? It means that if you are non-white and non-American, indeed non-First-World, you stand a better chance, with other bonus points for exotic hobbies & passions, gender, background, nationality, work experience, military service, sporting achievement, or even something as irrelevant as coming from an area not represented by any other applicant, and so on.

They don’t call it so, but it is, for all practical purposes, a quota system. Because if they only took the top academically qualified students, their classes would look rather unidimensional, something the top universities in the world (and most certainly in the USA) are acutely aware of and want to avoid. Not only does it diminish the richness of the learning experience for the students, but also is plain bad PR for the school since it will show them to be tone-deaf to matters of social justice and equal opportunity. You see, even in the rarefied space of Ivy League, optics matter.

Anyway, the point is that they don’t just admit anyone, but each class is carefully constructed. With a purpose to make it diverse, inclusive, and interesting. And to avoid filling it with white, males from the USA and Western Europe. As a deliberate decision. Purportedly (whether they actually believe in it or not is immaterial to this post) for reasons of inclusivity and offering equality in opportunity to people who are not as privileged as the white WASP males that formed the bulk of their past students since their founding.

Which is why, when Indians who pass out of that system speak of merit and spit upon affirmative action, it generates enough irony to build the Statue of Unity, or Liberty (since most of them then proceed to take up American citizenship, which the USA is happy to offer such accomplished and well-educated people). It is even cuter when they claim that it was affirmative action that forced them to seek admission in a foreign university to begin with and how India is suffering from brain drain because people like them are leaving, ostensibly for lack of opportunity. Because of affirmative action. The very affirmative action that was responsible for the pivot of their entire life, from which they have proceeded to build their wealth, reputations, and careers, not to mention create huge opportunities for their descendants, who will follow their footsteps, and then add ‘nepotism’ to the ‘merit’ argument as the cause of India’s decline and the USA’s greatness.

Thanks, folks. But no thanks. You did not leave because you lost ‘your’ seat to a ‘reserved category’ candidate. You left because you were the reserved category candidate in the USA, took full advantage of their system, including their freedoms, their democracy, their economy, their welcoming nature, their historically immigrant-friendly society, and their First-World stature, and you made it. Now, you want to turn around and piss on India by telling us how to run our country and shape our society based on your warped definition of merit? Fuck off! Oh, and by the way, your descendants will continue to milk the same privileges as you, even while pointing to a Tina Dabi (and some random SC/ST friend of theirs who owns a Mercedes or Audi or lives in a comfortable home) in India trying to make hashtags like ‘One Family One Reservation’ go viral.

There’s a Hindi saying for the likes of you: ‘सौ चूहे खा के बिल्ली चली हज को’. Bloody hypocrite.