SOTTO VOCE: Caste Counts

It was the summer of 1996. It marked my loss of innocence. With grand plans of stepping into college life, we were all busy filling up forms for junior college after our CBSE class X results. And while in that zone, between school and college, we were bewildered by a column in the form. Ostensibly to champion the cause of social justice, the Bihar government, that year, had introduced 27 per cent reservation for OBCs in addition to the already existing 22.5 per cent quota for SC/ST communities in the state's universities and asked teenagers, just out of school, to reveal their caste identity.All of a sudden, childhood friends, untouched yet by the Mandalisation of politics and social engineering were preparing to deconstruct the new lexicon of caste the column had introduced in their simple lives. Scores soon became secondary and caste calculations came into play for that coveted seat. Now, secretively all of us wanted to know each other's castes, a piece of information that held no importance till then to any of us when we were in school. But with little experience in decoding the caste matrix, it turned out to be a futile exercise. Surnames were more often that not ambiguous.
The Prasads, Singhs, Sharmas, Thakurs always led to open-ended answers. We were soon to find out that the caste dynamic was not as simple as it was explained in school history textbooks. It was only when the list was
declared, the real identities came to light. I didn't figure on it.
For some of us, faith in the state had been severely dented. Under the veil of undoing the oppression of ages, the 'government of the underprivileged' had done its bit to sow the seeds of caste animosity and disenchantment among us 90s' youth, denying the 'privileged' a level playing field.
Having secured decent marks in the boards and looking at the trend of the previous years, one was sure to make it to the best institution in undivided Bihar. But it was not to be. I was filled with angst and cursed myself for being born in an upper-caste family. At that impressionable age, when one should have been balancing chemical equations, one was trying to think of ways to be downwardly mobile. I finally did reconcile to the reality, but think that the quota system is nothing more than a political ploy to consolidate vote banks.