I have no doubt that your drafting and analytical skills are exceptional, but you are making too naive an interpretation of an extremely obnoxious social structure. That being said, caste remains and will remain (especially in the near future) instrumental in our social interactions. I belong to an upper caste and I know that how the women of SC/ST communities have been treated in my village. SC/ST women have been nothing more than sex fodder for the so called upper castes like us. Untouchibility is rooted in every vein of ours. There are hardly any examples in our country wherein, a savarn boy has married a dalit girl or vice versa. And if at all few spirited and progressive youngsters gather courage to defy this social mandate, either they are brutally murdered or are deemed dead by their honourable parents. The tragedy does not stop here, if their parents succumb to their happiness, then the whole family is considered an outcaste by a particular community. Therefore, when we start vocal criticism of reservation, we must take objective note of the underlined social causes. Now, I come to the overall question of India being pushed into mediocrity, I must tell you with a certain amount of authority, as I reside in Canada. An Indian student (my colleague) from SC/ST community did reasonably well at McGill University, while pursuing his LL.M. Hence, a myth of reservation being a sure short recipe for mediocrity is selfishly preached by us the upper caste elites. I must tell you that people from the general category like us get a call for the civil services interview at 1000 marks out of 2000 and an SC candidate gets an interview call at scoring 600 marks out of 2000, which means it is equally difficult for each individual irrespective of reservation. At this juncture, I might face a counter narrative that it is unfair to the candidates from the general category who scored 700 plus. This hypothesis appears flawless if we perform a superficial analysis. However, when...