The Elite And The Masses

Uttrakhand disaster has been flooding my timeline for the past few days. Preferential treatment given to the selected few to save their lives sparked a debate whether the privileged deserve this distinction ( for their extra contribution to the society) or not and this lead to me thinking about Elitist Vs Populist

In a democracy like India, functioning without a populist approach is impossible. However much one may hate the quota system, a little solution exists to close the gap between the rich and the poor. Our Foreign policies can’t be based to favour bureaucrats, it has to favour NRIs and their families and similarly, environmental policies can’t favour industrialists, it has to favour the population living in those areas. Populism is the reason why a Jayalalitha doesn’t allow a Sri Lankan player to play for IPL in her state. Catering to the needs of the majority of the section of society is how a democratic government functions.

That being said, how do you get above par intellectual and professional performance? Would you want a sub-par doctor performing your surgery, don’t best students deserve extra attention to make them even better doctors (or scientist and engineers) which ultimately is an egalitarian goal and serves majority population? I can’t be the only one to want only the cream people in ISRO (Meritocracy)!

Populism is basically a belief of equality (egalitarian) which leads to doing what majority section wants whereas Elitism is a cerebral belief and leads to doing what one believes yo be right (or more important) and not bothering about what majority wants. Simply put, a TOI gives you everything you want (Populism) as compared to an Economist that gives you only the refined version of the news (Elitism). That explains the difference between the money that a documentary makes as compared to that of a Bollywood movie. How else can you explain the years that CID or a Star Plus serial ran?

Personally, I find Populism as a Utopian ideal. For Class-less governance, a class-less society needs to exists. In our society, the elite pay more income-tax as a price for civilized society. Everybody is working hard, some are just smarter or even lucky but they have been paying their dues! Populism maintains the status-quo, it gives society what it wants. Elitism, on the other hand, improves society. If you believe a girl isn’t to be blamed for her rape (which majority in India still believes), how can you not support elitism? If you want society to value a Sam Pitroda more than KRK (Twitter followers: 85k+ & 128k+ resp.), how can you be a populist? In the end, what matters is, how you want your society; just like you are or better than you are?

P.S. 1) For the purpose of this blog, Populism also include pluralism, secernment etc and elitism refers to intellectually smart, hard-worker category of people and not inherent-rich category which is racist, sexist etc.

P.S. 2) For my research, I got a lot of help from articles of Christopher Edley, (Dean of the Law School at Berkeley) and a website: http://retnoespinoza.blogspot.in/2013/03/elitisme-elitism-is-belief-or-attitude.html

Know Your Politicians

With all the fuss about Presidential Elections, 2014 General Elections and December Elections of Gujarat, I was inquisitive about Educational Background of most important people in Indian Politics. With all the grapevine about Mrs Gandhi being Fifth Pass doing rounds, I felt the need to ascertain the same about our current CMs and Presidents, PMs of all times. I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw.

Usually, my Blog Posts are my Opinionated Domain but this time it is just a compilation of what I came across. Also, bear the bad embedding of media. 😛

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

• Presidents

Most of our Presidents of all time have been extremely “Highbrow Men”. Receiving Honorary Doctorates and Lecturing at Universities like Oxford and Cambridge assures me that our Head of the State is a credible person.

• Prime Ministers

Level of my awe decreases here but we still have had a Kashi Vidhyapeeth Scholar and a Cambridge, Oxford Graduate. All-inclusive, not that bad.

• Chief Ministers

Assorted people form the body of our CMs. From being Home-Schooled to Doctors to IIT Bombay Graduate, some of our CMs are highly educated while few are not-so-well-read but even then they have done well for their states.

Even though all this Google research tells me that states have performed even with the CMs that are not so well learned, but personally I have always been of the opinion that more the educated people in Politics, more the progress we will see. Few of the relatively new CMs (viz Goa, Bihar etc) are also well-read and I am hoping for huge progress in their respective states. I believe Education has a trickle-down effect. If the head of the State is highly qualified, the probability of success of states increases (plus, it gets easier to respect the States-person). Compared to earlier times, I find more CMs having proper education qualification today.