Tag: meritocracy

  • Classes Apart

    Sometime back, during an evening out with friends of the ex-colleague kind, one of them remarked how, for the business analyst roles he was hiring for, he had asked his HR to only consider the IIT + IIM species. It’s an understandable heuristic, and one I have seen too often now to be vexed.

    In public, that is. It didn’t stop me from thinking of a subject that hasn’t appeared on the blog since 2016 – meritocracy. At a personal level, I have battled the systemic bias with whatever cognitive privilege I had, and made modest gains. There have been scars too – “the muscle memory of having to fight for every little thing“, and it’s only recently that I have been able to deal with it objectively, and heal. But increasingly, I have felt that education is the new caste.  (more…)

  • The divide and the rules

    It has been just over a year since I wrote “A responsible meritocracy“. My view was that meritocracy had indeed played a huge role in dislodging systemic inequalities (e.g. ethnicity, religion, even economic background) but not only is it not an ideal system, it is now widening the gulf between the haves and have-nots, and even creating entry barriers to prosperity. To use an adage from pop culture, it’s a hero which has lived long enough to see itself become a villain. Arguable, yes.

    Every system is bound to create two sets of people – those who benefit from it, and those who do not. I’d rate the success of a system on two counts – the ability of its beneficiaries to see the other side, and what they do about it.  The merit in a meritocracy is accrued courtesy intelligence/smartness. Intelligence is a means to creating the universally acknowledged currency – money. In that respect, I’d say that Silicon Valley has been a big beneficiary, and probably the most visible. (more…)

  • A new kind of privilege

    A couple of weeks ago, we visited a newly opened eatery in Bangalore. Something about the crowd made me observe it more. It seemed like this was a set completely different from the kinds I usually see during restaurant visits. It took me a little while to understand why I felt so, and when I did, I remembered the nuance I had discovered only a year ago.

    In the restaurants/pubs I visit, I usually see people like me. The ones who, irrespective of career highs they might have scaled, have to go at it daily with the business of life. They are curious for new experiences and/or are eager to climb a rung or two, and see such places through these frames. In both cases, they are ‘visitors’. But there is a different crowd I saw here –  a set of people whose body language – a certain kind of composed languor, and the way they behaved with each  other, reflected a sense of belonging. I consider them privileged. (more…)

  • A responsible meritocracy

    Every story needs a hero, the one who stands up against injustice and wins. In the story of inequality, meritocracy has long been a hero. To be fair, it did quite a job, dislodging inequalities that had become systemic. But then again, to twist Ra’s al Ghul’s words “..if you devote yourself to an ideal, you become something else entirely.”

    One entity that has been at the centre of the debate around meritocracy is Silicon Valley given its influence on the immediate environment and clones developing across the globe. A popular line of thought among those who have made it there is that they earned it all on their own and are not obliged to give anything back to society. (read) (more…)