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…)