Good Pittance - Fundamental disconnects
Hyper sat gazing at the plumbing works under a mobile phone company. He was suffering from a mixture of depression and confusion. His intentions had been good, to bring an element of critical review in this dark town. He had selected a particularly favourable spot which allowed a large crowd to gather in discussion. He had chosen fairly interesting topics. But the crowd had just not been receptive. The 12 sessions so far had been disasters, or at best, lukewarm.

He also missed FM's presence.

I must not get exasperated, he said to himself. The creatures here have never been exposed to something like this. Its just a matter of time, and once I have a faitfhul following, it should get easier.

What he did not take into account, which he may have if FM were around, was that it is difficult to form a faithful following when most creatures living in underground sewers have lifespans lasting a day or two, or at most a few weeks, or at the very outer limit, a few months. It was obvious that he would see new faces every single day.

As he sat ruminating, his mind drifted towards the 3rd topic he had selected as part of this series. The subject was reservations in India and the particular debate was does reservation make sense?

He felt he suffered from a fundamental disconnect with the logic of the concept and the related protests. He ran through his thoughts in his mind.

Reservation, most skeptics argue, is a politically motivated tool. It is driven by the political desire to win elections. The disconnect is this - aren't elections won 0n the basis of majority votes and not minority votes? In which case, politicians should actually favour majority reservations. Which doesn't seem to be the case.

The deeper argument, then, must be one or some of the following (which FM had pointed out when they had discussed this 20 years back)

1. The majority of the country does not actually vote when it comes to it while minority groups are far more diligent at this

2. Majority votes are governed by very complex mechanisms which politicians do not understand (like economy, roads, globalisation etc.) while minority votes are easier to garner with easier to appreciate grassroots issues (like hunger and unemplyment)

3. Majority votes are roughly equally split between the leading parties, and it is the minority votes that actually make the difference between winning and losing

4. It is easier to break up the voting population into contiguous groups that vote in a single direction. In other words, the returns per unit effort are much higher.

Hyper ran these through this head, and also noted that FM was not aware of the numbers that would support any of the above arguments, and thus only qualified as intuitive hypotheses.

All this confused him even further till he screamed out loud - someone please shed some light on this!!!
- posted by Rallix @ 3:33 AM