What we deserve

All of us are entitled. All of us are privileged. All of us have been given many things that we didn’t earn. Or deserve.

Do you think you deserve everything that you currently have? Your money, your beauty, your education, your intelligence, your body, the square foot of earth that you stand on, the square metre of earth that your body will be buried in when you die? Is any of it something that you have earned by the virtue of things that you did in your life? Or was it just handed over to you by your environment which includes your parents who in turn got whatever they got in life because of their environment. Did you ever deserve to be in the college that you are in right now or the one you are going to go? I mean it was just luck that you were born with enough intelligence and means to have reached where you are right now. This moment in space-time that you can shout your thoughts about anything you want. 

Now imagine. Imagine you were born in a less privileged society to parents who had fewer means. Not because they did anything wrong in their life. It’s just because they too were born to similar conditions and the cycle has been rolling since a long time. Let’s say you are intelligent too, if you are not able to understand the concept of intelligence being something given to you by luck. 

So, you are more intelligent that anyone in your society. You know this and you want to go out and do something with it, say do Business Administration. But your parents never had the means to take you there. But then you find this wormhole through which you can actually reach where you always wanted to. You realize that you are probably not as intelligent as some other people out there who would have got that place if it wasn’t for this wormhole. But you still take it. Because it has been your dream. All your life. This life that is essentially the only thing that you have an illusion to have a control over.

Now, how is this wrong? The wormhole wasn’t placed by you. If you don’t take it, some other person will find that wormhole and do the same thing to the poor person who ‘deserved’ it more than you because she or he got a better percentile. Because the wormhole exists, you should grab it. And you should be putting-it-as-your-status enough happy about it. It had been your dream.

Then do you have a problem with the wormhole itself, or the people who put it there? I will answer, albeit in a while.

Frankly, I am not in favour of the reservation system really. I mean everything happening in the world is around Natural Selection anyway. The poor are poor because they don’t have the resources to be richer. Those who have do become rich. I’m not talking about individuals, but a trend in the society. The rich feed on the poor because they have climbed up the evolutionary scale in the sense that they have resources which can take humanity forward. The rich and the powerful are more evolved than the poor and the meek. Macroscopically speaking.

But that’s just inhuman, isn’t it? All this castism, sexism, statism in the society so intent on making divisions everywhere is just so inhuman. And so is this. This intrinsic need in all living beings to discriminate between the better and the worse. And let the better have the better and the worse have the worse. So that the better survive and the worse don’t. And the society becomes better, not worse.

But humans have evolved enough to realize that now we evolve as one species and not sections of the society. We are not going to let other humans face worse conditions just because our forefathers thought there was a better and a worse. Today, there is no such thing. All women and men are equal. 

The above is a dream. And we are still sleeping. We need to spam everyone’s sleep with this dream so that one day when they wake up, they would want to live that dream. 

You are sleeping, and you are not seeing the dream that I and many of us want you and many more of you to see. The dream is that you realize that it is not a question of whether the person who got IIM deserved it. It is the answer which says that neither of you deserve it. It is just because you are human that you are able to experience these things which a dog can’t. And since you are human you should realize that the other human who has got less privileges in the worldly sense is actually equally ‘less-deserving’ as you for that seat. 

The people who put the wormhole are seeing this dream. And they want to see it in reality when they wake up. I don't blame them. 

TL; DR: Your intelligence is not something you earned. Congratulations for getting an opportunity I know you didn't work hard for - but you didn't completely deserve it, so please don't be proud of it.