Funny Story 69 and the Google ticker

Funny Story Sixty-Nine is a Thai movie. A movie out of Thailand with 69 in the title is sure to make your imaginations run wild. This movie is pretty tame by the way. Nope, not even that, in case you are wondering.

So, how is this relevant? Glad you asked.

Remember the SC ruling that quotas shall not exceed 50% of total seats? Well, apparently Tamil Nadu has unilaterally decided that it does not need to pay heed to the SC directive. Backward classes have 69% of seats specially reserved for them. How does TN pull it off? Here is a blog that attempts to explain it. We could not really make any sense out of it except that TN has shown its middle finger to the SC through some complex legal maneuvering. Apparently this drama has been going on since 1994.



Remember the Google ticker? The one that you see when you log on to gmail?





Well, it looks like we could affix a ticker of the same kind on the walls of the offices of Hon'ble Minister for Social Justice Smt. Meira Kumar. After securing quotas for her half-dalit kids, she is now trying to increase the 15% quota for SCs to 16.23%.

In a move that may further fuel the quota controversy, the Social Justice and Empowerment Ministry is 'favourably' considering raising reservations for Scheduled Castes from the existing 15 per cent to 16.23 per cent following the increase in their population.

This is alarming because if the population of certain segments increase at a very high rate, there is potentially no end to it. This happened in the past already.

A draft proposal for this points out that the quota, pegged at 12.5 per cent in 1953, was raised to 15 per cent in 1970 in light of the 1961 Census.

Funny thing is, now an entire religion will be officially considered scheduled caste, i.e. implicitly a part of the Hindu community. Guess which one?

Besides the increase in population, Kumar said as many as 68 more castes and one religion - Buddhism - have been included in the SC category, resulting in an increase in numbers.

I wonder how the Japanese will react to this!