Posts Tagged ‘merit’
In India, a shift to meritocracy sets aside the old elites
Accounts of India’s changes focus on its economic growth, its surging migration, its skyward construction: changes in outward trappings. Less apparent, but no less momentous, is the decline and fall of the Anglicized ancien régime.
Some in the old elite saw change coming. They sold inherited businesses, learned new professions, reined in maharajah-like spending. But many did not, and now a wave of aspirations is rising from dank slums and hopeless towns, crashing at last into the delicate structures of unearned privilege.
Quietly but unmistakably, a whole country is changing hands.
In cities, middle-aged graduates of India’s leading colleges struggle to get their children into the same schools. With children of humbler backgrounds aiming higher than ever, even a 90 percent score on the entrance exam is no longer enough. This is the secret reason why, in a new age of Indian opportunity, many rich Indians still send their children abroad for college: not to escape India, but because their children are unable or unwilling to compete in an increasingly fair society.
The newspapers print photographs of those who “top” the exams. They are routinely scrawny and dark-skinned, drawn from the distant suburbs and villages, Indians whose ancestors might have cooked and cleaned for the ancestors of the students they now displace.
