George Menezes

I am sure there is nobody on the planet that does not have reservations.

Having participated in competitive sports till the age of 40, some cricket and a great deal of hockey, I carry broken fingers and damaged cartilages and ligaments as my old age baggage, and I have serious reservations about the state of these sports in my country.

More than 33 percent I can assure you.

I have reservations about the mockery called IPL.

Utterly shocked veteran cricketers and knowledgeable spectators and fanatic followers of Test cricket and even One Day cricket express their reservations about IPL’s “tamasha” by calling it “gilli danda”

I have more than 33 percentage reservations about a beautiful gentleman’s game which had courtesy and style and patiently honed skills converted into crass entertainment involving blind aggressiveness, grooming youngsters for membership of gangs specializing in hit and run techniques.

I have worse reservations about Indian Hockey. Does the body that controls hockey have a vision or even a game plan except to move downhill to the bottom position of the international hockey rankings?

I see no forwards and halves. Only defenders and they are all in the Committee not on the ground. They spend their entire first half making atrocious and biased decisions and the second half in defending them unsuccessfully scoring what is known as self goals. Or self-Gills.

M S Gill the Minister for Sports threatens but is unable to get KPS Gill the Head of the Indian Hockey federation to quit because KPS wants 100 percent reservation of the post for himself for life time.

And if we also have 100 percentage reservations about Joythikumaran Secretary of the same Federation, caught on camera taking a bribe to select a player for Team India, calculation of percentages will reveal that our reservations do not need a separate Bill but an urgent inclusion as an addenda to Pranab Mukerjee’s Finance Bill.

All said and done my greatest reservation is about the Bill for Reservation of 33 % seats for women in Parliament and Assemblies.

Fr Jerome D’Souza and other Christian members of the Constituent Assembly refused reservations of seats because they wanted Christians to retain their dignity and self esteem and participate fully and equally with other communities in the governance of a great, secular democracy.

Unlike in Pakistan where Christians have reservations but no voice or power, Christians, thank you, are doing very well in Bharat that is India.

Women in India do not need reservations. Already,the most powerful people in this country are women and thank God for it.

First, there is the very mixed pot of Sonia, Jayalalita and Mayawati. Try to dislodge them from their positions of power and the country will experience a tsunami from which it will never recover.

Look around. There are powerful women in politics, in industry, in business, in the bureaucracy, in the media, in every kind of NGO and citizen initiative.
You name it. They are giving our incompetent men a hard time.

And so we have a male plot to allow only 33% of seats in legislative bodies knowing that the writing on the wall says that many more than a measly percentage of women are ready or will be ready to govern the country and control other centres of power if we just let them be. Just let them be, for God’s sake.

They need empowerment not reservations. Deliver them from the clutches of a society that treats them as objects. Deliver them from a society that day after day, violates the sanctity of their womanhood in thousands of villages where they are in bonded slavery to their men folk requiring ptheir permission to even mensurate. Deliver them through the empowerment of education, through freedom where they can speak up and get justice and a even playing field, deliver them from outdated (for women only) cultural practices and watch them fly.

Keep the 33 % reservations for men and there will be fewer fisticuffs, microphone flinging, less walk-outs and more dignity in places where dignified behaviour is constitutionally mandatory.