Sashi tharoor
I was born to a middle-class family: my father was a salaried newspaper employee, my mother a homemaker, with three children to educate on one income. For a family like ours, merit was not a slogan. Scholarships, fair examinations, honest results — these were the only way one salary could carry three children’s dreams.
I went to school in Mumbai and Kolkata, to college here in Delhi, topped the University and earned admission into IIM — and chose instead to follow my passion for international affairs, in America, on a scholarship. Nothing was inherited; everything was earned by hard work and yes, Exams.
So I know that a fair, merit-based system is the only ladder for young people from lower and middle-income families to climb up. When that ladder is broken — papers leaked, examinations cancelled, trust destroyed — the children of the rich and powerful do not suffer. They have other ladders. It is your dreams, and your families’ sacrifices (and tragically, in some homes, young lives themselves) that are betrayed.
’- Shashi Tharoor
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