Reservation and the SC/ST atrocity act is a curse upon this nation. They took away the life of Sahil Wakode. Let me explain why I say this. I too have studied at one of India's premier institutions, and I saw something that people are often unwilling to discuss honestly. There can be an enormous academic gulf between students sitting in the same classroom. This does not necessarily mean that one group is hardworking and the other is not. Some of the students who struggled the most were also among the hardest-working. The uncomfortable truth is that human ability has natural limits. The human brain, like the human body, differs from person to person. Exercise cannot turn every man into an Olympic athlete, and effort cannot give every student the same aptitude for mathematics, abstraction or rapid learning. Hard work can take a person a very long way, but it cannot abolish differences in innate ability. Yet modern Indian society refuses to accept this simple fact. Modern Indian parents are taught to believe that hard work is the answer to everything. When a child struggles, they do not ask whether the child has reached the limits of his particular aptitude. They tell him to work harder. They beat him, shame him, compare him with other children and make him believe that failure is a moral defect. This becomes particularly vicious when education is treated as a matter of family honour and social status. And then we take a student who might have been perfectly capable of succeeding in an ordinary college, place him in an extraordinarily competitive institution through a reservation system, and surround him with students selected from an entirely different academic distribution. What happens next? The student does not suddenly become stupid. He is simply competing in an environment in which the relative gap between him and his classmates may be enormous. He works harder and harder, yet continues to see others effortlessly doing what takes him hours. His marks remain low. His confidence collapses. And because this is India, marks are not merely marks. They become a public measure of intelligence, worth and family prestige. The student begins to believe that everyone around him is discovering what his parents refuse to admit: that he cannot keep up. That is where reservation becomes cruel. Had the same student entered a college whose academic level was closer to his own preparation and aptitude, he might have been an average student instead of a perpetual failure. He might have competed with his classmates, made friends, succeeded at something and left college with his confidence intact. Instead, our caste-based admission system can put him into an elite environment where the academic mismatch becomes a source of constant humiliation, while the surrounding culture tells him that there is no legitimate explanation for his struggle except that he has not worked hard enough. This constant humiliation makes him resort to desperate measures like cheating. This is not compassion. It is cruelty disguised as social justice. And there is another poisonous consequence. Once caste becomes institutionalized in admissions and discipline, every academic dispute can acquire a caste dimension. The student sees himself as a victim of caste. The institution becomes afraid of appearing casteist. Teachers become conscious of the SC/ST machinery hanging over every interaction. Resentment grows on all sides. Reservation and SC/ST atrocity act is breaking India