What does ‘merit’ mean? And how it relates to investing

There I was, queuing up for the ladies’ room and the line went from right outside the door up about one-and-a-half flights of stairs. There were 52 women waiting (yeah, I counted). Next to the ladies’ was the gents’ and the men were just strolling in and out—there was no wait at all.

And this is not an outlier situation. This is the case pretty much in every public place in every country.

What does this say about fairness and equality? It could well be that similarly sized spaces were allotted for both the men’s and women’s toilets, but then how do we end up with these unequal and frankly unfair waiting times?

Here are some reasons. Obviously, urinals take up less space than stalls. Then there’s the fact that women’s physiology and clothing require more time to manoeuvre, making the whole process more time-consuming than for men. Not to mention that a certain number of women will be pregnant or on their period and are more likely to be looking after children or elders. That pushes the average turnaround time up even further. All of these result in the mind-bogglingly unequal waiting times we see in such places.

This isn’t my discovery. In fact, there have been ‘potty parity’ movements around the world to ensure that the outcome for users is equal, rather than focusing on allotting an equal amount of space for the two kinds of toilets.

At this point, you may be wondering, ‘What is this discussion on toilets doing in a business paper?’ Well, it is symbolic of what equality means and how it can be interpreted.

Every time I see a discussion on merit versus any kind of affirmative action or reservation, I think—what is ‘merit’? Can I, as a person who grew up as a child of two professors in a house full of books, really say that I am competing on the same basis as someone who may be a first-generation learner just because we are answering the same exam?

It really came home to me when I was talking to a friend who runs an after-school education centre in his father’s village. He said that it was not an especially poor village. Even so, the schoolkids did not see a written word outside their school because the shops did not have name boards and there were no magazines or books at their homes. A majority of readers of this newspaper cannot envisage such deprivation.

Most children in our country do not study in a school which can even get them to the bare minimum level of reading, writing and arithmetic.

Now suppose someone does get into a so-called good school on the basis of some social quota; even then, is it a level playing field? Besides the way such children are often treated by other students and teachers, they also lack the kind of support at home that other kids may take for granted. There is also the prism of expectations: both in terms of the chores they are expected to do after school hours as well as how much encouragement they get to score well and aim high.

And I have not even come to the generational disadvantages faced by many—not just in education, but even in basics like health and nutrition. Not to mention the mental health implications of being humiliated and discriminated against all your life.

However much we may say that caste discrimination does not exist in India, listings on most modern matrimonial sites expose it as a lie. Not to mention news snippets of people and even children getting beaten up for ‘offences’ like drinking from the wrong water vessel or going on horseback for their baaraat (wedding procession).

A long-time friend who only recently shared that he belonged to what is called a Scheduled Caste told me that when his father was studying in a village school, he had to clean the classroom and then listen to the teacher while sitting in the veranda outside the classroom. When his mother herself became a teacher, she could not even go up to the desk of upper-caste students.

Can you imagine the impact of this trauma and humiliation?

The really sad part is that this friend did not use caste reservation and neither did his daughter. But his daughter told me that even in a professional college in a metro city like Mumbai, the caste question was always an unpleasant undercurrent. That is still the lived reality in metros, let alone smaller towns and villages.

In investing, when our portfolio is doing well, we attribute it all to our genius-level stock picks, without giving good luck a thought. Whereas when the portfolio crashes, we have many villains to blame, from market operators to shady managements and bad luck.

In other aspects of life too, we hate to attribute our success to privilege, or the ultimate lottery of where we were born. We do not want to admit that we would not have reached where we have were we born to landless labourers or pavement dwellers. We credit only our merit.

There is reason to examine all this. What is real parity? What is privilege? What is equality? And what does merit really mean?

The author is founder of First Global and author of ‘Money, Myths and Mantras: The Ultimate Investment Guide’. Her X handle is @devinamehra