Mr Rahul Gandhi, take note, don’t give…

Rahul Gandhi is clearly out of touch with how much education — especially in any technical field such as medicine or engineering — costs these days in India. He also seems to have a rather erroneous idea of how much a newspaper costs in India too — even taking inflation into account — if he indeed offered a paperboy a Rs 1,000 note for a single copy. Newspapers are considerably more expensive in the west than here, so the Gandhi scion may not have merely been condescending when he offered the spunky boy the largest note in circulation, but simply forgot he was in Bhopal and not Boston. However, to expect any vendor to proffer change also betrays his ignorance about ground realities in India.

It was also charmingly naïve of the Congress vice-president to imagine that the boy’s dream of becoming a doctor would be fulfilled, or even given a fillip, by a single Rs 1,000 note. As any aam aadmi could have told him, far from covering the actual fees of a medical course, it would not even suffice to grease the palm of an office clerk to get into a good school en route to higher education, or fund joint entrance examination coaching classes. The solution offered by Sajid Ali, a local Congressman who owns a medical school, is far better: a guaranteed seat for the boy when he finishes school —from the promoter’s quota, no doubt.