Growing up in Guntur, India, structural inequality was not an abstraction — it was the street I grew up on. For centuries, the caste system fixed entire communities into place at birth, and the doors that mattered — schools, government jobs, land — opened or closed accordingly. India’s fix was Reservations, an affirmative action system so large it now sets aside as much as half of university seats and civil service jobs for historically disadvantaged groups.

The goal in 1950 was reasonable: repair a specific, documented harm. But policy has a way of outliving its purpose once politicians discover what it can do for them. Over the decades that followed, Reservations shifted from repair to political currency. Every election brought pressure to add another group to the list or raise the ceiling again. The pendulum, once aimed squarely at fixing a real wrong, swung past the center of the arc and kept going — until communities with no personal connection to the original injustice found themselves locked out by the very system built to correct it.