Periyar is God for Tambrahms !

The Tamil Brahmins today are financially better placed than they were in the early seventies. I grew up in an agraharam and have witnessed the dramatic rise in the prosperity of hundreds of families.
The biggest benefactor to the Brahmins has been the Periyar founded DK [the word is used to describe all the Dravidian parties] and its variants. To appease the OBCs during election campaigns, the party had to always choose short fixes and not proffer long term solutions. [giving fish and teaching to fish]
As a result, the reservations in education and jobs were ill timed and tremendously helped the Brahmins.
Let me elaborate.
1] In the early seventies, the Brahmins were financially weaker [even the few jamindar families had come to grief by then due to the land ceiling act]. The only dominance they had was in education and Govt. jobs.DK in their bid to capture power showed up the positions held by the Brahmins in the Govt. as a symbol of Brahmin hegemony that extended beyond the agraharams.And offered appeasement to the OBCs by way of job reservation in the Govt.
The best tactic against the Brahmins should have been to keep them in a state of sufficiency by not closing the door to the Govt. jobs.[ the most poorly paid and no real sense of power either; the only way to make money is to become corrupt which over a period of time eats into the moral fabric of the community ; how does one discipline the community into any moral framework with blatantly ill gotten wealth -which also needs to be invested in shady investments or investments thru illegal routes -which in turn ensures that one gets more and more tied to the criminals.]
DK should have encouraged the OBCs to compete better in academics. Instead it offered the “fish”, the job, by the reservation policy. This ensured two things:
1, the OBCs didn’t concentrate on studies
2, The state govt got to be increasingly staffed with mediocre people and the irony is that numerically the largest customer block for the state govt are the OBCs themselves.
As a result, Brahmins got into [right thru 70s,80s and 90s] the IITS, RECs IIMs and all the top colleges with little or no competition from the OBCs and went on to the private sector in droves resulting in large number of families transitioning into the middle /upper income class.
2] By late eighties, when the OBCs realized that the private sector is the better proposition and that there is no way of reserving jobs therein by a Govt fiat , the pressure was back on the DK for yet another quick fix.
DK seizing on this opportunity, painted a picture of Brahmin’s affluence as being due to the education system and the education reservation binge started.
Reservation in the few govt colleges could not help in a significant manner. Therefore, DK resorted to starting new engineering colleges [the irony being that these colleges are mostly owned by the OBCs , make money by selling the seats at a premium to the OBCs and admit the Brahmins under the merit category at Govt. fixed fees ! i.e the OBCs are paying for the education of deserving Brahmins !!!]. The small FC quota on a larger base was enough to take in the left out Brahmin candidates. Because of the value system that stressed on education, they excelled and continue to get the best of the private sector jobs. The IT industry for instance has become almost an extension of the agraharam.[ Today, there is hardly any Brahmin home with out a close relative in the US !.]
Ergo, Periyar’s photo deserves pride of place in the grateful Tamil Brahmin homes!!!