Another RANT: The Story of Indian Students
Posted by Prashanth | Filed under Education, FIITJEE Pinnacle, Headshot, School Life
Really, the present happenings across my (older) peers’ lives sends jolts of electricity making all hair on my rise up, and has all the hairless parts goosebumped! In another few months, fate would get me close to something like this. It really makes me uncomfortable looking at people whom I thought were of the deserving kind in a helpless state. Really, Indian Education system makes beggars out of the brightest minds in the country.
Caution: You might see this post the same way you usually see rants on most other Indian blogs, especially on those run by students who are going through the toughest examinations in the world… Or you might see it as another perspective, another unique opinion, or perhaps something a degree lesser than a consolation to all those who have gone crazy in ranting so vehemently not just on their blogs, but in those phone calls better used as ventilators, those conversations which could more or less be addressed as punches on a rice sack or maybe those moments spent in Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt…
Here it goes…
Thinking in depth about everything, education in India lacks the 3 big M(s)… Money, Mindset and Modernisation. These things are barely enough to bring out just a few hundred successful professionals each year with a potential of several million. lack of money is a big problem in itself. Lack of money means so many things… lack of good colleges, lack of sufficient infrastructure in those colleges, or even lack of good teaching faculty in the colleges. The few institutes which DO get money don’t stand up anywhere when compared to the international institutes. Honestly speaking, it is just the maddening admission intake ratio or you might say the filtering process with the least porous membrane that gets nothing but the best inside. Maybe it is the general intellect of the students which gets IITs in the top 100 ranks of the world.
How does this effect India? Due to the lack of quality institutes, the success or the money making tendency of students is concentrated in just a few camps. Because opportunities are so few, and everyone in the populous of a billion odd people have big dreams, especially most literate ones, attachment towards studies is totally lost. Actually, studying is something someone OUGHT to do in order to earn enough to meet the family standards, which disproportionately grows with the country’s average income. The result - desperation,hunger and a famine like state with people craving for drops of those few seats which can mean the difference between owning a 100cc bike and luxury car in India.
There is this trend in India that makes money vending machines to placed in just certain fields. Like for instance, this particular hour has the management guys making the most out of the lot. A few years ago, it was the rapidly growing software engineering industry (which are mostly test centers or menial job sites for the world’s largest software MNCs) that got maximum professionals. All this leads to narrowing down what a student might want to do. Now everyone I know wants to go for the management side after the COMPULSORY engineering course. After all, everyone worries about FUD. With an Engg. degree in hand, he is ready to mint quite a bit, just in case management, which requires any damned degree as a pre-requisite doesn’t work out. The slightly under-exposed or the innocent sort speak what they have in mind… “It would give me better placement!”. The smarter ones, who know people or critics like me are around, fake or artificially create interest towards management. In reality, it is that very interest that the Indian students have lost. Money can actually buy everything, even interest. If a child confesses that he is not interested in Engg., the family and the brigade of relatives have him hypnotized into being interested in that subject.
Really, I know so many people, even upcoming software engg., who don’t have a crumb of interest towards their subject finally ending up as professionals for Indian counter-parts of well-known corporations really complacent about getting a job that pays them a tenth of a million rupees. People fail to realize that it might be a lot when seen in Indian standards, but then it is cheap labour for companies like MS, which would get those drudging jobs else where at a higher rate. Indians have lost choice, taste and the will to opt for what they really desire. Socio-economic conditions keep true interests confined inside, and the worst part being that the student never even realizes that he inside a fake world world which he didn’t actually desired to design. He has a fake illusion of happiness and satisfaction which finally removes feelings like - “Am I going to do this for the next 30 years of my life?” nurturing similar mentality in the next generation as well. The children of the so-called big professionals in India grow up to be in a similar race for trophie made up of anti-matter called success. Its a vicious loop that has to be stopped, and it is not really impossible to accomplish that.
Solutions can be many -
*Availability of greater number of universities
*Larger allocation of budget for higher education
*Competence amongst Indian colleges to go ahead of others in the world
*More diverse corporations basing themselves in India
*Corporations giving out large scale projects amidst Indian minds which are more than capable to create things, provided aptitude is generated at an early age
Aptitude comes during high school, when the student dreams. Dreams can be closer to reality than anyone might think. Dreaming, pondering is an activity that can lead students to dig and know more about what they might be doing in the future. Here, immature kids at the age of 18, who know just a little more than the placement opportunities in different fields decide what they could be doing for the next 42 years of their life. Coming to think about it, how much does an average student know about what exactly happens in in any stream of engineering that he might enroll himself in? How does he know that he is interested in it? Actually, Indians don’t need to know that. It’s almost like choosing what pays the most here. Finally, what you get to see here is brainy kids turning into menially productive mugpots, in time-lapse cinematography. And frankly speaking, I really don’t enjoy any bit of that show…
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24 Responses to “Another RANT: The Story of Indian Students”
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Abhishek Says:
June 7th, 2008 at 5:57 amRead Shantaram.
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Prashanth Says:
June 7th, 2008 at 6:14 amAs far as the plot summary of the novel Shantaram goes, it has more to do with lives of rural to urban Indians without that emphasis on students… Anyway, book recommendations can be done in the comments form of just about any post… Sure, I would give it a read…
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Perx Says:
June 7th, 2008 at 6:35 amWelcome to the club dude! “The youth of India ranting about our medievel systems” club!
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Prashanth Says:
June 7th, 2008 at 7:21 am@Perx: Neat blog there dude. And I have been in this club since a really long time… And thanks for the linkback. Anyway, it must be quite a cultural setback you must be facing after shifting to Kota from a Metropolis…
I too study in a similar environment, but its at Delhi, called FIITJEE Pinnacle… Anyway, best of luck, I would like to see you maintain regularity on the blog! I bet it can’t last for long considering the place where you have gone…
Cheers! -
Prateek Says:
June 7th, 2008 at 7:23 amWhat pìššëš me off more is that because of the “go where the money is mindset”, the few who are actually interested in one of the popular fields almost always end up loosing out because they weren’t as good at, say, physics and chemistry as the other guy.
While what you suggested would definitely help, I think the best way to solve this would be to inspire kids during high school. It’s then that they make these decisions and schools should steer them in the right direction.
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Prashanth Says:
June 7th, 2008 at 7:52 am@Prateek: Agreed, it’s leaving no space for anyone to discover what the student can best perform in. Just the money factor doesn’t generate efficiency, interest and motivation has a huge role too… Unfortunately, money erases those words from a student’s or his family’s dictionary…
PS: Do you feel that my blog is too slow? I did have a reader telling me about it a few days ago. I cleared off the unnecessary PHP calls to replace them with static HTML, disabled and removed unwanted plugins, and even reduced the size of images. I guess Google Analytics is the main culprit, but then I really haven’t seen it behaving this way in some other blogs that I read. Some advice/help would be appreciated…
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Prateek Says:
June 7th, 2008 at 8:07 amI haven’t found it slow enough to be noticeable, but that also might be because I almost never have just one webpage to look at (or wait for). As for speeding it up, there are a LOT of factors which affect a site’s load time. I will however recommend enabling some sort of caching. I’ve heard of a plugin called wp–cache (I think) for Wordpress. Oh and I highly doubt Google Analytics would be “the culprit”.
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Prateek Says:
June 7th, 2008 at 9:13 amAddendum: I noticed you’ve got your Google Analytics code in your `head` tag. Google recommends placing their code right at the end, just before the closing `body` tag.
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Abhishek Says:
June 7th, 2008 at 10:54 amYou’ll get what I mean after reading the book. India is the most difficult place to talk about in the world.
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Abhishek Says:
June 7th, 2008 at 10:57 am@Prashant.PS:
Your blog’s feed is difficult to catch by default.
My hunch is that it’s because of feedburner preventing the default feed if you’ve got some plugin installed.
The feedburner feed works marvelously. Also you might like to have thumbnails stored on your server, that’s how they usually are but sometimes they are created on-the-fly.
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Abhishek Says:
June 7th, 2008 at 11:12 amAnd before I forget, you’ll find it easier to park your scooter/Maruti than your Mercedes Benz. That’s India
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Prashanth Says:
June 7th, 2008 at 11:19 am@Prateek: I really have to do some proper testing with my blog’s theme. It may be too heavy. I have to work a bit on optimising it. Or perhaps my Dreamhost servers are too slow…
Anyway, Google Analytics is known to slow down sites. I have to try moving the code down near the body tag. I really don’t think that the order of execution matters that much. Think of this as the RDS (Rate Determining Step) of an organic reaction… (Forgive me, IIT_JEE prep you know…
) -
Prashanth Says:
June 7th, 2008 at 11:28 am@Abhishek: I will go by your recommendation. Do you own that book?
And coming to the feed, I have not been able to use the live bookmarking option that comes in the address bar in Firefox since I moved to Wordpress 2.5. All the feedburner plugin does is that it redirects the blog’s default feed to the feedburner feed…
And I am not interested in buying large gas guzzling vehicles anyway. May be I would like to own a Mercedes Smartcar… (The one owned by Sophie in Da Vinci Code, or the one owned by Saif in Salaam Namaste!) -
Perx Says:
June 7th, 2008 at 12:07 pm@Prashanth
Thanx! You have a pretty cool blog too!
I didn’t live in a metropolis…… the culture is surely different and old here, but I can see it modernizing slowly…
Yeah, I’ve heard Pinnacle is good too…. u r in +2 right?
I have been updating my blog… I will be regular, cuz if u hadn’t figured out, studies aren’t my first priority
Cheers to u too! -
Perx Says:
June 7th, 2008 at 12:11 pm…..continued
@prashant
yeah, i know this club of ranting youth is pretty old. I mean u ask any one young, and they will have somewhat the same views about our country’s education or even politics that we have, but sadly the country is being run by old people….. living in the past dreams….they don’t even understand our point of view….. what can we expect?
I mean we live in a country, where state boards are considered below private boards like cbse, icse…… this gives much idea about the education system of india -
Prateek Says:
June 7th, 2008 at 8:18 pmPrashanth, order of execution matters, big time! And the thing with caching pages is that even if your theme hasn’t been optimized, it’s only the first page request that’ll take some time. All subsequent requests (until the cached page expires) will load in a jiffy because there’s almost no processing done on the server.
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The Tech Nut Says:
June 7th, 2008 at 11:56 pmHey, I agree too. I feel that if you go with what you believe you’ll excel in, you’ll have more dedication in what you do. It won’t be the drudgery of a job you dread, but a new enjoyable experience. However, there’s one fact of life. from EUReKA, which comes on Star World -> Life - Dreams = Job. If you want to survive, sometimes you might be forced into something you don’t enjoy.
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Ankur Banerjee Says:
June 8th, 2008 at 1:29 amYup, your site is VERY slow to load. As Prateek said, shift Google Analytics to just before the body tag close. And be careful with WP-Cache. It can cause trouble, because by default all the admin and plugin pages aren’t exempted. So it tries to cache an admin page which NEEDS to be executed each time you use it, but fails, and then you get stuck…blah blah blah…big headache. And find out if yours is a reseller account. That could quite possibly be the reason.
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Prateek Vijayavargia Says:
June 8th, 2008 at 9:37 am@Prashanth - Yes I agree with u 100 percent. Its not good for India though. In my opinion, its more important to be happy and satisfied with what u r doing rather than just earn money at where ur heart isn’t. Anyways, I hope things improve. Rather than blaming the authorities, I feel its the mindset and people who have to change, as Obama wud have said - Change We Can Believe In.
And Yes, Ur Site does load very slowly as compared to other blogs. And I suppose maybe Google Analytics is the culprit, because it shows on Firefox status. So hope u can work on it
Prateek
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Prashanth Says:
June 10th, 2008 at 3:23 am@Vivek: The thing is that excellence, and not just survival is possible in almost every field that’s there… People just don’t give choice, and that option in itself any chance for it. Life+Dreams = Self-Satisfaction. After all, you do need to interpret your dreams right as that’s gonna decide what you would do in the next 42 years…
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Prashanth Says:
June 10th, 2008 at 3:28 am@Ankur, Prateek and Prateek: Fine then, I would get to work to see if that really helps. And then, I really can’t do much if my Dreamhost servers aren’t fast enough… or the hosting plan I use doesn’t guarantee speed. A little optimization should have it working usable enough I guess…
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achyuth sanjay Says:
June 11th, 2008 at 3:22 amjust to point it out, you know, there might be few people who are interested in management after engg. and you just cannot conclude the above debate for all people taking mgmt. after engg. (probably like me, and seriously i am not feigning interest for it)
as for the rest of ur debate, i agree with you totally.
and btw, just to inform everyone, kerala’s education minister is proposing to introduce a 3000 question Question Bank, and all questions in the kerala entrance exam for engg. and medicine will be from that book!! the reason for this is that in kerala, after 10th most people prefer to join CBSE schools rather than state boards, because CBSE students perform better (because of poor state curriculum)! the question i want to ask here is, is THIS the solution to bring CBSE and state syllabi at level grounds??
when i heard this for the first time, it sounded insanely hilarious to me!! -
The Tech Nut Says:
June 11th, 2008 at 7:40 amRegardless of the fact that I am a Malayalee, yes, the decision by the Education Minister is pretty uncalled for.
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Rohit Khosla Says:
June 23rd, 2008 at 6:11 am1. yes ur site is slow to load. not being a gek, i have no clue why is it so
2. the reason for the absurd high entrance bar in higher education is the very cause of it - government funding.
can i ask why should the KG class fee be higher than the IIT fee?
It is a neat system concocted by middle class to keep others out.
The entry bar (high fee for a good school) is in the school stage and the college is cheap. This inverted structure has lead to all sort of problems and the collapse of any intellectualism in our universities.
3. Instead the government should (a) have no funding for higher education (b) fund only schools - free and universal education in the primary and secondary level. (c) provide limited scholarships and limited interest free loans for those who are interested in H.E
