Evanescent Thoughts

The following is a random premature thought of what in my opinion is going wrong in India, which I am sure a lot of people think about.  Well I am  not gonna put on the Raja Ram Mohan Roy costume and lecture  about changing the society and  stuff ,  but I do  feel  that filling up a few bytes on the internet about this isn’t  a very bad idea either.

So, Whats wrong with India ??? I mean we are a body of 1.2 billion people constituting 20% of the world population. Which means out of every 10 guys on this planet, 2 of them are from India and  2 are from China and the rest 193 nations of the world constitute the remaining 6. Yet we just have nine Noble Laureates, and three of them are of foreign Origin. When we are 1/5 th of world population,  no matter how screwed up you were with  your 10th grade probability calculations, its not a tough job to figure out that Indians must be in top of everything.. not just population. But why is it that, when u take any field, its tough to find an Indian doing better at it ?? I am not talking just about Academia or Research for which every Indian’s instant response is the two worded phenomenon – “Brain Drain”.  Lets talk about sports.. How tough is to find a runner who can at least fetch a bronze medal in Olympics. Why is it that when we have Hockey as our national game, a majority of Indian kids don’t even know the names of the players(not like I know any of them). But every one does know that Sachin Tendulkar did start playing cricket at the age of 16 and has blah blah runs in his pocket and runs a restaurant in Mumbai. If we are so obsessed with cricket, why don’t we bloody change our national sport to Cricket !!!. Whats stopping us from doing that. Oh wait !! we are a democratic nation run by a bunch of corrupt politicians who roam around like zombies in wheel chair.

Population :

Population IS THE biggest feature of India. As a strength, it gives us diversity. You can go all around the US and  you will pretty much get bored of the same burger and pizza and the food varieties and culture it throws at you. Now back in India, you walk a few kilometers out of your district, you might actually end up in a totally different culture.. A different sect of people who talk a different language,  who listen to a different music, eat different food, have a whole array of local cinemas and cine-stars.

I sometimes get curious as to how India ended up with such a big population. I mean how ?? May be the so called Gods had such a plan you know, to stuff maximum number of people into this country and  to top it , they had to make the whole country  HOT and TROPICAL that when Mr Software-Engineer returns from work in the evening, he has to deal with both the HUGE traffic and import supernatural powers to tackle the hot weather outside. At the end of the day, all that is on top of anyone’s mind is  how to survive in this place. At times we even manage to have entertainment amidst all this and that’s why people all over the world respect Indians. They can almost survive any bullshit thrown at them. They are cheap labor who don’t mind sweating it out because compared to what they were doing back at home, anything that you throw at them sounds like luxury.

If India has a 1 billion population, it also has  an equal  number of  divine supernatural entities aka God. At times, you even wonder if they count the  number of Gods into the population stats. And Sachin Tendulkar does contribute under both the human and  divine category to the population stats.  How are you even supposed to survive in  a country with so much population??.  On one side, having a diverse population is a positive thing. But what actually happens in India is a different story.  Lets do a simple math. Say X guys were supposed to live under a km-square of area and it takes Y units of money to provide all necessary amenities to that area. Doesn’t it make sense that with the X very high in India, it would actually be easier to develop infrastructure and facilities ?? No .. that doesn’t happen because, One – we don’t pay our taxes properly. We just love painting our money black. And two – we cause more damage to infrastructure than the amount we contribute to build that.  And the moment we step into a foreign nation, we don’t spit,  we don’t urinate in public. We suddenly get a public sense of responsibility. We enforce that because every one else around you does so. In India, if you don’t cause any public nuisance, you get a nice portrait of yourself   in the “Hall of Clowns who follow rules”.  And nobody wants to change. We just continue living our lives putting up with all of the crap happening around us and contribute to it.

The Indian Rat Race at Schools  :

Lets get back to where all the talented people in India go to ??. The first thing that you notice is, every body in India wants a shortcut to success. By success we mean making more black money. How many of us actually think about living the life on our own ??. Half the Indian kids grow up listening to their parents. The parents mold  their kids into who they wanted to be when they were once in their childhood. Its  a sort of a pipeline where your dad wants you  live his dream and you want your kids to live your dream. You just throw your dreams onto your kids.  “Here kiddo, take all this books and digest them and become a doctor., Because, I once wanted to be a doctor and I didn’t have  facilities back in my childhood to achieve that.  And this will also make you rich and powerful in the society”.  I agree on the fact that parents have the responsibility to teach their kids of how to  become successful. But going a step further and choosing how they do it and in what field they do it is an over kill. And hence every kid gets lectured to be an engineer or a doctor. No one advices their kids or even talks to them about other areas like sports, literature, science, history,  economics, politics, art etc. Those fields are for kids who missed writing their 12th std board exams or those who forgot to bring a pencil to exam hall and lost out on  marks because they didn’t manage to underline the important points in their answers.

I feel like kids of this age are stereotyped into doing things. Each mom compares her kid with the other kids in the neighborhood and lectures him/her about how they need to take them as role models and score better marks in the next exam. And thus the rat race of engineers  begins with a big fat salary cheque on the other end. So most  of  the kids never get to  explore the opportunities in the other fields. A lot of talent actually comes  out in this Rat Race. Thats why when you go abroad and see a graduate student struggling with calculus, you just realize how great the Indian Schooling was. But most of these kids who could do calculus by just hand waving, don’t actually end up as successful engineers compared to what  US produces as undergrads and graduates. Thats just because once the Rat Race is over, we all take a well deserved rest during our undergraduate period. In the contrary, students abroad have a steep learning curve during Undergrad and graduate courses. Which just doesnt happen in India. Thats why even though we have a very successful schooling system, we have a very bad undergraduate experience ( IITs in my opinion can be exempt). There are several perspectives to this but lets rest on this.

Why Brain Drain??

So we only manufacture engineers in our country and what happens next ??  All these bright engineers run away to better places in the world because, those  not-so-talented kids who chose  the other important fields that constitute a society, do a bad job in their field and make the place a hell to live. To become a developed nation, India doesn’t need top notch computer scientists, but it needs talented people in the other fields who make India a better place to live. You need a good politician, a good economist a good city planner,  so on. But no one wants to choose these because they are poorly paid or have no clear shot at success in Indian terms and scenarios. So why not give these guys who do the less interesting but important jobs a better future. Lets lure the talented people into these fields.  One of my  batch mates  who graduated with an Instrumentation  & Control Engg degree, decided that Politics was the field he wants to be after he joined a company for work.  He even went on to enroll for some correspondence courses in politics as he works. Now if some one had put a thought in him when he was a kid that a politician was some one whom the society respects and needs,  he wouldn’t have wasted 4 years in NIT Trichy attending crappy engineering classes.  We would have had a  good politician who could have run the CWG without any corruption or not cause $36 Billion  loss to Indian government over the spectrum allocation. What India needs is not eradicating brain drain and stopping the talent from going outside the country. But  what India  needs is to make sure that  a fair share of the young talent pool goes on to contribute and develop the  other  fields that contribute  to the society. And of course yeah better politicians.

PS : All of the above are  random thoughts feel free to smirk them off if you are not in the mood to listen.