Education in India

Do you have days when you feel like your problems weigh squat compared to the hardships in others' lives? Imagine not being given the opportunity to learn more about the world, to be trapped in a town or a city or a group of people with a frog-in-the-well mindset. I then go through the whole process of chiding myself for taking my comforts for-granted, for cribbing about the so-called difficulties in my well-cushioned life.

As a teenager I often had the dilemma - Is it 'Do I get what I deserve' or 'Do I deserve what I get'. Typical existential meltdown.

Recently I had a long discussion over cynicism and idealism in people who at some point wanted to change the world. The conversation obviously included dialogues like "Inside every cynic is a dissapointed idealist" and rebuttals of the nature "Inside every cynic is an idealist who gave up too soon". I definitely believe social change agents need perseverance and patience, if nothing. It is a hard job to defy governments and a harshly profit-centered world. People are quick to assign labels such as 'anti-development', 'marxist', 'socialist' etc. Its rather unnecessary. It definitely ticked me off when I was watching Karan Thapar interviewing Medha Patkar on Devil's Advocate and relentlessly tagging her 'anti-development'.

On another note, I also have much trust in the brilliance of Public Private Partnerships.

After much digression, coming to the title of the post.

The budget came out earlier this July and I was looking particularly at allocations on education and health care. Fiscal allocations and policy making have brought up many questions in me. The more I am exposed to the subject, the higher the number of questions.

I saw this. Very insightful.


Some observations/ideas from the past:

-> I heard from an NRI friend that the 'Teach for India' program only takes NRI's who bring in financial resources, as their fellows, and that her well-qualified IIM-A friend was rejected. Is that true?! If it is, then it is hideous and highly abominable. I love the way the 'Teach for America' program is executed. In fact UT has a very well-known teacher certification program which I was considering earlier. (Teaching in a high school is on my list of '30 before 30')

-> The Union passed a law a few years ago, that went something like this...every school in India that is surrounded by slums, should allocate an appropriate percentage of their admits for students from these communities. However, there was a lot of hullabaloo on the inefficiency of such a law. Kids from poor communities don't integrate well with the rest of the crowd, don't perform well and hence feel ousted and eventually drop-out. An extension of this is the discussion of reservations in higher levels of the Indian education system. I don't particularly oppose reservations because it is a decent quick-fix and just that. By no means is it a permanent solution. Now, if kids from poor families don't fit in a primary school, where then do you start changing things to improve the system?!

-> Another prominent personal debate I can think of, is the rule of compulsory internships in rural areas for medical students in India. The comments that I heard from leaders of medical students' unions were atrocious. They complained about lack of safety in villages and such. I think it's wrong to say "I will not go" instead of saying "I will go if you make sure I am safe".

-> Along those lines, I also think, engineers should be made to teach basic subjects in government schools. Think about the number of engineers that India makes every year and the govt. schools that they could serve, even if each of them worked for 3 months in the 4 years of their engineering study.

-> During my high school years when we were living in Hyderabad, we had a maid at home who was 3 years older. I taught her alphabets and she was pretty thrilled that she could recognize alphabets after that, if not make sense of words. The inability to decipher the script of a language you speak is quite frustrating.

I come back to the issue of Indian demographics and allocation of resources to the needful sectors again.

People between the ages of 0 and 14 yrs - 31.1% of the population, in 2009.
Allocation to education, a meagre 2% of GDP.


and finally (on a lighter note), for Atanu Dey much 'respekt' (in the words of Ali-G) is coming, and this is why.

I do know people who want to give back to the communities that made their degrees cheaper, but there are also those who care not, and for that the 'respekt'. Not out of grudge, although I have many reasons for that too :P

New Beginnings

Looking at the frequency of the me-notepad files in the past 3 years, I realised how much I have changed. I got into an intense relationship, indulged myself thoroughly in expressing every poetic feeling with flowery sentences, transporting myself to unfamiliar worlds like the magnificent foggy roads of Delhi in winters (Yes, I can make the most ordinary of places rosy and dreamy).

As time passed, as the pain set in, as the conflict set in, I bottled my feelings in a glass container. I could look through and know they existed, I was almost scared to look for too long. It wasn't long, before I compressed them. Adiabatically at that. To keep my real-life sanity intact. To not get ahead of myself. After a great ordeal of patching up and finding pieces of me that were lost in transit, in this (I call it) at-times-miserable-but-mostly-immeasurably-happy journey, I am back! Back to cherishing lush green ivies draped on roadside trees towering unusually high, and sun showers highlighting patches of metallic mundane freeways, and writing mellifluous sentences about them :) Instead of being pre-occupied by the same drivel.

So, the mostly-immeasurably-happy journey. I was insecure, possessive, inane (in my defense, if you can't take the worst of me, then forget relishing the best). I was, simply, in love.

But I know, I did it all right.

I experienced all the magical moments life bestows upon us, besides, the uncanny irony that it is rather well-known for.

-Sitting across the table from that special person, listening to the jabber in the group and just admiring the non-sense with puppy-eyed admiration.
-Giving someone the privilege of your undivided attention and tender loving care.
-Standing at the door after he left and staring into the distance till he turned into a tiny fading speck.
-Having him admire all the idiosyncrasies you admire about yourself; be it singing halcyon one-liner songs with the sweetness of a granma's lullaby, while sitting on a lawn under the blanket of midnight's stars or in the privacy of an unlit room.
-or, Painting cartoons like drawing class exercises of primary school instead of complex recurring dreams that are begging to be portrayed and released to life.

Yes, pure indulgence.


I have finally come to the fine realisation that what matters is I have grown.
I know myself more. I understand myself better than ever and I can talk with a surreal assertion about what I want in life and that definitely contributes (one last time) to the immeasurably-happy factor.

dhum pichak dhum

Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it.” -- Buddha

if you have read a few of my previous posts you will notice the repetition of the word "eventful". I look at every phase of my life to be eventful, call it my naïveté. It works wonders for me.
So this summer has been, just that, eventful.

Imagine being absorbed in your work so much that it doesn't leave any time to question your existence, and so you strategically avoid all existential crises (and thus the process of growing up, that's another thing). Done?

Now imagine absolutely loving that work that you do all day. Something else, innit?

The economy is in recession and I could have gotten a moolah paying, sort of soul-selling job this summer, instead, I did what my dad calls 'crazy'. I am volunteering for the Health Systems Lab at the Earth Institute, Columbia University. It's the 2nd smartest thing I have done in my 21 years of existence(First, being declaring a Economics major, 4th year into engineering). This stint is giving me the validation to what I merely 'guessed' was my passion. I like to believe I have a knack of creating win-win situations. So here I am, sitting and creating a whole road-map for what a health system in a sub-Saharan country should be like, drawing successful examples from the world, criticizing the failed ones, and drawing win-win situations!



Read this. Idealistic. But there is truth in it. Yes, you can turn on your cynical radar and spew your criticism all over it.

I was telling a half Indian-half American friend about what I think Indian mentality is like..."we Indians we look around a little, if it seems ok, we take up a job and then learn to love it, likewise, we look around a little, if it seems ok, we get into a marriage and then learn to love the spouse." She found it comical, but agreed and said, "its a very western idea to 'seek out for your passion', the western culture doesn't care about financial security or stability contrary to the eastern counterparts".

But I have grown up seeing people ask for more. Some friends I have will not settle for non-gratifying jobs. Sure, they have difficulties of shunning custom, so they start companies and work after coming home from a 9 to 5 job, and then they leap when they have seen their brainchildren grow to give them that financial security or stability.

It is a 'movement'.

If you are not part of it then you are missing out. Imagine being a college student in 1968 and not being a Sechziger (60er). Not knowing what revolution is. Not knowing what rebellion is. Not knowing what it is to be part of a protest.

Dont miss out on this movement!