Saturday 3 April 2010

JEErs and CATcalls...

The lamentable fact in this country is that entrance examinations are probably the national pastime for all young adults. Its an unnecessary act of heartbreak, emotional nerve-wracking stupidity that seems to have become a rite of passage to adulthood for most of the Indian teenagers around. However...this is not a blog of derision...NOT a blog about the inescapability and the inevitability of that gruesome monster that is the Joint Entrance Examination. No, this blog is about how, in a stupid, convoluted, rather fucked up way...it WORKS. Yes, everyone says its a fucked up system...that discourages, rather counterintuitively, the very principles it is supposed to uphold. Yes, the people who run the system KNOW that it is fucked up...and very broken(in the same way the government's welfare schemes are broken...or that expensive vase that you just decided was a frisbee one day got broken). But it WORKS!!! And how.. India produces over 350000 engineering students a year, it's world renowned for the (lack of)quality of its engineering graduates, and despite none of our colleges being in the top 100 of the world... We still produce some of the biggest names in corporate legend...and enterpreneurship history.

Yes...we are probably one of the foremost nations in terms of edcational prowess in the world today. Simply because Indians are the best sort at reverse engineering...and (legal)creative accounting(Ramalinga Raju notwithstanding). We have the unique ability of taking a system, and destroying it...before remodelling it to suit our very obfuscate(to ourselves that is) needs. Simply put...we can take any system...fuck it up...and make our own Indian potpourri out of it...don't think so?? I have one word for you... Rajnikanth.

So what we have done is taken a perfectly good aptitude test system...and twisted it into a rote learning, Kota-sightseeing, TIME classes joining, billion dollar enterprise. As a result...everyone is happy... the Kota tourism industry is booming, TIME classes are flourishing...and our parents are thrilled at their wards actually DOING something for their future. People are idiots, as a general rule, and where the herd mentality doesnt strike, the power of money does. Irrespective of the fact that a clerk in a bank makes more than a startout engineer, after the Sixth Pay Commission(yes I will be writing a blog on that too..), there is always that iota of hope that the erstwhile engineering graduate might just be THE one to earn some double digit salary(in lakhs...we aren't thaat poor a country). And now I'm just going to stop paranthesizing everything and get to the point...

Yes..we have a flawed system...but this flawed system works very well. Lets face it, we have shit colleges...shit profs, a really shit counselling system, and probably the most shit idea of aptitude tests in the whole world. And we are a bunch of really desperate, materialistic people looking to make as much money as possible in our rather short and meaningless lives. And while I would like everything about our educational system to change...rather radically...NOT that stupid bullshit that Kapil Sibal insists on doing...but REAL change... let's face it, it's not going to happen. When it comes to the Indian tertiary education system... it just has to be, in the most despicable way, said that All Izz Well. That just about sums it up. Oh, and DIE Kapil Sibal DIE. I do hope the CBI doesn't read blogs...but then, knowing the effectiveness of the Cyber Crimes division...it should take them a mere 29 years to find and arrest me...

2 comments:

  1. honestly..well put...:) and as for mr sibbal's fate.. amen.

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  2. I enjoyed this post very much. You seem to have acute insight as to what you're talking about but one thing that I wanted you to explain further - "how" does this retarded education system, broken as it may, "work very well"? You say it works well but you don't give a context as to how it works well or what the end product is. You just mention that it is unintentionally good. It would be nice if you could explain your stance further.

    Cheers!
    Ragav,
    SMU!
    www.stopmanufacturingus.com

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