Archives for December 2009

Like to wish all my readers, a very warm happy holidays and merry Christmas. I don’t watch a lot of Bollywood cinema but yesterday I went with friends to go see 3 Idiots – a movie about lives of 3 engineering college students during the four years in school and then the life afterwards. Having spent my formative 4 years at IIT Kharagpur, the oldest and best (in my completely biased and probably untrue opinion since they are all awesome) of the Indian Institutes of Technology – I was transported back more than a decade in time.

Let me summarize what I learned from the movie about how life and aspirations are evolving in India, the effects of the global pipes (Cisco calls it the Human Network), and what this should mean for education here in my adopted country USA (or the country that adopted me!).


Geeks are Cool (in India)
While people definitely look upto the likes of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Sergey & Brin, there are no ‘highest grossing’ Hollywood movies depicting the lives of MIT or Stanford college students. The college movies that do well here are movies about getting laid, smoking weed or Spring Breaks. I enjoy those movies too, and there is the occasional ‘Good Will Hunting’. But all in all, the celebrated lifestyle is that of either the rich or the jock. This means if I am a kid growing up, I want to be cool – and the route to being cool is to chase money & fame, not invention and entrepreneurship. The heroes in India are no longer the Bollywood stars (only), the younger generation looks up to the engineer entrepreneurs like Nandan Nilekani of Infosys. As Wall St Journal commented recently – 

Twenty years ago, no one could have imagined that four of the 10 richest chief executives in the world could be Indian. But Forbes recently released a top-10 list showing how much India has changed. Lakshmi Mittal, the steel tycoon, was ranked second, followed by Mukesh Ambani (sixth), Anil Ambani (seventh) and Azim Premji (ninth); Warren Buffett came in first.

and –

The heroes of the old India were film stars, cricket players and, perhaps, freedom fighters and politicians. The heroes of the new India include businessmen. In 2003, when MTV India held a poll among its predominantly young viewers to pick the Icon of the Year, Anil Ambani won. The people he beat included filmstar Shah Rukh Khan and cricket hero Sachin Tendulkar.

This transformation was clear in the movie. The “hero” of the movie was a kid who enjoyed learning for learning’s sake – to discover & invent, despised learning by rote – the curse of India education for decades, and goes on to teach kids. And yes, he gets the girl (the one in the orange Sari above).


Education, Education, Education
Nandan Nilekani talks about this at length in his book Imagining India – that India has a demographic dividend but for it to pay off, the country must invest in education. Whether the government is doing this well or not, the individuals definitely are. As the over-the-top melodramatic scenes depicted with tongue-in-cheek humor in the movie show, the 3 kids come from diverse economic backgrounds with the 2 poorest coming from families where there biggest (and probably only investment) is in the future of their kids. This is true in America too – I know of several families where college education is where all the savings go. But in India, 2 trends have made this remarkable – 15 years ago, most colleges were government run and so you either got in (1 in 1000) or you had to go attend a lame school teaching you curricula that was relevant 30 years ago. Today, there are private schools that will cost you an arm and a leg but teach you what you want to learn – computers, telco, management skills – and in English. 


The aspirations have changed too. In two ways, with a diverse (and somewhat less noticed in the west) economy – Indian students no longer are confined to careers in medicine and engineering but can go be newscasters, photographers, animators, storytellers … and earn a decent living doing that. Secondly, the poorer sections of the society are no longer willing to live with words like fate & destiny but are doing all they can to change it – by sending their kids to the best schools they can afford – which is far worse than most schools here but better than no education at all.


Family and Friends
Christmas is a great time to reflect on the year gone by, and as I watched this movie with a group of closest friends – I felt blessed and grateful. I remembered my IIT buddies from days at Kharagpur (India) where we had little in terms of conventional comforts – 100 degrees heat in summer was common with no air-conditioning (except in computer labs), erratic water supply, and dorm food nightmares. But we had friends, lots and lots of them. The bonds we formed are till this day some of the closest.


So as I close out this year, I am thankful to IIT for the education it gave me, the friends I found there, the friendships and hospitality of my adopted country (thank you North Carolina and California) … and to my mentors. One of these days, I will write a post about the 7 mentors that changed my life. 


Till then, go get yourself a (subtitled in English) copy of 3 Idiots (Netflix queue), or better still go watch it (with subtitles) at a movie theater near you.

I am on a 2 week annual vacation to India. I have often written about seismic changes in Indian reality, realty and perceptions. On this trip, I came across Nandan Nilekani‘s book – Imagining India. A thick tome but a book that captures how India has transformed, is transforming and the challenges and opportunities for its future transformation. Anyone looking to understand India must read this book.

I am not going to try to summarize the book but here are some key points that touched me and where I agree with him almost entirely:

The Demographic Advantage
Growing up in India, you were deluged with the message – India is overcrowded and getting worse – and that the reason we could not get a telephone connection in time (it literally took months if not years) was because there were too many people; the reason our roads were always poor was because there were too many people; the reason only 1 in 1000 people could get into an engineering school of choice was because there were too many people. And the solution was to prevent “The Population Bomb” from exploding. This did not make sense to me as I saw crowded cities like Delhi and Bombay offer better lifestyle than my grandparent’s villages in Himalayan foothills. And, from the limited exposure to foreign media – I could see that places like Japan and New York had more people per square mile but did not have starving populations. Something was wrong with the picture.

In reality, the problem was not population but the system governing the population – a thinly veiled socialist rule that tried to optimize our lives every 5 years in the famous five year plans.  Nothing much changed except the face of the politician that claimed to be solving all of our problems through the magic of socialism while fighting off evil capitalism and foreign hand in trade. This translated into very tangible effects on me and my family’s middle-class existence:

• No Books: While we were upper middle class by Indian standards, I distinctly remember that while I went to the best Indian private schools (some Catholic schools, some private run) – our textbooks were rather poor. And for a nerdy kid like me wanting to learn about everything from gravity to super nova, the only books I could lay my hands on were highly subsidized Russian books sold at Russian book fairs.
• No Car: Our first car was a Fiat (that was based on a 1950’s design) bought my father in 1988 for what was at that time his one year’s salary. Imagine that – it would be the equivalent of an upper middle-class American paying $100,000 for a 2009 model car based on a 1960’s design. 
• No Phones: When I went to undergraduate school 2000 miles from my hometown (like going from East Coast to West Coast for college), I had no communication with my family for entire semesters except a solitary phone call from a manned phone booth. These phone booths usually had 2 hour long lines and a 10 minute call could cost you hundreds of rupees.