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Archives for December 2009

Days of Our Lives – On IIT Life, Indian Education, and Geekdom

admin · December 26, 2009 · 3 Comments

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.

Scene from movie 3 Idiots (courtesy: www.santabanta.com)

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.

Imagining India with Nilekani of Infosys

admin · December 4, 2009 · 2 Comments

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. 
I can go on and on about lack of basic medical care facilities that nearly killed me while studying at India’s premier engineering school, or ‘express’ trains that took 28 hours to traverse 1500 kms with average delays of 4 to 12 hours.

Things are Better

Today, everything has changed and while India is far from perfect (or even functional) – its like India went from a 1900s America to 1950s America in 15 years in stead of 50. That’s quite an achievement.
This transformation is creating massive opportunities at the bottom of the pyramid. These range from somewhat well-known $2,000 Tata car to small innovations like single use shampoo packets that cost $0.10 (ten cents). The impact of a ten cent shampoo or detergent for cleaning clothes is not to be underestimated. It transforms lives by giving the poor dignity.
Telco
If I had to pick two industries that have transformed the most and probably had the greatest impact on lives of people – it would be telecom and banking.
India went from 5 million in 1991 (mostly landlines) to over 500 million telephones (mostly mobile). In a nation of about 1 billion people, that means teledensity increased 100x. While these statistics are amazing, the impact on people’s lives is even more so.
My Neighborhood Electrician 
Everytime my Dad needed an electrician for an odd job around the house, till 10 to 15 years ago – he would walk over to the neighborhood shopkeeper that sold and repaired transistor radios and televisions and had a few people on his payroll. He would dispatch one of his men and collect the fees from my Dad. The electrician that actually fixed the wiring or repaired our television (yes, the socialist era TVs needed fixing on a regular basis) would get to keep a very small percentage of the fees.
Today, the electrician does not work for the middleman. He has more than one mobile phone and we simply dial him directly. He shows up promptly, charges us a more reasonable fee and gets to keep all of it. This has at least 3 beneficial effects:
  1. No middleman means he gets to keep 100% of revenue and not 20% to 50%. This essentially at least doubles his income.
  2. Being able to respond to calls while working, he claims he now visits 2 to 4 times more customers a day. 
  3. We, the customers, get immediate and personalized service which is greatly more accountable.
So, the electrician that was making about $25 to $50 per month now makes $500 to $1000.

All of this is changing millions of lives. Watch Hans Rosling’s TED India talk to see how rapidly this change is happening.

And watch the following video to see India’s glorious technological past – water harvesting techniques perfected hundreds of years ago showcasing great engineering feats.

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