Out of Hibernation after a long time...I just wanted to make this Christmas Break more fruitful than just all-day napping and late night movies !! More Blogging hopefully !!
I watched 3 Idiots few nights ago and I must admit I totally loved the film! Perhaps that's because I could so relate to it, having been in the same 'idiotic' shoes about half a decade ago. Most of those wonderful idiots I did my engineering course with continue to be very close friends. And while those four years will always be remembered as 'the best days of my life', the good part about not literally being 18 till you die is you can step back and see the flaws in the system.
The one question that I always think of is, “Why did we end up in engineering?” I for one simply went by the overriding family profession and respect coupled by the fact that my Class 12th marks allowed me a free seat at a good college in Bangalore. Some Farhans gave in to parental pressure, others like Raju figured an engineering graduate fresh out of college would get a job easier than an arts, science or commerce graduate, still others decided the four-year long engineering course would complete the 16 yrs of education required to be eligible for the GRE, just a precious few Ranchos came because Mechanical Engineering is what they could visualize doing for the rest of their lives.
If we discovered through first year that this isn't what we were cut out for, opting out would mean sacrificing a year. Not too many of us had the courage, so we just carried on. Conversely, friends of mine who did their undergrad abroad were asked to take all the courses that were not related to their majors in the first semester, so they'd have tasted everything before they decided on what they wanted to do.
As we settled in, we discovered the dreaded ’s’ word in all engineering colleges - submissions. So we got about writing file after file, assignment after assignment, drawing graph after graph. Sure we understood that the observations, inferences and graphs would differ every time the experiment was done, but why we need to hand write the procedure that had remained the same for the past 20 years is still unanswerable? But 'photocopy' was taboo. And the worst part, thanks to some apparatus not functioning properly, or not functioning at all, we actually copied the one thing we shouldn't have - the actual findings, from reports handed down by our seniors!
Then comes the even more fearful oral examinations or vivas as they're popularly called. Having an external examiner come and question you about topics that the internal never covered and put you in a pool of uncertainty. During the written examinations, if you got the right answer but didn't get it in the requisite number of 'steps', chances are your marks would be cut. So we all prayed to the God of memory rather than the God of logic.
Some things came as a whiff of fresh air in this monotonous monochrome, prime amongst those, our third and final year projects. The smell of solder metal in the air, the familiar pricks of foundry and forging, turbines and IC Engines, the excitement of designing and building a concept model and seeing it work - moments I felt truly alive. They were few and far between.
When we finally stepped out of the four-year whirlwind, not one of us was equipped to even read a salary slip, and most of us lacked any communication skills whatsoever - the fallouts of a unilateral, not to mention outdated, syllabus.
I have great expectations from the current HRD minister, who's at least shown some gumption in revamping the school system. From reducing the marks system to Grading system in CBSE, whether he'll ever make higher education more flexible is questionable, but the real point is, that the onus isn't purely on the government. It's on society at large, parents who don't bother to ask their child what their hearts calling is, teachers who don't bother counseling students, professors who insist on memory rather than knowledge, recruiters who go purely by grades and peers who make competition an evil word.
Until we realize that, you could pat your heart a thousand times and convince it that all izz well, which we get along fine with the current system, that restructuring is a distant goal but not an urgent need, but try telling that to the families and friends of the 8000 students who commit suicide in India every year.
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