2421000 idiots!

By Ranjan Yumnam *

2421000 is the total population of Manipur according to the census of India's projections. And I wish we all were idiots like the smart idiots in the latest Bollywood flick-3 Idiots. The lead actor wears a thinking cap, and he has been often compared with Tom Hanks, an actor I suspect the same actor secretly emulates.

Okay, 3 idiots is a Hindi movie-so be it-but the lesson the movie tries to teach us and is worth absorbing is this: Never ever force anyone, especially your kids, to choose a calling or a career because you want them to or because of the ill-perceived importance that society attaches to some particular professions.

You know what I mean. In Manipur, the craze among the parents is to send their children to expensive private coaching centres to crack the entrance examinations of medical and engineering colleges. Fine, no problem with that. The question that needs to be asked is whether all of these young boys and girls actually possess the aptitude to be a doctor or an engineer, most of whom would end up as mediocre ones anyway.

I doubt.

Among them, wasting away their talent could be a future virtuoso painter, singer, tennis star, a professor, an ace photographer, an able administrator and anyone excelling in a given field. Is becoming a doctor or an engineer the pinnacle of our aspiration horizon? If that is so, sorry I don't agree with you. Have a nice day.

3 idiots, which is inspired by Chetan Bhagat's novel Five Point. Someone mocks at the education system that we follow, the system that rewards rote learning and puts down innovative ideas and the students who come with such ideas-often with adverse consequences. The lead actor's character tells his pals worried about exams' results "Do not think about success, think about excellence and success will follow you". That is what we should remember and put into practice.

Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Our children are the prisoners of a rigid evaluation routine called examination that tests their mucking up abilities rather than their comprehension and problem solving wits in a span of three hours-a time not even sufficient for watching a comedy movie.

If you forget something, which we all do, during this all-important and gruelling three hours drill, you are out of the race and could cost you a seat in the institution you always wanted to attend-and sometimes a life in the extreme case.

If examinations are a necessary evil and a systemic flaw, then the way we choose what to study and which college to attend is also to blame for the progressive dullness of our minds and the mass production of unemployable graduates year after year. Our children and for that matter the parents chase after big names, like teenagers swearing by branded labels, disregarding the intrinsic calibre of a child and her suitable stream of studies.

In short, we ignore aptitude for latitude to gain status and prestige. I wonder what prestige one can earn if he does badly in a field he dislikes in the first place. A dog in the manger is what a person would ultimately become if he has the natural talent of a cricketer and performs the job of a singer.

We lose three things from such mismatch of abilities and actual assignment of professions to these confused souls. First, we lose a valuable asset in the society by sacrificing a person to a wrong profession. Second, a profession loses its face by the presence of misplaced quacks in its midst. Third, we lose our faith in the human spirit.

Not all bad academic decisions are because of the parents or their wards' lack of understanding of the aptitude versus latitude situation. Sometimes, we goof up because we simply do not have the options to choose from. India, not to talk of Manipur, suffers from a woeful lack of institutions that can deliver quality education.

The seats available in our universities are too few that can't meet the demand of the ever rising number of students in a country that does not know birth control methods. So those who have not been lucky enough to get high marks in the sham called examinations cannot enter the topnotch institutions or get to study the subjects of their choice.

The result : they end up wasting precious years in a wrong college suffering a subject they like only as a second fall-back option, if not the one they hate. It is no surprise then that our campuses are full of unhappy students seemingly upto nothing, good for nothing, hoping for nothing and nothing caring for them a hoot. That's the state of our education in general in the country.

The solutions are simple but difficult to carry out. Sitting in my office, I can intone thus: establish new colleges, upgrade schools and appoint great teachers. Let a thousand universities bloom and transform all of them into IITs, IIMs, Delhi University, AIIMS so on and so forth. Thank you very much.

The challenge is to do it in a practical manner. One way, among many others possible, is to reduce our spending on bombs and missiles, and instead of investing in the business of (in)security, allocate more portion of the GDP to the education sector.

One country has actually done it to the extent of entirely ridding its army and according to the World Database of Happiness, that country happens to be the happiest nation on the earth. The country is Costa Rica. It is not a case of extremely happy coincidence either. Countries which give more money to its military set-up are also the countries with the least number of contented people.

So what are we waiting for : Say no to arms, and yes to schools until we can all shout in unison "Aall iss welll".

Ranjan Yumnam

* Ranjan Yumnam, presently an MCS probationer, is a frequent contributor to e-pao.net. He can be contacted at ranjanyumnam(at)gmail(dot)com. This article was webcasted on January 03, 2010.