A country of Consultants

This one comes at 330 in the morning with music blaring outside my room, while people are cheering one fellow to finish an entire bottle of some liquid which people tell me has earned Mr Mallaya a few million dollars. So what is so urgent about this post? Well its simple. I went about my usual trip on the google ride and looking for interesting articles on some topic which was eating my head. These days the topic is education in india and how it can be improved. Obviously it’s a very complex question, probably at the same standards of difficulties as the Kashmir problem. But then we need to think about it and come with some solution. So at this point of time I would like to bring to notice some aspects of this which may be worth noticing. The Rights to Education bill with its whole lot of jargon was passed. And this is where you start seeing the bone of contention. Don’t see it?

Well it was these two economists from varsities in the fabled country of America. The land where all our smart guys go, learn some more smart things and then end up working for smart corporate building/researching smart things. Sincerely. Now these smart people while working on these smart things wrote an article on one of the newspapers in the country where they have mentioned what they understand of the Right to Education Bill and they go on to then propose some improvements according to them.

Of course the fact that they have such a impressive profiles means that most of the people who tend to read these things start reading the article with the assumption that they are right, that the research they have done is correct (@Chazz and sathya – note) , that the recommendations which are given in the article are perfect solutions to India’s problems. So after reading the article some of the recommendations seem good. Actually, it’s too good to be true.
Now after so so so long a reading, I will bring you to the main point. We are a country of consultants. We probably were the ones who wrote the bible of Mckinsey and BCG. Am sure you don’t even need to be told why I have made this comment. There are quite a few among you who are right now thinking –

“This guy does not know exactly what to write, I should tell him what he should do” It’s just in our blood. Your mom will tell you what medicine to take, dad will say what bike to buy, girlfriend will tell you what hair style to sport and the list goes on irrespective of whether we have any knowledge or not. My hypotheses is that the lesser you know on the topic the more fascinating are you “advises”. On topics as unimportant as dresses and bikes even I am ready to hear you out. But when people start discussing politics, oh the best example for this is that group of 40-60 year olds who meet up in arbit locations like trains compartments, parks, office corridors etc and start “discussing” what is “wrong” with the country. I mean come on man gimme a break. What is the point if you tell all is wrong with the country’s politician and law&order and then try to bribe the ticket collector because you forgot to buy the ticket?

All that I expected in the article was some solution at some concrete stage man. What was the point of suggesting “we should punish non-performing schools and incentivize the ones performing well” Even the kid in that school will tell you that is a good solution. If to make that solution in the first place you needed a B.Tech degree from IIT and then a MS in some US varsity followed by a PhD then lets compare your efficiency compared to that kids efficiency. He outscores you a million times over. So obviously the correct way to prove the argument wrong is to allow the scholar to go on and present a more concrete solution which has some practical feasibility.

Now that I have vented some anger of mine at the sheer callousness with which our smart people are taking up these opinion spaces in newspapers, I know that the guns are now trained towards me. You say – So Ravi, you also have some of these degrees so why don’t you propose some solution. And the answer to that is – well I have not spent the appropriate time on this and now that me and my few friends are working on this in a concrete manner we plan to come with a working model soon. I assure you there wont be much consultancy in that post.

As always, please feel free to comment on the post and make this a healthy discussion. J