Episode 2: The Turning Point

If you had a chance to go back to the time you finished your school or college, would you have become something else other than what you are today?

Before I go any further, I would like to thank all those people who have read my first post and encouraged me to go ahead with my writing. Thanks, it feels good to have your support.

The reason behind my question was not to make you think about your past and come up with an answer, but to ask yourselves if you really are in such a position right now that you would rather go back and change what you would become than what you are today.

Almost all of the students would have come across this piece of advice while they were in 12th / 2nd PU – “Study well this year, this will be the turning point of your life”. I used to wonder what was so special about 12th standard/grade. I mean, if it was being called as “The Turning Point”, it surely must have been a very big deal.  Most of us went to some fancy tutorials in addition to the classes at college, because the basic ideology was that colleges don’t teach you anything and you will learn only if you took tuition. This divided the students into three categories. 1) Students who didn’t go to any tuition classes but fared well. 2) Students who attended tuition classes and fared well and 3) Students who attended tuition and got the same result as another student who didn’t even go to college, let alone extra tuition classes. I, just like some of you, belong to the 3rd category. We all just followed what we were supposed to, not what we wanted to. Failing to see the writing on the wall and not giving a damn. And I guess that is where we all slipped, fell into a sinkhole, never to be helped out of it. I wanted to write about this, because now I realize that I could have been in a better place had I paid heed to all those advices and more importantly if I knew this is what engineering would be like and what the future would hold. Of course, I couldn’t/can’t foresee the future but, no one ever told us what it was all about, there was no one to act as a guide and to tell us that we are about to step into a maze. But past is past. I only wish to tell you about the reality that’s out there as seen from my eyes.

After the 12th board exams, there is one more stunt called as the Common Entrance Test for students to get into engineering colleges where the students are allotted ranks ranging from 1 to around 80,000 or even more. Even with an 80,000th rank you could assure yourself an engineering seat, not at some remote part of the state, but you might get one in the city itself. Be it anywhere, a bad rank would sometimes force people to change their profession, but not in this case. Here, the more intelligent ones get into colleges of their choice and the rest, although they cannot choose, still get a seat in some college or the other. So there is no question of missing out on an engineering seat because of a bad rank. In my case though, and I believe in some of your cases too, people used to tell that I wouldn’t get a seat for such a rank (my rank was way below average by the way) and that I would have to go out of the City and study staying away from home and so on. Relatives show a lot of care and concern about you during such times. They are not even bothered about you until then and all of a sudden, when you get your results, you are like their son/daughter.

You endure all of these and more only to get into a college so that you can earn yourself an engineering degree that the society is so badly forcing you to have. You enter college, which is another trap. A trap within a trap within a trap. This is a place where you are forced to do things, compelled to learn about something that would be of no help whatsoever, write tests and exams so that your teacher can compare who is better than the other, where you will be the only one to feel sorry about yourself, or anything at all for that matter. Because truly, nobody gives a dash.

It would have been a lot better if there were only 8-10 top notch colleges (for every state, except the IITs, NITs ) offering engineering courses after 12th. This would have made life easier. If you were good enough to get into a top college, then you wouldn’t have had to worry about your future and having colleges which would not settle for anything less than good would have been ideal. But the case here is different. We are talking about Engineering in India. Do you know how many engineering institutes are there in India? I’ll tell you the numbers. There are 5672 engineering colleges in India, and 1000 of them are in Orissa, around 900 each in Andhra & Tamil Nadu, over 700 in Maharashtra and more than 200 each in Karnataka, Kerala, Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan(Source – Wikipedia). I’ve left out the statistics of the other states. You know how many states there are in India, so just imagine the number of colleges put together from all these states and the number of students graduating out of it! The entire educational structure is like one endless comic strip and no one can ever understand the idea behind granting permission to run all these colleges. More than 95% of them are sub-standard and the whole system seems like a joke.
How do you feel when you realize that you’re just another part and product of this mess?
More to come. Keep watching this space 🙂

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