Quote:
Originally Posted by Amartya Ever wonder why India has an "IT industry" and China has manufacturing and Japan, USA and Israel have the inventions, the innovations etc? |
The Indian education system is geared to-wards teaching you bunch of things. They don't worry about making you a thinker, innovator, creator, inventor, etc. Also, the system is geared to-wards making nerds with no concept of building all-round personality.
In fact, you are punished if you try to think. I have a really screwed up academic record because I was trying to be an innovator. Thanks to that I ended up having a very unconventional career within a conventional field.
I used to build all kind of stuff right from primary school. I used to make my own toys. I remember making a microscope in 6th grade by myself, although some things I got fabricated by a local carpenter by giving him my schematics.
Later I used to participate in science modeling competitions, which used to be held in VITM-Bangalore.
Now you know how I got the skills for this:
https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/shift...-totalled.html
When I joined National college (NCJ) for my PUC (11th-12th grade) in 1984, it was one of the super-nerd colleges in the city. They abhorred any deviation from conformance, and their single point agenda was to make you an Engineer or Doctor. They even had an excellent Arts department which aimed for IAS and other civil services careers. The most ignored set of students were the B.Sc students, who had missed out on becoming Engineers or Doctors, and looked only towards an unexciting and uncertain future.
However, I enrolled into NCC, and this decision was constantly berated by parents, well-wishers and lecturers as a distraction that would cost my career. The NCC unit I joined had some top-rated senior cadets who were just awesome. Those guys did something nobody had done before, they inspired us. Two years later I had something that most of my non-NCC nerdy classmates didn't have, an all-round personality. My interest in martial arts and fitness training was kindled during this time. My academic learning/record in this college is not even worth talking about. I never even tried to apply for IIT-JEE. However, I did manage to bag a free engineering seat via CET.
The engineering college (BIT-Bangalore) was no different, but we had lot less nerds thanks to a good infusion of students from the north.
But the college staff were local and believed in the same mantra of conformity to the syllabus. And I was getting really suffocated and slowly found my creative ability dimming eventhough learning about electronics was really interesting. Only my interest in non-academic stuff like martial arts/fitness kept me sane.
In the 3rd year, something changed. We had couple of new lecturers from Andhra who took over our lab activities. They didn't care much about syllabus, instead they forced us to think, innovate, experiment. Not surprisingly they confused the hell out of most of the students. They gave us problems to solve, whose solutions were not found in any prescribed books. Even the University level rank students in our class poured through all the senior notes (sic) to figure out the solutions, to no avail. But I was liberated, I started buying technical books of my choice pouring through Gangarams and Higginbottom book shops. I would dare say that I was rarely taught anything useful by the college, but these two lecturers challenged me to learn via unconventional means of independent research. Their names were Satyaprasad Lanka and Pratap Reddy. The former was the primary motivator, not only he inspired, but he also made sure that other lecturers and even HOD couldn't interfere with this non-conformance method of learning. Suddenly engineering became fun.
I remember this particular incident. Pratap Reddy gave us an assignment to design a very complex logical circuit. A week later I was the only person who solved the problem, using a method unknown to Pratap Reddy. Any normal lecturer those days would just throw it away as garbage. But he spent half a day understanding the circuit, often checking with me, and in the next class declared it to be correct and very innovative. Now consider this, I have solved a problem that nobody else in the class could. Guess how many classmates borrowed my solution to understand and learn it after the lecturer's wholehearted praise. Just one. Rest shrugged and focused on the syllabus and GRE/TOEFL exams that was the real ticket to career then. Later that year, when they were writing GRE/TOEFL exams, I ended up joining a C programming course and fell in love with programming.
In the final year Lanka became our class/lab in-charge and therefore I could continue learning real stuff from books of my choice in class and especially lab, while mostly ignoring the syllabus. Even my final year project was so far from the syllabus, I had to spend 1 hour explaining the technology to the bewildered lecturer/professors during the project presentation. It was about electronic telephony (new in India then courtesy of C-DOT), and transmission of voice using time division multiplexing over E1/T1 lines.
Couple of years back I paid a small tribute to him here:
https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/shift...ifference.html (Teachers who made a difference)
Meanwhile, my academic marks took a real beating. When I passed out in 1990, I was ineligible to even apply for most companies including the PSUs. In a way it was a blessing in disguise. I joined the same college as TA and continue my unconventional studies in the college computer lab. Lanka made sure I am well-protected from department politics and free from classroom duties. Based on the things I learned here, I joined a small company which rarely paid even the peanut salary I had, but let me work with lots of creative freedom. Large companies would have put me through the cookie cutter training process without giving me any freedom. But I developed some special set of skills there eventhough I was hardly paid most of the time. Conversations like these were common:
Me: Boss, I can't come to work tomorrow.
Boss/CEO: Why?
Me: Don't have money for petrol, bus ticket or meals. I am ashamed to ask my dad anymore.
Boss/CEO: Ok, here is 100 bucks, you are good for a week.
Since I lived with parents, I didn't have to worry about food and shelter. Anyway, for need of a real salary, a year later I joined TCS and found that my special set of skills/experiences make me stand apart from the rest. A year later TCS sends me to AT&T Bell Labs in NJ, to work on telephony switch, thanks to the word E1/T1 in my resume.
AT&T Bell Labs then was a different world, we had lots of free time. So I used that time competing in AT&T POTM (Programmer Of The Month) brushing shoulders with giants like Doug McIlroy (he was too good), David Korn, Palith Balakrishnabati, etc. This contest was open to all AT&T staff, and we could use C, C++, ksh, awk, etc. BTW, Doug McIlroy was then the manager of certain Bjarne Stroustrup. And David Korn competed using C rather than the ksh he created. When my friend (and fellow competitor) met him and asked about it, he said he created ksh using C and there are many who could kick his butt in ksh.
TCS in the 90s was not a place for creativity, total emphasis was on process. Therefore, they used to be eternally confused about where to place me. So they kept lending me out to Hewlett Packard where I could work with latest technology. But large company is no place for you if you want to be creative. So after 6 years of TCS, I joined a tiny software product company with only 2 people, still in the same job after 11+ years. I started programming in 1989, I still do it and love doing it.
Moral of the Story: If you are creative, and want to pursue that interest, you can succeed despite your Indian education and IT industry. Just don't let them stop you.