Why should I care who Sundar Pichai is?

A google search for this title will obviously return a favorable response, since he is after all the new CEO of Google. Congratulations to him on that elevation. However, unlike most other Indians, I really care a damn about this episode.

You would have to be Kumbhakarna to have missed out the announcement of his appointment and you must have been in a coma to have missed out the follow-up news articles splashed all over the media. But unlike those who wrote those articles or the larger herds of “educated” Indians that consumed it with glee, I AM JUST NOT PROUD OF HIS ACHIEVEMENT. I don’t have any kind of attachment with that person to feel happy or proud or going to the other extreme on the emotional scale, I don’t feel angry or jealous. It is for the simple reason that I F***ING DON’T CARE who Google appoints as its CEO or its janitor for that matter.

Why should I or any Indian feel proud of his achievements? Agreed he didn’t inherit this position by virtue of being related to the owners of Google, but his life is not really a rags to riches story. He hails from a regular middle-class family, studied in IIT and then moved to the US for higher studies. Fair enough. That pretty much sums up every Subramanian, Mahesh and Ranganathan in this part of the world. Ok, not all of them become CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Pepsi or Apple. Oh wait, only Apple doesn’t have a person of Indian origin at the top.

While I said earlier, quite colorfully, that I didn’t care, I actually do care about something and that is what is prompting me to write this post. It is about all the tax money I pay and all the tax money that so many other Indians pay, for which we see no returns.

This is a rant about all the IIT students who get the best of education using MY MONEY, who then opt to pursue a non-Engineering course OUTSIDE INDIA and then go on to work for some foreign company. And most of these people, give up their Indian citizenship at some point; not sure if Sundar did it, but I won’t be surprised if he has.

The defenders can give a thousand reasons from the lack of space for creativity to corruption to reservation and what not, to justify this brain-drain. If these IITians can actually beat those very same parameters to gain admission into an IIT, why can’t they stay back and do some actual engineering work within this country? They simply choose the easy way out and leave India.

But not all of them leave the country. Some of them actually complete a management degree right after finishing their technical course and join the Financial or Marketing line of Business. Seriously, is that what I paid MY MONEY for? If you were not going to continue working in the Engineering field, why the F*** did you pursue a course in the most premium of institutes in this country? Couldn’t you have simply done some vanilla Bachelor’s degree by correspondence and then take up an MBA? Wouldn’t that have actually helped another fellow Indian citizen to gain proper technical education? Or did you decide that even the person who would take up your space would also do an MBA and so it doesn’t matter if you do it. I can’t fight that line of argument!

What I really want to implement is a fee structure in the IITs, so that it is made clear to the students that what they are paying as fees is only the interest component of the loan that the Government has given them. This loan has to be repaid over a period of 5 years after completion of the degree and it would be waived off for those who join a Government agency and serve there for 2 years. Kind of like the internship that every MBBS student has to go through.

If the student wants to pursue a non-technical higher degree of education, he/she must pay out the loan and get the Transfer Certificate. Alternatively, those wanting to leave the country must have to repay the loan or else have their passports revoked.

Does this sound a tad too dictatorial? I don’t deny that. But unless something like this is setup, all the money that we tax payers shell out, is never going to be of real use to us. And we will continue to keep complaining about the lack of infrastructure in this country, even as we work harder to send our offspring to these institutes and then abroad; who can actually stay back and make the difference we want.

Alas, Sundar’s achievement is only going to be another bad example for the beleaguered middle-class to follow. We are going to send more kids to IIT training centers in the hope of creating the next Sundar.

Footnote:

1. The one inspiring thing about Sundar is the fact that nobody really knew him; his schools didn’t know that he studied there; his friends didn’t seem to. This shows that he was an average Jawahar when it comes to scoring marks. Yet, he has succeeded with his knowledge. This trait must be advertised more to students. And parents!

2. My entire argument about keeping IIT students in India can be negated with just one name –Arvind Kejriwal.

3. This is also the country where Governments have awards named after Kalpana Chawla and Sunita Williams; so who am I talking to!