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!
