Last night i watched 3 Idiots for the 4th time, I admit that I totally love the film! Perhaps that's because I could so relate to it, having been in the same 'idiotic' shoes about half a decade ago.
Why did we end up in engineering? I for one simply went by the overriding family profession. Some a la Farhan gave in to parental pressure, others like Raju figured an engineering graduate fresh out of college would get a job easier than an arts, science or commerce graduate, still others decided the four-year long engineering course would complete the 16 yrs of education required to be eligible for the GRE, just a precious few Ranchos came because textiles is what they could visualise doing for the rest of their lives.
As we settled in, we discovered the dreaded 's' word in all engineering colleges - submissions. So we got about writing assignment after assignment, drawing designs after designs and doing GT (Glass tracing) after GT. Sure we understood that the observations, inferences and graphs would differ every time the experiment was done, but why pray did we need to hand write the procedure, that had remained the same for the past 20 years? But 'photocopy' was taboo. And the worst part, thanks to some apparatus not functioning properly, or not functioning at all, we actually copied the one thing we shouldn't have - the actual findings, from reports handed down by our seniors!
Then came the even more fearful oral examinations or vivas as they're popularly called. The boy girl ratio in our class was roughly 50:1. So girls always found a softer corner in the examiners heart. I mostly got lucky with Vivas, my image of mischief monger would be shattered because of my ability to answer most of the questions and this would leave the examiners confused.
During the written examinations, if you got the right answer but didn't get it in the requisite number of 'steps', chances are your marks would be cut. So we all prayed to the God of memory rather than the God of logic.
When we finally stepped out of the Three-year chaos, not one of us was equipped to even read a salary slip, and most of us lacked any communication skills whatsoever - the fallouts of a unilateral, not to mention outdated, syllabus.
I have great expectations from the current HRD minister, who's at least shown some gumption in revamping the school system. Whether he'll ever make higher education more flexible is questionable, but the real point is, that the onus isn't purely on the government. It's on society at large, parents who don't bother to ask their child what their hearts calling is, teachers who don't bother counselling students, professors who insist on memory rather than knowledge, recruiters who go purely by grades and peers who make competition an evil word.
