Nikhil Kulkarni

Was busy and a bit lazy too throughout the last 7-8 days to post.Have placements going on in our college.I got placed in CTS(Cognizant Technology Solutions)!!!.Visit cognizant.com for details!!Here are the things that I’ve promised myself that I’d do over the next few days.

1.Create a new blog about the placements at our college.Have lots to share about it.The highs,the lows,the reactions of people and how people change not by travelling places,not by meeting new people,not by reading books,but by getting a job!!!.Details of my tryst with placements too will be there.

2.Upload all photos on placements clicked by Pandit with his digicam.

3.Create a group blog about interesting people we come across,places we visit,books we read,movie reviews…any takers????

Finally,here’s something which I wrote amidst our ‘hectic’ placement schedule.Why did I write the following piece will be made public on June 1st or 2nd.This is not even half as funny,sarcastic,hilarious,humorous I wanted it to be.But since it was written for a ‘purpose’,I had to toe more of a ‘formal’ line.Been observing people very closely of late and even this thought of doing a PG in psychology crossed my mind and Bharath almost beat me to death when I told it to him just before my interview for CTS!!!

Looking forward to reactions from you all on this,esp. Gujjus!!
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Gujjus (in) and engineering…

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Where on earth would you find a teacher in a computer engineering class asking students to “work out in the hostel and come”??……if you want an exact geographic location, it is the state of Gujarat in Western India. The teacher might not intended to mean “work out” as in picking up the dumbbells and sweating it out in the hostel, but the impression that it leaves on people is certainly not that one would be very happy about. Perhaps, what is more perplexing is that such a glaring mistake (though very much unintended) went unnoticed by most students also and a person like me, who instead of ‘listening’ to what the teacher was ‘teaching’ took notice of it and for a moment felt bad about the kind of ‘education’ I was receiving.

This probably sums up the higher education scene in Gujarat to me, with the little time I’ve had to observe it. The scenario is such that everyone thinks everything is rosy as long as at the end of the people get what they want.Students,marks and probably a degree so that they can venture into some business their family might be into and teachers, the fact that students are ‘happy’ also makes them ‘happy’. I might be sounding very cynical and sarcastic, but when I see people here clamouring to improve their ‘vocab(e)’ or their ‘English’ or their ‘communication skills’ in a matter of days so that they can clear their Gds and PIs so as to land jobs, it does bother me to tell that them it takes more than a few mugging up of Barron’s GRE wordlist or reading some ‘motivational’ books to have a good vocabulary and communication skills and also that they are skills needed to clear a job interview, but that they are ‘life skills’ and would keep a person in good stead through out his/her life.

Isn’t it paradoxical that Gujaratis known for their entrepreneurial zeal and undying spirit to do better in life pay little heed to finer but very important things like good English, vocabulary buliding,inter-personal skills e.t.c. To me it is from the school stage where the rot stems from. From the little I’ve gathered from the local news and my ‘localite’ friends, people are very happy with getting good marks at school level and do bachelors in commerce or arts and set out to do business. Those wanting to pursue science-oriented courses like engineering or medicine have it easy. Seats in such colleges are allotted on the basis of 12th marks, which everybody knows aren’t all that hard to score after spending so much money and time in the innumerable tuition classes that have mushroomed all over. No wonder then that introduction of entrance exams like AIEEE for admission to engineering colleges led to a lot of hue and cry and the ‘worried’ parents had to knock at the door of the courts to provide ‘relief’ to their children. Contrast this to the situation in states like Maharashtra and Karnataka where there was hardly any such and hue and cry and the parents and more importantly the students had no qualms in adapting to the new system. If such uncomfortable noises are heard about introduction of exams of the standard of AIEEE, which by all means is an exam lot easier than the JEE for entrance into the IITs, then wouldn’t it be too wishful of us to expect sizeable number of students from Gujarat to get into the IITs.Again cynical as it may sound, but one must surely ask this question-‘How long will people run away from competition?’.

Let me add a bit of my own experiences to this. We have a Gujarati friend of ours who attends tuition classes (tuition classes in engineering?? you might ask…let’s leave that for a moment).It happens sometimes (well, many times!) that I have not completed my programs and have to copy from him. And again it happens all the time! That I happen to explain the program better to the teacher and he, the person who wrote the program is left wondering how on earth I could do that just by looking at the program once. Mean as it may sound, I end up getting more marks than him. I’m sure the law of averages would catch up with me and I’d have to repent not being regular, the point I wanted to highlight is that with whatever resources I had at my disposal, I could together with my ability to convince managed to get out of that tricky situation and my friend still wonder how could I manage that!!!

Talking of ability to convince people, it reminds me of one of my seniors working with McKinsey & Co. When asked what does he look for people when he recruits them, he said tersely-“If that girl or guy is convincing enough to sell me the sun for 100 rupees, I’d hire him without any hesitation”. Not that he didn’t value the academic qualifications of a person, but we all know what he was hinting at.

Ending this ‘controversial’ topic on a ‘controversial’ note, I’d want to share another incident where the teacher again made a hilarious blooper (unintended of course!).We had to make presentation on an allotted topic with slides and at the same time submit the printout of the material in a file to the teacher.The teacher happened to find out that the content in the slides and the file were not matching. She stopped the person midway and said-“What is this? The material in the slide and the printout are so different. I don’t want people to make such ‘controversial’ presentations from now on”. Controversial–what the h*&l??It wasn’t a presentation on the Godhra riots or the Best Bakery case. How can a presentation on ‘Different types of Cathode Ray Tube monitors’ be controversial.

Then it dawned on to me that she meant ‘contradictory’.!!