Slaves of Saraswati

I’ll start off with “Saraswati”. She is the Indian Goddess of wisdom and knowledge, more so for the Hindus than anybody else in India. She is the embodiment of all that is related to education and is prayed to at all time during the student life, more so during tests and examinations. She is also one of the most exploited. In the sense that right from childhood till you start earning enough to keep the society happy all things good, bad and ugly are attributed to either a good education and bad education or simple lack of it. We concentrate on education and completely overlook wisdom and knowledge. No one will ever see how the other skills may have helped them lead a good life; instead it will be education that has to be blamed. Now, even the politicians have started to use this, just for fun and a good electoral base. Free education to all, free food if you go to the classes and free lack of future with the same. Right from the poorest to the richest, the one with food and the one without, all are lured into the vicious want of education. A child may not want it, may be even against it and interested in something completely different, say dramatics or painting, but no, the child has to study to reach all that his elders achieved and all that the society expects him to. It’s good to be educated but it should not be an end. Sad.

With education should come understanding and logical reasoning rather than becoming unreasonable and crude. More than anything else, people are all in for degrees; bachelors, masters and may be a doctorate. What is the end of this? There are not enough jobs in the market and we have a surplus supply of unemployed youth and talent that is being wasted. The educated person will not take to a job that he considers menial to his qualification. We have a few hundred thousand engineers that pas out of the engineering colleges that have mushroomed over the years. They are not as well read as the students from the premier institutes and hence miss out on the opportunities. Thankfully, we have the Infosys and TCS to take in much of this talent. We have a civil engineer writing codes or maybe answering the clients in the US. Not bad, but still a talent in civil engineering wasted. This also is the mother to many vices that the Indian society is fast getting into. We have chain snatching, robberies, heists by the educated of the society. One of the reasons, out of the many possible is lack of satisfaction. The youth is not satisfied as he feels that he is not able to get what his seniors or neighbours got. To get him off the guilt of being unsuccessful he takes up vice as a channel to fulfillment. How can something as noble as education get someone to be evil?

The Indian system is kind off a reason for all this that we see and it is not that we cannot get out of it. We can very easily, just that the change is dreaded and the “Chalta hai” (it’s OK) attitude are to be blamed and gotten rid of. Since freedom, we have been more socialist than capitalist. From childhood the vices of capitalism have been shown to all. I agree Indian culture is more about caring and sharing but when these become a burden and lead to loss of precious human resources; it’s time to check it. We have all sorts of departments and ministries that take care of everything. The government instead of governing and leading the nation towards development is more about how to check growth and prevent de centralization of power. The ministries will not lose control of anything as it may lead to loss of income for everybody, right from the minister to the peon who sits in the office. Water, electricity, roads, healthcare, railways; you name it and it is all in the hands of the government. The implementation is missing and all that we have had in the last sixty four years are big promises and even bigger dreams, all of which have been shattered.

Railways have laid just10% railways lines in the last so many years when the British laid the rest in smaller time period.

The government is more for changing names and erecting statues of unknown to meet political ends than development. Amethi by any other name will remain as under developed and as impoverished as ever. Years of promises by the Gandhi’s and now the Dalit icon Mayawati have gone down the drain and will continue to do so if we don’t work for it. We make hue and cry about privatization and the profits that the companies will make and completely oversee the profits the individuals called ministers have been making all these years. They also don’t create jobs the way private enterprises do. All goes to one who uses the money to exploit even more. Let’s take an example of water. Should we privatise it? NO will be the loud answer that all of us will hear. An essential natural resource, how can we even think of selling it at a price? Let’s look more carefully at the situation and compare it with reality that we completely ignore. Can any of us drink water directly from the tap? We can do so in Singapore and the US or any developed nation. So the poor are not getting potable water anyways. The government will tell us how to boil and drink it and make us spend money on every liter to be safe. And the upper middle class and the rich will purchase bottled water. Is this bottled water not privatized water? We are already using privatized water at a much higher price but still the government tag remains to save the organizations, ministries and the huge inefficiencies that come with it. Same for the food grains and the several thousand tones wasted every year not reaching the poor who buy it at a much higher price from the black market. Think of it, it is a big shame for all of us.

Remember some fifteen years back how it was to get a telephone line at home. Years of wait, hundreds spent on the babus in bribe and the inefficient service that we all got used to. Then came mobile telephony and thanks to the incompetence of the babus it had to be made open to private players. Not only did the competition help in lowering the price, get efficiencies of scale and a phone for everyone it got the same department to start working and trying to save their jobs and several thousand jobs for everybody. Now the same babu will not ask for money, will not want more time, they just want you, the customer. Several lakh villages are now connected and all can enjoy the fruits of this revolution. People may not have anything else but they definitely own a phone.

Let’s listen to a story. There are two people A and B on an island, they have to fish and survive. They catch 7 fishes each. Both are happy and content. Suddenly A realizes that he can catch much more fish if he has a net. He sees that it will take him five days to make it and he can survive on 5 fishes rather than the usual 7 he takes. He calculates that he needs 25 fishes to make the net. He saves 2 fishes for 13 days and then when he has 26 fishes he gets down to work. After 5 days he has the net ready, and he starts to catch 50 fishes every day. He is rich. B sees this and starts to complain about how poor he is with just 7 fishes, blames A for his miseries and wants a share from A’s hard work. He finally gets it and does nothing but sleeps. This is what the government is doing. It is breeding people like B and making A not to think and grow. Instead of B starting to concentrate on other avenues he cried, maybe B could have gone in for dramatics and entertained A, and got fishes from him as a fee and A’s efficiency would have improved and he would have caught more fishes making everybody richer. But no, we want one to feed all.

As I had said earlier that people want more and more degrees with no jobs for them. If we privatise then maybe we will create more jobs many would like to go for what they feel is their forte, not needing to study or cram through the exams. In the developed nations a gardener, a barber earns the same as a programmer. With better skills he may earn even more. Not so in India where there is a huge divide of rich and poor on what a person does. A gardener or say a farmer may be toiling the whole month but may not even quarter of what a programmer on bench may be making. Isn’t this an irony of our society. We are not able to realize the true value of hard work and labour, both mental and physical.

We have to get rid of these vices. Government, as the name suggests, is for governing and not for implementing. Give away the implementation to others, have proper guidelines monitor and regulate but not be an impediment to the development and prosperity of all, not for the benefits of the ministers and their families. This may sooner or later lead to such levels of dissatisfaction that the ministers may not remain relevant. We don’t want a Sierra Leone of India. We want the best for Bharat Mata, the mother as we all call her. Let’s open our minds and get the best. May be privatization is what we want. Let’s be devotee of Saraswati and not her slaves and get to know how we can all prosper together.

Many of the thoughts and ideas are a result of the excellent discussion that I had with my friend Prashant on my last trip to the US. I completely agree with these and feel happy for being the devil’s advocate that I was.