Making a parody of merit

Readers! G.B Shaw has got competition now. Our own ministry of HRD is breaking all the barriers and has been keen to make satire out of "merit" issue in the education system present in our country. Decisions, one after another, are hilarious, funny and sadly regressive.

Latest attempt: changing the procedure of admission in the prestigious Regional Engineering Colleges or NIT, as we call them now. According to the decision taken recently, these colleges will relinquish the so called "flawed" method of admission, in which these colleges had a fixed quota for each of the states in India. The seats under that quota had to be allotted to the students hailing from the respective state. The colleges will now have a 50% allocation for the state in which it is present and rest 50% will be allocated according to the students according to their ranks in an examination which is conducted on a national scale.

This method of allocation of seats, wherein scholars from every state could study together, was as a matter of fact, one of the underlying principles in setting up these colleges during the second five year plan (1956-60) .On one hand it helped to meet the growing demand for quality engineers for number of industrial projects meditated at that time and on the other, it assisted in socio-economic growth of India as a whole.

Being an alumnus from NIT Calicut, I have tasted the very fruits of such a system of education, where one is able to get trained in an environment which has reputable teachers, modern facilities and laboratories and at the same time he is able to exchange his cultural views. This, in fact, is a distinguishing feature of a NIT from an IIT, where this potpourri of culture is missing.


Coming back to our HRD ministry's ideology which emphasizes merit in admission procedure, why do these think tanks put this ideology under their bums when they introduce some new quota or increase some existing one in institutes of higher education. How they are able to shuffle this "merit" card deep inside the pack such that it becomes invisible?

Why don't they think that dallying with setup in the premier institutes causes our nation to sprint opposite to development? In order to consolidate their vote bank, ministers are ready to toss away nation's progress.

If at all, their motive is to bring some backward class abreast with the rest, they should concentrate providing them education from the primary level. Bringing them at par with the so called "privileged" classes should mean that these classed are able to compete with the "privileged" ones at the national level.

But for heaven's sake, do not try to be Santa and give away seats in premier institutes as gifts, neglecting your own "merit" philosophy. Don't be a mother who spoon feeds one of its children, out of many, and pampers him. He will only become a spoilt brat in the long run. Instead, be a mother who treats each one of them alike and encourages them to develop on a holistic basis.

Kickoff

As they say "it's better late , than never " . Yes , I have started writing and have refuted the archaic methods like diary pages. In all my honesty , I have never ever liked the concept of web logs or blogs ( as my i-generation likes it) for a very simple reason. Normally , and in my case too , they are written by someone who is not an authority of anything and has opinions about the most serious issues in which our world is entangled in .

Ironically , the blogs nowadays have solution for everything , be it avoiding a Tsunami , allaying Katrina , making Kashmir peaceful heaven again !

I mean come on .....how the hell wasn't Einstein able to complete his theory of relativity and tell us about the exact story of our Universe's origin and you were there to see how Big Bang happened and are narrating it now ? Till date , I was repelled by blog writing and kept myself away from it !

The question now is : "why....?" Why have I created my blog and have started publishing my articles .......

The question is brief but has lot of depth in it .... which needs a significant amount of research from my side. I can answer it easily by writing some commonplace sentences like , "it's the in thing" , "everybody does it nowadays", blah blah blah . But , it's not in my blood............my instincts do not allow me to be common. Whatever I do has to have a touch of humor and a dash of sarcasm in it...which makes the receiver "think"...............so here I go ... let me give it a shot !


By writing this blog , I am not aiming at the dartboard of letting other people know about how I think , how I write , what my thoughts are .........I am simply not interested in "popularizing" myself ...................the sole purpose is letting myself know , how many identities lie within me ..............I'll free all those characters whenever I am scribbling anything here........this will be a playground , a battlefield , a discussion forum for all those hidden "me" in me.

Sub-Prime Crisis......Huh???

Today , I was able to spend my time in browsing the articles which gave me a fair idea what the sub-prime crisis actually is. They were all written in a manner , which would enable a layman , like me, to at least participate in a discussion between the bears and bulls in our office.

Asking god Google about sub-prime crisis , gives you a whole bunch of results , which are at their place pretty honest efforts to educate people , but for a person like me , who has just stepped in the corporate world , it's just too much to handle. That's why , I clicked on the radio button , just below the search bar , to give me web pages from India . In this way , I could get closer to my objective of finding out how a so called "crisis" in the US of A can affect investors sipping coffee in cafeterias of Hitec City.

Out of all the search results , I chose to go with the link from Hindu (of late I have fallen in love with this daily) , which was as a matter of fact , an interview with a big shot from Deloitte ( who else can narrate the problem more emotionally ). He was very terse in explaining the problem and was frequently using the quotes which were pertinent to this situation. He started-off defining the term sub-prime , which is the pertaining to people who have low or poor credit ratings and in this context unable to avail loans for "my-own-house" dream.

An entrepreneur , who understands this difference between the demand and supply ( demand here is from the people who can't get the loans and supply is the loan itself) , jumps into the picture . As he has a good credit rating , he can get all the loan from any bank at some interest rate. The entrepreneur , in turn risks this money and gives it off to the sub-primes at a much higher rate of interest.