Confessions of an Indian Student

I am known as Dhiren since my parents zeroed in on that name soon after my birth. Now I am 27. After my high school, I graduated from college with a degree in Physics and later I studied law and joined the Bar Council of Mumbai High Court as a practicing criminal lawyer. What follows in the rest of this essay is my journey through the Indian Education System till date. The essay has not been rated yet as I don’t know how it’ll end, but I suggest reader discretion.

The current Indian Education system was setup around 175 – 200 years ago by the then British rulers. Their basic motive behind “educating” Indians was being able to generate a class of literate human resource who would be able to handle clerical jobs in the various businesses and administrative bodies setup by them. The system evolved progressively to first include subjects and later complete streams of different sciences and the Indian populace was familiarized to the Western idea of education. I say Western because there were education systems and universities in India even centuries before the British East India Company set foot on Indian soil. However, at this juncture it is important for me to mention that it was the British who brought about uniformity to the whole education system.

Back to me, I don’t remember my first day at school or what I studied in school, high school, college or law school. As in the academics part of it. I had cracked the code of the system and I could easily move on to the next level of education without having to actually know anything. The British needed educated individuals who could handle the clerical work and menial office jobs and the system gave them just that. After all these years the system still does the same because in India we believe that we should not repair what isn’t broken. And no one considers the system broken. So after a few initial hard years in the system, I felt like a liberated Neo from Matrix who knew how to manipulate the code to my benefit. I could either score high grades or study minimal and utilize my free time for fun. I often chose the later. Rather always.

The grading system till date is the same as it was during the British era. All I needed to do was look up question papers of the previous years and predict which of the question would repeat. I took calculated risks and only studied enough to get a passing score. I also studied the psyche of a common examiner who would be under any circumstances burdened with paper correction, managing his/her home, relationships, deadlines, low pay and an almost non existent relaxing mechanism. So if I was faced with a question paper different from my prediction, I could deceive the examiner by writing bundles of pages in neat hand writing, creating an illusion that I knew everything and it was waste trying to find errors in my answer sheets. The gamble till date has failed only once in my Mathematics paper during my crucial junior college graduation exam.

This must sound so unfair to a lot of people who are reading this and have till date slogged to get a good grade or even graduate to a higher level. Well, I just used my brains differently to accomplish the same task in an easier way. But that does not mean I did not learn or pickup any skills, values or procedures over the years.

I have come across some of the best educators in my journey till now. Some of them taught me academically and some of them did not. Both the categories have been instrumental in my evolution till date. I have been sensitized towards the environment and been exposed to the finer details of life. I have understood the importance of quality over quantity and in the process have mastered the art of minimalist doing and thereby saving energy, time and money. I learned the art of bargaining and negotiating. I learnt how to calculate risks. The art of presentation and the art of impressing others. How to make friends and being there for them. Instilling in myself a never die attitude. A sense of rebellion.

It is sometimes funny to realize how a bad system can actually teach you good things. I wonder if I would have ever been able to think as clearly as I did when I quit my practice as a criminal lawyer earning loads of money to start working for a non-profit organization which was high on social experiences and low on salary. There I met a different category of people. Who had been exposed to the same education system but had not managed to crack the code. This resulted in them either not being able to complete their formal academic education or not being able to cash in on their degrees. Currently, I am trying to be Morpheus to them.

Disclaimer: The above are my experiences, YMMV (your mileage may vary).