Adhitya Iyer: The Interesting Story of Our Educational System at TEDxCRCE (Transcript)

You want to know what those mistakes are? OK, so the first mistake of my life was that I was good at studies. OK, the second mistake of my life was I was particularly good at math. Now, in India when you commit these two mistakes you end up committing a third mistake which is: you get into engineering. This is exactly what I did.

In engineering life I kind of realized early on it wasn’t quite my thing, right? So I founded this T-shirt startup. In case you can’t recognize me, that’s me without all the beard. So I founded this T-shirt start-up to vent my frustration and for which I was listed as one of India’s top student entrepreneurs.

Later on, I moved to the city of Bangalore where I spent a solid two years essentially selling chai. Now here is the thing about Bangalore, all right. Bangalore is full of engineers, OK, and they are not just engineers, they are engineers frustrated with their lives. No, it’s not funny. So one in every 20 IT employees in Bangalore contemplate suicide at some point of his life. Crazy, right?

What happened next is I quit my job, because I was curious, like how did such a diverse country like ours get so obsessed with one thing: producing engineers, and looked like nobody before we tried answering. So I quit my job and then something magical happened. Some 300 people across the globe contributed 14,000 Australian dollars in a record-setting crowdfunding campaign to help me, the goofball, compile a book, OK.

So over the next two years I found out about a lot of interesting people, places, and events that helped shape what I call one of Indian’s Greatest Obsessions. Now it’s going to be difficult for me to take you through like two years of research in a couple of minutes, right? So what I’m going to do is going to take you through some of these people, some of these places and some of these events. OK, are you ready? Can we start?

OK, so the first person I’m going to tell you about is this very very interesting character who goes by the name Thomas Babington Macaulay. Macaulay was a born genius. He had an estimated IQ of like 180 to 190. He had the tremendous ability to learn any language within a fortnight. OK, so the Brits told him, ‘Dude, like you know India is one of our newer colonies and one of our more important colonies. Why don’t you go there and you know help figure a few things for us. So he said, ‘India, there is no way I’m going to India’. So then the Brits said, ‘Dude, can you please do this for us’.

So Macaulay didn’t have a lot of friends, OK and he was dearly attached to his sisters. So he pleaded with a certain Hannah, saying, ‘Hannah, these guys want me to go to India. Can you please come? I don’t want to go alone. So Hannah said, and I quote, ‘I see India only as a country of filth and disease’. So this is what the Brits did next. They said, ‘OK, fine. We’ll give you 10,000 pounds’ which in today’s time translate to half a million pound. Now, face it, if somebody gave me half a million pound right now, I’d be willing to go to North Korea.

So this guy forcibly got his sister to India and he roughly spent four years in India, did not bother learning a single Indian language, went back to the Britain Parliament, OK. And on February 2, 1835 made a very momentous speech which I’m not going to quote entirely but I’m just going to pick up one line which kind of summarizes the spirit of the entire speech. Macaulay said, and I quote, “We need to teach Indians English. If we do not teach them English they are going to waste their youth touching a cow’s ass”. This is what he said. And that’s how English education came to India.

Now what does English education have to do with the life of India’s engineers, right? Couple of things. One, a vast majority of India’s engineers are actually unemployable. Do you know why? Anyone from the industry they probably know why, what’s lacking the most. Anyone? Lovely. Yeah, close enough. They don’t call it that. They call poor communication skills, right? Poor communication skills innuendo for poor English and, come on, English is international language, right? It’s an acquired language. So English became a class in India, it didn’t just become a language.

Secondly, this very important IT revolution to which so many of Indian engineers owe our lives to, and also our first foreign trip to, happened in India and not in China. You know why? Because of our familiarity with English. Just because we were acquainted with English, could we able to quote easily and also talk to our clients in Europe and America. Cool, right?

Now that I mentioned America, let’s discuss the Indian engineers’ tremendous success story in the US tech industry. So beat this, right? Two of the biggest tech giants in the world are today run by India engineers. And, you know, they actually owe their life to a very specific moment in history. That moment is actually as specific as this: October 4, 1957, 7:28 p.m.

OK, so what happened on October 4, 1957, 7:28 pm is the Soviets launched the first human satellite in space: the Sputnik. And the US lost its mind. You know, the US and Russia always have had this Indian student type — have been like two Indian students, right? Always want to better than each other. So the Americans lost their mind and they said, ‘Dude, we need to do something, man’. So they changed their entire immigration policy, and they invited the best of scientists, the best of doctors and the best of engineers from across the globe.

Now, engineers back in India were pretty brainy, are rather still pretty brainy, I’d say. And they were frustrated with India’s socialist regime back then, because it didn’t allow them to do much. The government controlled practically everything. So they had two options: OK, one was to go with our best friend forever, BFF as they say these days – BFF, Russia or to go to America with whom we didn’t have the best of relations at least back then.

But what happened was something curious. Most engineers ditched their best friends Russia and all went to — most of them went to America instead. Can anyone tell me why? Anyone? Macaulay. English. Because we were comfortable speaking English like the Americans did, all of them moved to America and rest is history, right?

The earliest bunch of engineers who went to America did extremely well, not just for themselves but also for America and then paved the way for future engineers to come from India, so much so that kids these days actually take up engineering so that they can go to the US. That’s the easiest ticket to the US, right? In fact, you won’t believe this and I’m not exaggerating, OK. There are communities in South India that educate their sons in engineering, send them to the US just so that they can command high dowries. Because US return has a lot of command supposedly in their community a lot of dowry. Right?

Now moving from the US, coming back to India and to my favorite three-letter word: the IITs. Now, see, if you’re Indian I’m not going to bother introducing the IITs to you. But what I am going to tell you instead is how an American news broadcaster once introduced the IITs to its viewers in America, and listen to this carefully, OK. Listen to it carefully. It said, and I’m quoting, “We import oil from Saudi Arabia, cars from Japan, television from Korea, and whiskey from Scotland. So what do we import from India? We import people, some really really smart people and all these people seem to share a common credential: they are all graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology or the IITs as they’re known”.

Now when US compare something to oil, you know it has to be valuable. And in fact, it’s not just valuable to them, valuable to our society to the extent that once this affluent woman in Delhi accompanied by her equally affluent father took her son to the then director of IIT Delhi, and requesting for an admission of course. So now the father got slightly embarrassed, so he left the room. The father left the room and then the director saw this kid’s report card, and he said, “I’m sorry, ma’am. I can’t get your kid into the IITs. However I can get him into the Imperial College of London”, which eventually did.

But you know what’s fascinating about this story: the characters involved. Does anyone want to take a guess as to who the characters are? I’ll tell you: Indira Gandhi, Pandit Nehru and Rajiv Gandhi. The most powerful family in the country can be denied admission into the IITs.

So where I’m coming from is what happened gradually that in a society that reeks of corruption in everyday life, the IITs became one of those very few meritorious institutions for the Indian middle-class for their social upliftment. That is one.

Second, what also happened is for the longest time the IITs were essentially – IITs or other engineering colleges were essentially the only institutes which offered quality education of any kind, right? So eventually the Indian middle class decided to stay put their kids into the IITs or take up other engineering courses.

Now if something Bollywood has taught me, OK, is that every great obsession has an equally fascinating chase, be it women or be it engineering. So my journey took me to a lot of these places of which I am going to tell you about two – two very interesting places.

The first one is the city of Hyderabad. These images that you see are from one of the student hostels I managed to get rare access to. I’ll tell you why rare, because these kids are disconnected — absolutely disconnected from the outside world. I’m not kidding, if the aliens were to invade us right now they would be the last people to know. Guys and girls aren’t allowed to talk to each other. They are suspended if they’re caught talking, right? The sole purpose of their life is to study and get through a good engineering college. In fact, you won’t believe this — and the funniest part is whatever I’m saying may sound funny and that’s the funniest part. This guy left all his belongings and ran for his life out of the campus. Nobody knows where he went, nobody knows what he did, he just ran out of this madness. Seriously.

Now, from Hyderabad, let’s go up north to this interesting city called Kanpur. OK, in Kanpur there is this small locality, that’s called Coaching Mandi, because there are so many coaching classes there. So the locals call it Coaching Mandi. So then I got talking to a local pan-wala and I said, “Can you tell me the origins of this place and history and how did it start?” So he told me there was this old professor who started coaching kids into engineering colleges and gradually everyone followed and it became like a big business. I am like, “Cool. But where can I see the old man?” He said, and I quote, “Sir, woh to upar hi milenge, unka murder ho chuka hain”. It’s like, murder ho chuka hain, it’s like one of those things, right, that keep happening. In fact, not just that – so this place is actually a hot pot for gang wars between coaching professors who shoot each other death out of rivalry, right? Just kidnap and shoot them dead. But this isn’t really the sort of death that worries me the most. Let me tell you what does.

This young girl could — like most teenagers have had her share of man crushes, listen to her whatever music, could have been part of this audience today or seen this video later on YouTube, but the sad part is she is no more. And she is no more only because she didn’t want to become an engineer. And she isn’t entirely alone. India has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the world. 20 kids kill themselves every day mostly due to academic pressure. God knows by the time my talk is over some kids somewhere must – tried killing himself or killing herself. Crazy society we live in, right?

Anyway let’s get out of this gloom and I will show you one of my more relatable illustrations from the book. So here you see a young boy called [Mohan Aggarwal] who back in 2003 goes to his parents and tell them their mom, dad, ‘you have this fantastic idea. I want to create something called as a social network and I think it’s going to change the world. Obviously Indian parents think that he’s possessed probably by a ghost — get him into engineering college and today [Mohan Aggarwal] is probably a mid-level IT manager contemplating suicide in Bangalore.

But, you know, every story has a villain. Every story has a villain. So I was trying to find out the biggest villain of my story. And I searched for really long, and guess where I found it. Right behind me with the cute and innocent little face. You know what that is: a school. Indian schools no matter how you look at it is easily the biggest human resource tragedy in the world, I can assure you. But the biggest tragedy actually lies in its design. If you look at it how did a school come into being, no.

Schools are actually more than 400 years old. So the empire 400 years ago basically needed three kinds of people, right? They needed clerks to manage their territories, military guys to protect their territories, and they needed factory workers, because industrial revolution had just started. And what are the kind of skill set that these factory workers — these three kinds of people require? No creativity. These are required skill sets: no creativity. Listen to instructions, right? So it is actually no coincidence that our schools are modeled on a factory — like exactly how factory is modeled, right? If I can give you another — right from the ting ting of the bell in the factories to symbolize that you know it’s lunch, you all can go get out of the factory and go and eat your food to the grouping of kids, it’s based on the age and not the learning ability. The point of a test is not to assess your kids’ strength and weakness but to actually certify him as OK or FAIL. Just like in factories.

It’s clear, if we don’t really fix our schools, India has the largest student base in the world. And if you don’t fix our schools, all these kids are going to look the same: boring, dull and uninspiring. Now unless we fix our schools in India, you will always become an engineer first and then decide what to do with your life. And with all the chaos, tragedy, dead, blood, the life of India’s engineers will continue to remain the world’s most interesting educational story.

Thank you so much.

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