Interview blues

One of the highlights of life at IIMB is interviewing students for our various programmes. I do not miss that opportunity if I can. I would be surprised to be if anyone can think that it is a chore s/he can do without!

Interviews give me a peep into the new generation's thinking. Their worldview. Their upbringing. Their attitude to life.

It is true that they impose an enormous sense of responsibility on you. You have to do your best to ensure that the programme gets the people best suited and the ones that deserve most to be in on it. A task that is more easy to describe than to execute. And all the while you have to make sure that your prejudices do not come in the way. And God help you there if you have an observer ego as dominant as the one I am blessed with.

But then to get something in life you have to give something, right? Well at least when I was brought up they had not started auctioning air waves. So I do not have the benefit of learnings from spectrum auctions. You know what I mean.

So it is with interviews. Over about six to eight hours everyday you meet the most talented among the young men and women from among the top 1500 out of some 250,000 contenders. All of them acutely competitive. All of them realise that those twenty or thirty minutes could make an important difference to their lives. So their powerful engines are firing on all thirty two cylinders. And you have to make sure that all the eight cylinders in the old heap that your mind is are firing away too. It is exhausting in a way, to say the least. But invigorating too, in many ways.

So when the admissions office approached me this year I happily said yes to as many days as I could afford to.

The sense of deja vu at the end of the interviews this year was not new. And here is what is striking. It is a binary experience.

At one end of the spectrum you meet some truly extraordinary young men and women. People who have attended schools with such formidable reputation that folks in the technology and commercial capitals in the world are in awe the power of their intellect. People who can hold forth on how and why a cricket ball swings to what they think needs to be done to the agricultural sector in India. Men and women who do amazing things in a day's work such as design chips that will help patients deal better with chronic diseases. People who have played highly competitive sports and won commendable laurels.

At the other end you meet people whose CVs make you feel your whole life was a waste compared to their marks in school and the ranks they scored one entrance exam after another. All of this on top of excelled in some art or sport. Yet they flake up on the simplest of questions. They have trouble spelling "convenience" and "occasion".

Which makes you wonder what is wrong with our educational system. Or if it is the parenting that has to blame. Personally I think it is a bit of both. I think today's schooling and education are to blame in large part. Today's schools in India are miserable hell-holes. I will write more about that in another post.

But I do believe equally it is the social pressure and life styles that are to blame. The disproportionate amount of emphasis on success over substance . The obsession with achievement as opposed to character.

As I reflect on those long hours of interviewss I think about the two young men back in my own home. I begin to wonder what kind of a world they will inherit when they attain the age of these interviewees. I let off a long sigh and say to myself Allahu Akbar, as I always do when I do not have answers.

Nanni. Namaskaaram