This post has been on my mind for many months. So many months now that I cannot remember how many. I have been avoiding writing because of the realisation that writing these posts has have been a pissing waste of time.
The trigger for writing this came from a news story that my colleague Professor Jose broadcasted. For the past five years Professor Jose has been busy disrupting higher education.
Before you form wrong impressions about him I must say that he has made a nice little business out of disrupting higher education. If he had done that in a private enterprise it would well have been on the way to becoming a decacorn by now.
So coming from him the forward is not surprising.
Here is the link, which I must confess I have not watched fully. I think it is just another news producer struggling to fill air time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlWgClVeMxs I would much rather spend time on a Malayalam movie or re-watching any episode of Yes Minister or Yes Prime Minister.
Now here is the main point. For some years now I have felt that all this higher education is useless. And here is why.
Rolling back in time around the time I was five years old my old man decided that I would be the first IAS officer in the family. That was a fateful day indeed - for him as well as for me. It was the day my childhood was taken away from me as my old man got me ready with the three Rs of Thomas Babington Macaulay on my long walk towards getting me ready for Mussoorie.
Destiny had other plans and I will not bore you with how I got to where I am now instead of having retired as a pompous bureaucrat. The more important story is that I was brought up to believe that reading and knowledge derived from a study of books can make us successful in life and better as human beings.
Therein lies the connection, albeit somewhat tenuous, with the story forwarded by my disruptive colleague.
During the past thirty years or so I have been fully convinced of the futility of such wisdom. Let me share a few anecdotes to explain my point.
I have been taught that to understand the affairs of a nation one needs to understand history, economics, a smattering of law. Then one has to be up to date on current affairs. Read newspapers, in particular editorials. Early on as a school boy I was forced to read G K Reddy's laborious prose with one watchful hand poised and ready to box my ear if I ever strayed off.
Now, as an old man, I continue that practise religiously in my endeavour to understand the goings on in the nation. I am grateful to my old man for having set me on that path.
But there are members in my family who skim through the headlines or watch a shouting match on a TV channel or read a whatsapp forward and then declare confidently, knowledgeably, that the current surge in the pandemic is because we do not have a CEC like TN Seshan!
I try getting in word edgeways saying that the issue may be more complex than that. That there is a double mutant going around, there is the whole livelihood vs life question and so on. I am promptly shut up by being told that I think so because I spend too much time reading a left leaning newspaper. And that I should stop watching BBC World because that is a fading channel that is forever ruing the loss of the jewel in Her Majesty's blighted crown.
This extends to many other aspects of life: getting vaccinated, getting routine diagnostics done, getting the car serviced, choice of schools for children, undertaking journeys in uncertain environments, career choices, purchase of assets, choice of restaurants, decision to settle outside India. The list is endless.
I know what you must be thinking. You might say, "Wait a minute. They could have all been wrong."
The irony is they are not. All of these people who believe that it is a waste of time to read and reflect have trumped me time and again with their choices. Their decision making technique, which my b school smugness would describe as seat of the pants decision making, has won hands down every single time, against my evaluation of probability weighted expectations.
The wisdom that we all know already what we need to know and we just need to think and decide to press on with whatever seems right at that point seems to carry the day all the time. So much so I have now stopped proferring opinions. I know they will be shot down. And ex poste I will look foolish.
It is not just the decision makers around me who make choices about their own personal and professional lives who remind me of the futility of my reading driven approach. I am surrounded by examples of that in the world of business outside.
The story of nearly every unicorn and decacorn seems to bear the truth that it pays not to waste one time's reading. Just write the code you can, build the product and go to market. Somebody will pay for it. Even if no one does, as long as you can convince M Son, F Lee or some other fat pocketed investor that someone will buy your product, valuations will soar to 280 times Year 3 forecasted sales. In a private capital market driven economy that is what matters. Getting your Series F and hitting decacorn status. Off you go buying a nice villa. And your tweets will be featured in ET every now and then. That is a quick course on value creation for you.
That brings me to two possible explanations as to why I find myself where I am. One, I think this whole reading business is highly over-rated. My old man did not merely steal my childhood, but also set me on a path of sheer futility. The other possibility is that the trouble is not what I read, but what I do with it.
I do not have the answer as to which one it is. My sure-footed friends and family will definitely know which one it is.
In any event, at the end of all of this I have only thing to tell the world, like many of the great men in this world that have gone before me: My life is my message. With a minor twist. Just dont do any of what I did. You are sure to do alright in life. Be it deciding to go to business school when I should have probably done maths or literature or history, getting into private enterprise when I should have been a babu, be it getting into academics when I should have just been pushing paper at an obscure office desk, getting married when I should have remained single so that the misery of being myself could have been at least contained to one soul and so on.
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