I never really understood what India's bold strides on the world stage as a knowledge economy meant until I experienced, this past month, the reality on the ground. It's the time of year when millions of households across the country seize on hope and set out on a harrowing search for a brighter future. There's no escaping this annual national exercise, even for the most fatalistic. In the dailies, on TV, up on billboards and hoardings, through counselling sessions, seminars and exhibitions, the multibillion-rupee business of generating, imparting and exploiting knowledge for the creation of wealth makes an unavoidable splash, engaging parents, relatives, friends, acquaintances and strangers in high drama while the one protagonist in all this, just a blooming teenager out to discover his or her world, is often sidelined and left wondering: what about me and what I want? For sure there's a great deal on offer in terms of career choices for the tens of thousands of PUC, ICSE or CBSE high-school graduates whose results were announced this week. But in my time in the mid-1970's the situation was quite different. You either made it to a graduation course in Medicine or Engineering or ended up being a dog for the rest of your academic life and beyond, unless, of course, you worked a miracle and passed the tough IAS/IPS/IFS or Chartered Accountancy exams at some later stage. Nowadays, there are so many choices that much of the agony of a dog's life gets concentrated into a month of overt and covert interference by family and well-wishers wanting to have a say or two on what the fresh high-school graduate should aim for in life. Of course everybody means well but the pressure can be killing. After the PUC results were announced some weeks ago, the papers carried stories nearly every day on suicides by failed students. The reports involved not only parents who drove their children to willful death with their wickedly expressed high expectations but also those who consciously avoided badgering their children and had not the faintest clue that social or peer pressure could also be a big killer. Last weekend, I met with four woefully lost professionals in their early thirties whose careers were at a dead end. They were all from Malappuram district in Kerala state which is best known in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf for contributing the biggest chunk of expat workers. All the four were high salaried, three of them IT engineers. They were holed up in an upscale apartment that belonged to one of them, Yusuf, whose wife and children had abandoned him. Yusuf was in between jobs, having resigned from AOL because there was nothing in the job that inspired him. He was waiting to join a small start-up that wanted to tap into his creativity as a web designer. It was a step down but it made him happy. His wife, however, thought otherwise, deciding he was no longer that awesome IT guy she married. Nikhil's plight was similar. His inlaws threw him out of their sprawling villa in one of the poshest district in Bangalore after he took to wildlife photography and began neglecting his job at Mind Tree. Looking at Nikhil's photos on his website, it was clear he knew where he was going. His inlaws, however, had doubts and took his wife and child away in protest against his wanting to be “just a photographer.” The third IT guy, Rehan, was divorced after he gave up his secure management job at AOL and wasn't quite sure how to make a living as a painter. The fourth was a biotechnologist who couldn't go home to fights with his wife anymore because she and her family won't accept his decision to start an animation studio. All four had another thing in common: theirs were arranged marriages clinched mainly because of their academic qualifications and good jobs with multinational companies. It was only after the children were born that they began to realize what was becoming of their lives in careers not of their choice. In India today, engineering is in big demand and there are more seats available in colleges than there are candidates. Yet, studies show that only a small percentage of the engineers passing out are capable of innovation to meet the real needs of the country's booming private sector; the rest end up doing low-end engineering jobs or use their degrees to worm their way into other careers. Even from India's famed IITs, a large percentage of the graduates end up in the high-paying banking sector, putting to waste all their knowledge in engineering. Then again there are also frequent reports of suicides by students unable to cope with the professional courses forced on them. What many parents refuse to accept is that with India steadily recording one of the world's highest economic growth rates, a mind-boggling array of career options have opened up for the country's youth. A generation ago, a carpenter could barely manage to raise a family but, today, with proper training, he can possibly develop an international brand since purchasing power in the population has tremendously increased to make a start-up venture feasible enough to qualify for a bank loan. Industrial design, automobile design, fashion design, gaming, farming, fishery, forestry, forensic science, wildlife, oceanography, material sciences, music, performing arts, shipping, packing – you name it and there's a graduate course available in good colleges having high job placement rates. Better still, arts or commerce students with an appropriate set of additional skills can now also qualify for many positions that were earlier meant for only science graduates. There are so many jobs available that the new challenge for students is to figure out the right set of academic qualifications and skills they need to bring out the best of what comes naturally to them. And that's mainly the student's call. – SG Feedback: [email protected] __
