What one generally finds in India is that the educated and the most intelligent middle class used to join the top bureaucracy while a few others entered the professional courses in the recent past (1940s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s). Now there is a plethora of professional colleges both in engineering and medical education offering seats not only to the top brains but also to others with medium intelligence including the lower cadres on the strength of performances in higher secondary schools or on the quantum of donations / capitation fees offered by rich and influential parents.
While the very top and enterprising graduates go in search of higher education and jobs abroad and a small group either enters management schools within the country and thereafter joins MNCs or runs parental ventures, the majority of the remaining lot tends to adjust in competitive and low paid jobs. Only a minuscule minority does find an opportunity to apply its mind and brain to invention and improvement either due to self motivation or incentives offered by employers.
Once a person joins a job or occupies a seat of power with perks and moderate security of tenure, his or her mind stops working or exploring the new ideas and processes, nor even starts trying to reform the techniques already deployed or engaged to serve and execute. Majority of Indian minds are no doubt inquisitive but hardly employed in their work or style of execution but invariably involved in the status of their neighbors, their strengths and weaknesses and the possibilities of taking over them by pleasing the masters to an unwanted degree & extent. They do it basically to destabilize the existing, traditional and conventionally utilised best practices and procedures to suit their selfish requirements. Western brains are generally inclined to fully apply their minds to what they do and waste little on others in the neighborhood but try to excel in their occupation by taking adventurous steps or making the job easier, better and pleasant to the extent possible on a continuing basis wherever they are. Technologically one could notice the advancement they have made in every piece of work they have undertaken with the help of simple but effective and sophisticated tools deployed by them in construction of buildings, roads with beautiful and useful markings for the pedestrians and automobiles, bridges, factories, theaters, tunnels under rivers and in transportation vehicles with excellent handling devises and equipments reducing the necessity of straining hands and the human body. Look at their shops, shopping malls, super markets, company outlets / clubs. Human life especially that of woman folk is made so much simpler, livable and lovable, compared to the past, with umpteen types of goods and appliances they have produced and pushed into the markets for sales! Simply Mind-boggling!!
Let us ape the West in this regard for the present and show remarkable progress and improvements in our day-to-day life wherever we happen to work.
Look at James Watt.
ReplyDeleteAs a child he was, in his aunt's kitchen, watching the steam gushing from the mouth of the kettle due to boiling water inside with a speed and force that enabled him to design a steam engine later and led to industrial revolution in England.
Science and innovation needed no formal education or university degrees before the scientific genius could discover many theories and practices in those days it seems(Dinamani - Siruvarmani (Child-time) dt December 31, 2011).