The University

Yesterday I happened to overhear a part of a chat between two guys in the lab here. I guess they were discussing the state of their respective theses (all PhD theses at all times and places are in a bad state, naturally), and somehow the chat seems to have moved on to PhD students in general. One of them suggested that nobody does a PhD in IITs. And the other one agreed and further said that even the ones that do are not up to scratch, and they probably do PhD in IITs because they don't have any other option. Actually, he used Hindi equivalents of words such as "leftovers" and "otiose". But anyway, that's not the thing.

Forget these desis who have apparently escaped the below par IITs (the very havens to reach which they doubtless spent several months in Kota, Rajasthan, only a few years before that). A labmate of mine, a fellow PhD student of mine, in fact, used to proclaim repeatedly, the following line - "BTech's are the products of IITs, MTech's the byproducts and PhD's the waste products."

The cleverness of such things notwithstanding, we can point to several leftovers and waste products that are, well, being very productive. But that is also not the point. I hear such things so often that it's neither offensive nor amusing. Surely the IITs, or the higher education in India in general, for that matter, has a very long way to go. That low quality students join IITs (or other institutes in India) for PhDs or that IITs produce low quality PhDs is probably (circularly) true in general. While I don't have a problem with the generalization, I only find statements such as the ones I cited ironic.

When you state such truisms, you are either reinforcing a stereotype or being a party to a self-fulfilling prophecy or both. Let's say you are one of the few bright people in India, and you go elsewhere and state that bright people don't stay in India, I don't think that would come to me as a fascinating realisation.

Please make no mistake. I am not at all suggesting that people, bright or otherwise, should stay in India just because they are born here. It's an individual's choice. It's true that opportunities are not abound here. Especially the brightest people find great opportunities abroad, and it might well be foolish on their part to miss them. There are also strong points in favour of the argument - 'the best people should get the best opportunities and conditions.' I agree with that too. But the only clause that might be useful if we add it is - provided some of them come back and reproduce the kind of opportunities and conditions that they had the privilege of experiencing.

The US was, and continues to be, built by people from all over. It's the people who create the opportunities and nurture conditions that attract more people. After all, it is the people who make an institute or a country great, and not the other way round. So, unless the whole world can migrate to the US (or Western Europe), there is a dire need to create opportunities and nurture conditions elsewhere, on the way to making them also attractive and great.

One of the most important steps, if not the most important step, in this direction is the university. That's what made Europe and the US great. That's what we need to build if we want to see a better India.

There's also another incentive that the university provides in terms of preserving/developing our culture. Build high quality, big and real universities. Not just new IITs, but places that facilitate teaching and, more importantly, research in all disciplines -- arts, history, linguistics, basic sciences, engineering, culture etc.. Build places where ideas can flow freely, ideologies can clash in a constructive way. Let people discuss sciences, culture, languages and arts; let people innovate. Then we will see cultures being preserved in a real sense.