Indian Undergraduate Education

Indian education system seldom encourages participatory learning. Textbooks are bibles that guide you through your judgment day - the final exam. Questioning (forget challenging) textbook wisdom is considered a blasphemy. I majored in Botany for my undergraduate degree and liked it very much and I very much wanted to specialize in biotechnology for my Masters. But after my three years of graduate education (or the lack of it) at ZGC Calicut (the alma mater of the great of V K Krishna Menon) I realized that I was under-equipped to pursue for any rigorous advanced master’s program in Biology. I still recall a lecture for a plant physiology course during my second year at ZGC. The teacher was explaining root pressure theory and an experiment to prove it. I asked her curiously if capillary force can be an alternative explanation to the results of that experiment... she was angry at me and said something like this "The text book says it is root pressure, so it should be root pressure. If you write something else you will get a zero for your answer". This is just one instance... Educators (lecturers, professors, tutors, principal etc) at ZGC were less of knowledge creators and disseminators and more of self-appointed, draconian disciplinarians. Attendance was a must, students were expected to address their professors as Sirs and Madams, speak to them in a very respectful tone (i.e., not to challenge or question the content or any ideas they expressed), dress “like students” and write down whatever they dictate in class… any transgression was met with “serious consequences”… (the situation was no different (sometimes even worse) in other colleges in India). I considered quitting this program many a time, but a basic undergraduate degree of this sort, even if it doesn’t equip you to get into top any worthwhile advanced master’s program in that discipline, it is a prerequisite for many jobs (even menial ones) in India. On the bright side, once you get this degree you could move flexibly to an MBA, as I did, or a Masters in Computer Application (thanks to the heavy demand for computer engineers in the country). A majority of my classmates that I am in touch with are pursuing CS, IT and ITES careers. Being able to pursue an MBA after this worthless undergraduate degree came as a second lease of academic life for me and luckily I found management education more fascinating, thanks to some excellent professors I had at TKM, who though were not into knowledge creation, were certainly topnotch in knowledge dissemination and held an open mind to new ideas.

I dont say that undergraduate education in India is worthless. I think education happens outside the classroom. My best memories at ZGC had been outside the class room. I did make some true friends, learnt some serious life lessons and interacted with some great minds (Vasudevan Unni in particular). But all of that was outside of the classroom. I missed out on that part. All I was trying to communicate was the quality of the "in-class" experience was not good enough to foster creativity and knowledge creation or to even remotely instill any passion in purist of it. I too hardly met the "student requirements". In fact, I was almost thrown out of college on a couple of occasions due to my supposed "misdemeanor" (as defined by some of the self-appointed, and let me add hypocritical, disciplinarians) in the Men's Hostel - drinking alcohol  But I made good use of the campus life. I still cherish those memories (Playing Bartley in Riders to the Sea, for instance) and I laugh at the idiotic gimmicks of the "self-appointed, hypocritical, disciplinarians"