Indy Telecom & Industrial Media

From the NYT -

Gleaming new Mercedes cars roll one by one out of a huge container ship here and onto a pier. Ordinarily the cars would be loaded on trucks within hours, destined for dealerships around the country. But these are not ordinary times.

For now, the port itself is the destination. Unwelcome by dealers and buyers, thousands of cars worth tens of millions of dollars are being warehoused on increasingly crowded port property.

And for the first time, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, and Nissan have each asked to lease space from the port for these orphan vehicles. They are turning dozens of acres of the nation’s second-largest container port into a parking lot, creating a vivid picture of a paralyzed auto business and an economy in peril.

Well, shouldn’t the increased demand translate into lower prices for these vehicles? Cars are one of the worst depreciating assets around, and yet, the markups on cars is quite insane and rather staggering.

Perhaps this will encourage auto makers to reconsider their pricing models in these troubled times.

One of the most important things that the Indian culture (like most Asian cultures) insists upon is a good education. Growing up, the value of education is drilled into you, time and again.

And when it comes to education — and this is important — it is not just any education that is valued. It is education that serves a practical purpose that is considered “good”. You either get into engineering or medicine. If you are looking for variety, you do accounting, finance or law.

Even those that get into the sciences do so as a springboard for doing their graduate studies in something “practical” — like an MCA. If you’re studying something like fashion, art, economics or journalism, you must either be rich or just plain nuts (or just plain dumb, of course).

And of course, there is always that good old fashioned MBA. Do your penance of four years of engineering, either work for a short while (or not), and get into a B-school — any B-school. And Viola! You now have the perfect combination and all Indian parents will point to you as the perfect little example of how wonderful a son (or daughter) you are.

The really adventurous ones, of course, apply to graduate schools and come to the US (or go to Europe) to pursue an education (in the sciences — what else?!). The radicals come here and do *gasp* business.

But doing a PhD in Pure Math? Or studying History or the Classics? Or Philosophy? Music Theory? PLEASE!

You’d be insulting the Indian intellect by suggesting these subjects, because they have no practical value. You see, most of India’s educational system is not based on what you like, but rather what your family and friends deem you capable of.

Competition is rampant from the very beginning of your high school years, and if you still want to do Art History, you must not be very smart. Hell, I don’t even know if any school in India offers a degree in Art History.

Now, this is understandable since India is a relatively young nation, and a developing one at that. Therefore, the luxury of an impractical education is not one that is offered to most people. You get out of high school, and you study a subject that has the maximum earning potential (choice translates into what branch of engineering or medicine you want to do).  And once you graduate, you take up a job and earn money.

But what does this mean for India, as a nation? There is a rich intellectual tradition in India, and we’ve had our share of Chanakyas and Aryabhattas.

However, by implicitly attaching a lower value to subjects such as the Pure Sciences, Classics, History, Art, Economics etc., we are destroying that intellectual tradition. How many Ramanujans are lost because they do engineering and take up an IT job, rather than do pure math? How many Raja Ravi Varmas are slogging away at a call center? How many people study Sanskrit? For some reason, all the Sanskrit scholars I’ve met seem to live in either Cambridge, UK or Cambridge, Mass. And let’s just say that none of them are Indian. You would think that a Nobel-winning economist would inspire people to study economics, but no. Hell, the Indian Prime Minister is one himself, but that does not seem to matter. Because you see, India may need to open more engineering colleges because they can’t keep up with the demand.

There is a very significant downside to this. There is a reason that undergraduate degrees in Classics or Philosophy are valued before you do business, law, medicine or just about anything. It is because it broadens your perspective. It gives you critical thinking ability. You get skilled at abstractions, and at conceptualizations.

Indians are excellent at details. Given the emphasis on pragmatism, this is obviously to be expected. However, Indians are not good at looking at the big picture, simply because over the years, they have not been trained to do so. If anything, if you want plebes, looking at the big picture is probably not a good thing because you do not want your measly programmer to get delusions of grandeur.

But long term vision, long term planning and strategic thinking ability only comes from looking at the big picture. Intellectual traditions are very, very vital to the soul of a nation. And I am afraid that India as a nation is sacrificing its vision for tomorrow in its short term pursuit of practicality for today.