It’s been long since I gave serious thoughts to things. I usually write when I’m tired, and need a break, to unwind a little. But today, it’s something different that has got me keying in. It’s like a realization creeping from behind, out of the blue!
What follows, is my take on the student-faculty community I’m dealing with on-campus. And I’ve reason enough to believe that the situation isn’t much different in most of the premier institutes of technology.
The best that we get from our colleges is a handful of guys here and there, pulling hares out of their hats. That sure is good. But the fact that one out of a score of bright guys dares to dream, innovate, and materialize his/her brilliance into a work of genius, works out to be not too great a feat.
It’s up to us, the citizens of the morrow, to learn, think out of the box, and broaden horizons. I believe that students in technical institutions in India are a lot obsessed with the mathematics of all physical phenomena, which results in ignoring the actual phenomena. Well, the truth, however unwelcome or bitter it may seem is that most of the research and scientific progress being made these days isn’t on mathematical and theoretical platforms, but on observational and physical-quantum levels. We don’t want to become mere substitutes for calculators, do we?
The need of the hour isn’t how much information we’re loading our heads with, but channelizing information to solve our problems. Take for instance, the Internet. It always has all the info we require. But it’s up to us, to search for it, and that’s precisely what engineers at Google, Yahoo and the likes are doing- looking for better ways to optimize searches. A similar approach to all of our real-world problems would do us a whole lot of good.
Professors and Lecturers too, need to work hard on not letting the high student-faculty ratios come in their way, when it comes to motivating and pepping up their pupils. (It pained me once, when a lecturer got angry when I’d accidentally written a letter to him with a ‘professor’ against his name) Their job has to be integrated with modern scientific and engineering needs.
In the last century, India has to its name only 4 Nobel Prizes, including Mother Teresa. Hargobind Khorana and S Chandrasekhar won the prize only after years of working in the US! Universities and Research institutions in India are in a mess. It’ll take massive funding to change status quo. As of now,they are pools of mediocrity, coming out with occasional strokes of ingenuity. Careful nurturing of us, the future scientists and engineers, would be top on stratagem.
It’s a pointless exercise, trying to show patriotism in Sunita William’s glory back in the US, or APJ Abdul Kalam’s individual brilliance. Winds of change need to be set into motion. And they can never be individual pushes.
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