Begging for a World Class University

Consider this scenario. Someone you know imprisons his grown up children and does not allow them to go out and do jobs that they are fully capable of doing. He also locks up his productive assets and prevents his children from using them. Then he goes around begging his neighbors for help with feeding his family as he does not have any income. The words that spring to mind upon considering this man’s behavior are words like contemptible, immoral, stupid, pathetic, pitiable, and sad.

India’s Desperate Talent Search

Ramesh Menon’s article “India’s Talent Crunch” in DNA makes shocking reading but is news only if one has not been in touch with the reality of the desperate situation that employers face in India in their search for employable people.

India Spends $13,000,000,000 on Education Abroad

That’s what a report in the Hindustan Times claims: US $13 billion each year. Figures such as these are unbelievable but I suppose someone must have done the numbers. In any case, I had estimated that number to be around $10 billion a few years ago.

Let’s pause for a moment and figure. $13 billion every year. Or in the last 10 years, about $100 billion. Imagine what you could buy for that money. How about 100 colleges with first class infrastructure with housing, classrooms, labs? Each year India could have an additional capacity for 10,000 college students and in 10 years you could have 100,000 additional capacity. Imagine the multiplier effect of that spending — in construction, in salaries to teaching and non-teaching staff. Imagine the boost to the industry from creating human capital. The imagination boggles at the sheer waste.

Imagine how much infrastructure you could build for $100 billion.

One of the principal lessons one learns as one studies economic development is that success or failure depends largely on the set of economic policies that govern the economy. India, for instance, is poor and economically a failure because its economic policies are extremely brain-dead. Of course one can explain why these brain-dead economic policies exist. We will not visit that now. Here I would only mention that the policy on education is the most brain-dead and that educational policy is largely to blame for why India is poor today, and if the policy is not changed, then it will certainly doom India in the future.

“India’s Great Problem”

The headline in the NY Times article simply says, “INDIA’S GREAT PROBLEM: Nobody Knows How to Educate Her 300,000,000 People.” It begins

For many years past, those who have known India best have recognized that one of her greatest, if not her greatest, problem was that of education.

The Age of Profound Ignorance

We find ourselves in the midst of a transition, from the industrial-value-added analog world to the information-value-added digital world of the future. The relatively static world of the past is giving way to a dynamic world that defies comprehension and easy descriptions. The institutions that worked in the past are losing their relevance in an accelerating and rapidly changing world economy – one that is getting more interdependent and interrelated. This change is more radical than that which accompanied the transition from a primarily agricultural to an industrial economy.

Numerology Question

I need help with replying to this email which has been sitting in my inbox for a while. Every time I open it with intentions of replying, words fail me. Any suggestions from the gallery on what the appropriate response should be?

Atanu:

I read your article on name change and I found it fascinating. Do you have a numerologist you could recommend? I’ve just written my first novel and I need to choose between my name and married name. Thanks so much.

All the best,
Novel Writer

Thank you kindly for any help.