Subir Roy: Between being and nothingness

OFFBEAT/ Sometimes even a fraction makes all the difference

The English teacher who was a universal guide for us two years away from school-leaving said: If you read all the good non-textbooks you can lay your hands on, then you will certainly get somewhere in life; if you slog at your textbooks you will get a rank.

I made my choice and was lucky enough to crawl through the gates of the first division before they were slammed shut.

The marks were too poor for entry through the hallowed portals of Kolkata's Presidency College. But there was one hope. The snooty economics department, which knew it knew better than both the higher secondary board and CalU, held its own admission test. The test came and went, blessedly free of anything that had been there in my textbooks.

Having a rather poor opinion of myself, I organised a fallback. With a bit of help from a school senior who was well ensconced in the economics department of St Xavier's, I got my name into their economics list. The "father" there knew my friend, knew my school and saw a middle-class boy when he set eyes on me.

And that was enough for him, much like my school principal who had declared long ago that when he admitted a student, he preferred to interview the parents rather than the boy.

I am sure it was my ability to express myself logically in English, acquired through reading all the non-textbooks, that pushed my name on to the Presidency College list. Had they known of my inability to pursue any kind of textbook, they wouldn't have let me in.

That is something they found out much later. Today, it seems all this happened not four decades but centuries ago.

My son looked sorry as he stared at the blank screen of his shut-down computer. Another rejection, I asked casually, a little curious that a veteran of rejections like him should look disappointed. It's not me, he replied.

It's my friend who has missed law school (the country's premier one in Bangalore) by 0.2 marks (or should it be mark?). We both agreed that here was one person who would hate the decimal point for the rest of his life. Psychoanalysts may even have to coin a new phobia to classify the likes of him.

How did we come to such a pass? Considering how most of my school and college contemporaries have fared (now that we are all on the wrong side of 50 and don't have any more professional surprises to spring), the downright relaxed system that the best institutions had in those days to select who got in wasn't inefficient at all.

Today, the first problem is the rating system that well-meaning magazines have introduced to identify the best colleges in the country.

In the process a few institutions have got such a high profile that if you have not made it to them you are nothing. And a mark or two or sometimes a fraction thereof determines the difference between being and nothingness.

Good and not-so-good colleges were there even half a decade ago, but the not-so-good also had a place in the sun, if you go by all the successful people today who came out of them.

It is not as if we don't know what's wrong with the system. The Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management have been busy doubling or trebling their intakes.

Those who know agree that when youngsters miss success in life by at most a few marks, the time has come to multiply the number of top institutions and create a new, just-below tier like the national institutes of technology.

I rather like the rating that one management magazine has done of the top couple of hundred management schools, or the action plan that a global technology leader has to improve the curriculum at the top 100 engineering colleges.

During my college days I learnt most of my economics from The Economic Times, then edited by D K Rangnekar, rather than from my college lectures that were inaudible from Coffee House across the road where some of us were most of the time. But I am sure I have got it right in seeing it as basically a demand-and-supply gap, not between aspirants and number of seats available but between aspirants and just a few institutions that matter.

A couple of hundred institutions in the country in each stream need to do a bit of branding that simply says: "We may not be top dogs but we aren't bad at all. Do you really want to know what they actually teach at the top of the heap? If we were no good, why would those top software companies merrily recruit from second-rung colleges and get by so well?"

As things are, at the end of the road for all of us now stands a portal. The first choice it gives is: "Who would you like to interact with "" Lord Indra, St Peter or Others?"

Once you have crossed that, comes the forbidding demand: "Now enter your score of good deeds or go to the assessment site to get a score (remember there is negative marking for sinful acts)." And after that comes the banishment to damnation: "Sorry, you have not made it to Heaven; our cutoff right now is 105 per cent."

To that you protest in exasperation: "I am not such a bad guy, remember the prodigal who returned or Valmiki who was formerly a dacoit?" There is a ready answer: "This is merely a score and not necessarily a foolproof assessment of your life. You have interacted with a computerised assessment. Try again later and have a nice day." And when you type in panic: "Hang on, hang on...", all that you get in reply is: "If you wish to do the test again go back to the top."

(sub@business-standard.com)