Thoughts

I originally wrote these as part of an application for Colloquium Coordinator post. I didn't get that but was left with these. A friend, Tejaswi, suggested I put it up on a blog. So here they are. These are my views on three different subjects.

Increase in the number of IITs - In the year 2008 (the year I joined IITM) five new IITs came into being along with the decision to have 27% reservation in IITs. Gradually four more IITs came into being and now there are 16 of them. This was meant to propel the quality of education in India, but does the quality of education go up by setting up few colleges and naming them IITs? Any institutes strength lies in infrastructure, faculty and Alumni. Hasn't setting up new IITs diluted the Professor to student ratio? Does this mean that it had the negative effect of bringing the quality of education down?

Google Success story - In 1998 a website sprung up that broke all the accepted notions of '.com business'. Their motto was don't be evil. Most of the websites, search engines at those times wanted to keep users as long as possible on their site to maximise profit and were more advertiser friendly than user friendly. This website kept users on their site for as less time as possible, didn't have very many advertisements yet it went on to become more popular, bigger than any of those websites ever were. It was Google. It had proved once again the concept of 'think outside the box'. When we know that the best way to get success is to think outside box why do we still choose to ignore it? Why do all the top 'achievers' in our college opt to go to Mckinsey, Deutsche bank, Boston Consultancy group etc? Or writing CAT and getting into IIM? Isn't that kind of comfortably fitting into the box? Why follow a path trodden by many, even though a lot of them achieved money or success if you may call it so? If a person really wants to be an entrepreneur shoudn't he join as an apprentice under some guy who has put a start up, something which S.Anand, Infosys Consulting, London had mentioned in his talk here.

The Telangana issue - When Telangana was initially merged with Andhra, our then prime minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was sceptical of this decision. He though it would lead to discontentment, and it did. The current the Congress, which claims to be following in footsteps of its iconic leaders, thinks it would be unwise to split the Andhra Pradesh. I am not a Telangana supporter nor am in support of united Andhra Pradesh. I just feel that too much fuss is being made about this issue. All the agitations and protests in Hyderabad have driven many a prospective investors, who wanted to invest in hyderabad, to move on to other cities, this includes some IT companies as well. Isn't this then causing more harm to Telangana people than benefit? Kukatpally MLA, Jayaprakash Narayan said in his lecture here in IIT Madras that he thinks that it won't change anything radically. So why so much delay in coming to a decision?