Of honour and shame - part1

I have been upset for the last couple of days at the lack of respect for good work even at a premier educational institution. As I had mentioned in my post a couple of days ago, these are the same people who worked very hard to get into these schools. If my own memory and example is anything to go by, then most of these kids would be all starry eyed on their first day at B-School, ready to conquer the world. Effort levels are high in the first semester. And then something happens.

As soon as people figure out that they are not in the top so may percent of their class, they switch off. A number of them just roll over and play dead. What causes this binary, all or nothing mindset? Do we as a culture, place too much emphasis on the biggest winners? Clearly, we do. So winning is glorious. But where, along the way, did we lose our sense of pride in quality of work? I have a theory. Again. So bear with me.

I have a notion that we learned to excuse ourselves for our sloppy work when the resources made available to us were clearly insufficient, thanks to the planned economy. In fact, a number of social maladies can be traced back to the planned economy and the constrained environment that a couple of generations of Indian were forced to labour under. When you stand in line for an hour to get your litre of milk and then in line for another hour for a loaf of bread, the only breakfast you have time for is bread dunked in milk. When the milk is half water, you cannot make a good milkshake. When the wheat is the red wheat procured with the begging bowl of the PL-480 program, you cannot make a roomali roti. A few decades of this and we do not even expect to see a good milkshake and generally we learn to excuse ourselves easily when the quality of our output is less than exemplary.

What we need is a kick start to a new way of expecting and delivering quality work. And this process should start in our schools. We might need to reconsider our tolerance of sloppy homework and set the bar high. It is neo-intellectual to proffer the argument that every child has different abilities and needs to be loved.

I agree completely, but we also need to urgently find and enforce a system whereby every child learns that he or she has to do her best all the time. This second part is seriously lacking and we have built a generation of 'Chalta-Hain Jugaadus'. We have perhaps even glorified Jugaad as resourcefulness or improvisation. Then, to compound matters, as these children grow up to become adults, they have the gall to pontificate about what is wrong with our work ethic and about discipline.

To be continued…