Excellence In Education is Not As Easy As 1, 2, 3... :)

This post is a must read for anyone interested in the Indian higher education system and why it's in the state of debacle that it is.

Here is the website of a friend of mine from my undergraduate days at IIT Bombay: Kartik Prasanna (umich.edu)

His All India Rank in the IIT JEE was 87. With all branches at all IITs open to him, he chose the five year integrated M.Sc. Mathematics program at IIT Bombay. (That's called knowing what one wants to do and doing it!).

After his M.Sc. he went to Princeton for a PhD under Andrew Wiles (Abel Laureate) who proved Fermat's last theorem). Followed that up with a post-doc at UCLA and then joined University of Maryland College Park as a Tenure Track Assistant Professor.

Three years into his tenure track run (usually a 6-7 years affair), University of Michigan Ann Arbor (ranked higher than Maryland) calls him and offers him tenure and promotion to Associate Professor right then if he agrees to move. He accepts.

When he became a Professor, he had 11 papers - each strong enough to make a dent in his field! I haven't counted his latest count, but I believe he's still sticking to publishing only extremely high quality papers. You are welcome to check on Google Scholar.

This is how excellent universities in the first world conduct themselves. That is why they are excellent and that is why that's the first world.

If he had chosen to come back to India instead of staying in the USA, everyone reading this post knows that we would have destroyed him 🙂. From hearing "Kya? Keval gyarah parche? Utne to ham per semester chaapte hain! Ye aap Princeton Vrinceton jaake kya kar liye?" 😅, to being evaluated by committees who probably wouldn't understand even the abstracts of his papers, to being made a hostel warden worrying about whether our "creme de la creme students" like the dal of the day, to dealing with mass cheating in exams, ... Forget Annals of Mathematics, poor chap would have been barely surviving - that too on our terms, the geniuses that we are 😅!

That's why we are third world. That's why we will never be excellent.

And this isn't just Kartik's story. There are brilliant Indian professors at each and every excellent university in the US. They are staying put, they are excelling there, and that's the right thing to do! Because if they choose to come back, the minute they land, we'll start grinding them to our level.

It's not that we aren't talented or intelligent as a race. We sure are! But you see, we have mentally decided to neither excel ourselves nor let anyone else excel. Na karenge aur na karne denge. And that's fatal.