Only competition makes this class.

1. Self Esteem: Can soon become non-existent, if it depends on just outcomes.

2. Competition: Can destroy 1 above.

As a student in the computer science programme at IIT Madras, I was of the strong opinion that most people in the class were a bit off the usual. Well, they were expected to be, you might say, all of them had to make it through a gruelling examination and come out on top or do very well in the first semester at college. But they are different in a different sort of way as the "winners"/victims of excessive competition are likely to be.

If you do run into one of the guys (girls, luckily seem to be above all this), and cannot see the Halo around their heads, which other competitive individuals aware of their achievements do, consider yourself rather unlucky.
For most of them will strike you as merely usually slightly eccentric, some outrightly so and as a general interesting aside - ordinary looking :) (unlike what's expected as some people who've never been to the IITs but only heard of their 'magnificence' say)

Well, before someone says, speak for yourself,

Being a member of this class, I must admit to my own eccentricities too, the major one - an obsession with competition that seems to need tremendous soul searching to get rid of.

And various less important others (provided solely for entertainment below!) such as:
1. Searching for free stuff on gumtree.com and good bargains on ebay when I don't really need anything.
2. Going through blogs and websites (esp. rediff.com and econtimes.com, given) even when I know there's never going to be anything useful there
3. And a general absent-mindedness which makes sure i pocket any bunch of keys i find much to the consternation of their owners, and keep banana peels in my schoolbag for weeks to keep London clean and make biomanure in the front pouch.

But my most severe symptoms used to be the following,
1. A general mistrust of people especially if they could be competition. So I would never trust you if you told me you lost the book I wanted to borrow from you.
2. An obsessive curiosity about who's doing what, even if they have no relation to what I am going to do.
3. And my most worrying one - An association of self esteem to achievement and thus, outcomes, which is most worrying.

No 3 is a classic case, the university you get into for postgrad, the job you get after that, and perhaps the pay are all potential 'uplift'ers/destroyers of self esteem.
Given the number of desired jobs there are and the number of people who want them, it is likely that they destroy than uplift for most.

And the fourth year at college and the past few placement seasons at the IIMs were fantastic windows for observation.
From those who did not get into the universities(the IIMs included) they wanted when everybody else around them was to
Those who couldn't get the company or the pay they wanted to maintain their current self esteem at the IIMs and find it extremely difficult to mail friends, talk to relatives, classmates and colleagues, and these days, post blogs or scraps,
All of them are all classic examples of people who manage to get by in, what anthropologist Jules Henry put as, “a competitive culture endures by tearing people down."

History? Depends on who's writing it.

Rewriting history textbooks is a nice pastime, especially for those self-declared "preserve our culture and tradition" types. These types generally dwell on foreign lands that guarantee political equality, ie USA, Europe etc.
Distance, they say, breeds attachment. So Indian culture and tradition are suddenly more important than they ever were before crossing the border.
And as a yiddish proverb goes, "if you are a rich man, you also look good and write well", good finances are enough to make experts on Indian culture and its history.

So with enough money in the bank, close to retirement, nothing much to do except reading some partisan version of the Vedas, what do they choose to do ? - Join a Hindu society and lobby to change history or fund those who will change it at home in India, to put it rather bluntly.

And what happens to all of us, poor and rich families alike in India, indifferent to these changes ?

Before we know it, our children (and probably us, if we did not pay too much attention to history at school) are going to be learning that the Vedas are full of mathematics and science, that the Indus valley civilization is actually the very Hindu Indus-Saraswathi civilization,
Nor will you find a mention of Nathuram Godse and his membership in the RSS if you happen to forget the assassin of Gandhi.
( See "On Inventing the Past", The Argumentative Indian by Amartya Sen, if Prof Sen is to be believed)

Given the more urgent needs of poverty and other growing pains of development, one does not expect any but the reasonably well off to bother about this 'rewriting' of history.

Even for most of this bunch, all that matters is that their children score well in the final examination, how do a few lines changed here or there matter anyway?

History is just another exam.

After all, If they do well then they can go to America, earn money and maybe make their "mark" on Indian history too!

For more on Hindu nationalist revisionists,
http://abcnews.go.com/International/CSM/story?id=1534056
and an older reference to it on The Hindu, a national newspaper
http://www.hinduonnet.com/2002/03/25/stories/2002032500041000.htm

Bits and Pieces.

Once again, it's that time of the year, when the exams are near, when the ink that runs the blog threatens to dry out excusing itself for other troubles one's mind has to go through.

So all I can do is submit yet another patchwork of some unrelated pieces of my writing,

1. Life at College's coming to an end, atleast for now. Things that I can no more have:
a) Lectures in the Old and New Theatres, eating at the Brunch Bowl and the Wright's Bar
b) Eating out at the GBKs, Masala Zones and Pizza Expresses/Huts before catching a movie at Prince Charles Cinema, Odeon or Vue whenever i please
c) Footloose and fancy trips to England's countryside, the lake district , Scotland or Belgium or the Netherlands on shoestring budgets.
d) Catching that fantastic view of London over Waterloo Bridge at night.

And things to look forward to: ?
a) A daily 12 hr grind from 8 to 8.
b) Sandwiches for lunch on the desk, may be innumerable trips to bring breakfast, tea and lunch?
c) A nice home to get back to, perhaps and a lot more stuff that's affordable, only there's no time to enjoy it perhaps.
d) Minute-to-minute checks to see how much money I have accumulated so far?

2. To imagine life as a highly paid sales guy who has to sell to people born with gold nappies under their bums is not entirely pleasing.
Atleast that's what I picked up from the movie Syriana, even as rich Sheiks with no semblance of intelligence get, by simply being born, what most people have to work their entire lives to get.

3. It's bumper time, atleast for Indian graduates in the US and those at the IIMs. Nonetheless there will always be a few gloomy faces - especially those who would bet their lives that the frightening CGPA is the most foolproof predictor of future success.
(9 pointer Elec/CS toppers, average 8 pointers, lowly seven pointers, Cul Secs and Not-even-Sac Secs find themselves in the same boat, with similar pay in similar firms - so what decides who comes out on top ? I don't know but I can safely bet that it won't be the CGPA.)

True, High CGPA indicates a drive among young men not very common, but those in the middle ranges cannot count on a number printed on a sheet of paper to take them through the cut-throat concrete jungle that business districts in the world's prominent centres have become.
Nor are those numbers going to assure smooth sailing in academia, not with the politics professors have to play to stay in the game these days.

4. Coming back to the CGPA, nothing haunts the average male IITian more than a question about that feared number.
"Why is your JEE rank not correlated to your CGPA" is a common question that these hapless victims face, that I feel compelled to suggest, " Why was your JEE rank not as great as your CGPA then " as a reply to the chap who asks that question.
For such a question can only come from someone so insecure not just about one number but two(his JEE rank!) that he is adopting a time tested strategy of searching for security by fishing for people with lower CGs and pointing it out to them!
Moral-of-the-story : If you want to sell something to an IITian (These chaps tend to have big paychecks,unfortunately not always big hearts as is always the case with this kind of people - see 3 above) start with anything but the CGPA, starting on hostel life is a good bet.

5. As for the rest, I am doing fine and will be in India in June to seek your blessings whereupon I know i will be asked my grades and my pay converted to the highest possible exchange rate - I will however resist until early July after which I shall take leave to return to my 8am-8pm paradise.

PS: If No. 1 sounded like one of those stereotypical write-ups romanticizing foreign places to which most readers haven't been to, while ignoring similarsights at home, it was not meant to be.
I must say it's only true that the view over Waterloo Bridge is indeed wonderful, and so is the view over Tank Bund in Hyderabad, only I have not seen it with as much intensity as Waterloo, which i see twice a day everyday.
If that sounded apologetic, it wasn't meant to be. Bah! One of thse post scripts that leaves you with a tinge of dissatisfaction, I must say:)