From 'Foreign' to 'Phoren'

“Son, where you want to get an admission?”, the father asks. 

The Son thinks for a while puffing a cigarette. He is a current year pass out of class 12^th with some 42 percent marks and is now thinking to get an admission to an engineering college.

“How about MIT dad?” he asks after thinking a bit.

“Forget about MIT and the oxfords. I told you to fetch some more marks. If at all you would have got some 60 percent I could have tried, but now there’s no chance for it”, the dad replies.

“But dad, all my friends are going to MIT”.

“I told you, I can’t help. Why don’t you think about the IIT’s? They are also the premier institutes of India”.

“c’mmon dad. When I can get an oxford or mit after my name, why think about something that has Indian written on it. No IIT’s. I will only study if you get me to MIT, otherwise forget it”.

Dad looks helplessly, devoid of words, towards his spoilt son who this time lights another cigarette and walks away.

Amazed? Yes this is India, not now but some / many years after the bill of foreign universities coming to India passes and becomes a law. So does it mean that it shouldn’t pass? No. it should. After all calling oneself globalized can only be realized when it is on all fronts. And education is one of them.

But the aspect to think is what is in store for the future? Sure the universities will come; seats will increase manifold and the crunch that is being currently felt on the shortage of seats particularly in the higher education segment will fade away. But will that help the nation as a whole?

A question to ponder which we have already left behind issues such as how the reservation will come into play in the foreign universities, how the government will keep an eye on them so that they follow and abide by the central rules of running an university and finally how powerful people will again find a leeway inside the system to get in their wards popularly known as the management quota in India.

We Indians are quite capable of deviating and futzing around. Being an Indian I know this. We start off with targets that very few can think of, identify the problem but somewhere in the middle we get lost amidst self made vagaries.

I will give you one example. Just few days back our renowned bestseller novelist chetan bhagat wrote an article about this issue in the form of a nicely framed short story that touches the heart once you read it. He wrote it for people to read and realize where we are going wrong.

As always, to create a hype which our celebrities know very well, self-marketing some call it, Bhagat too as now he is no less a celebrity himself, with the help of new and fast growing networking platform twitter, tweeted it to his thousands of followers who then re-tweeted it to their million followers and friends.

As a result the news spread like a jungle fire that chetan bhagat had written a wonderful short story on Hindustan times. Hindustan times which have its own large readership base of course made it reach to much more. Almost all the youngistan, as we call it, read the story and then started to praise chetan bhagat for writing such a wonderful story and touching the hearts of Indians once again. Chetan bhagat too completely forgot for what he had written it and got busy in replying with words like thanks, keep the support etc.

In the whole fall of events something got very badly hit and that was the real issue.

It’s not a question that whether foreign universities will take away our shortcomings of not being able to provide good colleges to the millions but rather it is a question that how are we going to adopt it. It’s actually the opposite way which we are thinking, i.e how those universities will adopt us.

Moreover universities move very slowly unlike the opening of the economy when one fine morning our local businessman started to get stiff competition from foreign brands which have overnight spread itself over the whole market. If you really want to serve each student with a good college then combining the whole universities of the world may even fall short. Its just going to improve the percentages a bit. Its somewhere around 2 percent now and will grow to a 10 percent max. So then what about the other 90 percent like we talk about the other 98 percent now.

Just giving the universities a space to set up their buildings in India will only result in becoming them from foreign to phoren. Nothing else.

p.s : Do you see a comments link below this. Ok. Click it and type your comments.