Huh? What wrong I have written? My apologies in advance!
Nothing you said wrong. On the contrary.
OK, let me explain.
From 1988 to 1995, I was an independent; largely a choice born out of sheer anger at the organisation that wouldn't listen to me screaming as loud as anyone could that the B20 was too advanced to sell in this country, and we needed a UNIX box (six months after I quit, they brought in the U6000). During the first year, I taught myself (with some help from IISc friends) software programming. Afterwards, I made programmes for small clinics and hospitals with multiple sites, who needed to pull together their data, track excess cash, plan where to deploy resources, and how to divert patients and not lose them due to lack of capacity at one point while they had excess at other locations. Beyond a point, I couldn't do it alone; one reason being that after working in Pascal, I hated working in DBase and FoxPro and that kind of shit, and I wasn't too enamoured of either C or the rapidly onrushing C++. So, inevitably, I started hiring students straight from college.
It took me three months or more to work with them on analysis and design (nothing fancy; we still weren't using object oriented equivalents, I did most of my work manually due to lack of funds and therefore lack of a design tool). These were engineers from the best colleges in Bangalore and Hyderabad. The deal was straightforward; I paid them chump change, but they got a thorough grounding, exposure to live development, and, even more important, testing, that NO college taught them, and a fair chance of getting to a decent job.
I live in Hyderabad now. Two weeks ago, there was a strange phone call; the caller was teasing me refusing to identify himself, but clearly knew me very, very well. It was rattling. Finally, it turned out to be one of those kids. He was now a COO in a big name in IT, earning in a couple of months what I would be glad to earn in a year. I checked on the batch of eight of them who had come in together; each of them was set and doing very well indeed, thank you very much.
It's the bringing up to date, practical exposure to business and learning to work in a team, and to work in a process-rich environment that the kids lacked, when they left college.
Five years ago, having nursed an aging parent through his last years, I found myself dead broke and on the wrong side of a retirement age, with nothing to fall back upon. A lucky chance got me a teaching assignment and plunged me into four years of hell.
At the IIM, earlier in a premier college that kind of out-Ivy Leagued Ivy League, I was used to fierce peer pressure to know, and to be rigorous applying knowledge to a problem, I was used to working unusual hours to get a job done, I was used to gauging when competition was appropriate and when to sink differences to work towards common goals. Now, on the other side, teaching, I found the ghastly truth about teaching.
My colleagues (in B Schools, both times) were NOT interested in the Indian business situation. They were clear; they had their PhD, they had paid their dues and learning was over. They concentrated on teaching exactly what they had been taught, nothing more and on maintaining their ivory tower positions against any enemy action, such as, for instance, student panic at not getting jobs. I worked out, through my personal network, teams to support both the engineering and management faculties, to sit with them and to tweak the syllabus from time to time to update it, and to keep us relevant. Nobody was interested; least of all the VC in either of the two places I worked.
The Indian education system is broken, both at an operational and at a philosophical level. The kind of junk that comes into posts is a symptom of that fatal lack of viability of the system; we have literate people who are uneducated, employed people who cannot comprehend a simple issue or elementary wording, we have the detritus of an industrial failure parading around giving themselves airs because they are better off than the millions who have no jobs, no houses, no clothes, no food, no prospects.
So when I read your post, I nearly wept. As a race, we come out last in TShirt sloganeering; compared to other Indians, we cannot Keep Calm and Whatever; genetically, it is a proven fact that we cannot keep calm. I am no exception, and that is why I felt utterly defeated. Don't get me wrong; your posts are generally sensible and well-crafted. But if you take a 360 deg. view of the forum, do you feel that there is no reason to burst into tears? I have twelve on my ignore list, having just substituted a quarrelsome and utterly dense woman for a cynical, wise-cracking, smart-talking shallow fribble, who is still at least readable. But on this thread and another, there are enough bigots and crude, bad-smelling, bad-thinking, badly equipped mountain trolls picking snot out and tasting it to sicken any sensitised observer.
I don't know what I'm doing here, to be honest.