Ajit Balakrishnan rewinds to a decade when mobile phones were unheard of and when an IIM degree had a different purpose and value. Read on...
At this time of year, when Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Odisha, West Bengal, the Assam valley, the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand and the Mithila region of Bihar celebrate the harvest that has just come in, my thoughts often turn to the other harvest that we celebrate at this same time -- the graduation of hundreds of thousands of students from India's thousands of colleges.
This year, I found myself in Jharkhand's capital city as a guest at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ranchi's convocation.
As I watched the hall, full of young men and women, I could also not resist thinking of the time when I, too, had sat like these young men and women dressed in a gown and a cap, waiting to be armed with an IIM diploma and step out into the world.
When I graduated (in 1971), the personal computer had not yet been invented -- that took a good 10 years after my graduation.
Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, was probably in middle school.
When we said the word "phone", it meant a black shoebox-like object that you waited in line for up to 10 years to get, with one phone being shared between 100 hostel-mates, and into which you had to shout at the top of your voice when you tried to speak to your parents, reassuring them that all was well with you.
The mobile phone that is our constant companion nowadays was 25 years away.
I could not but conjecture what world lay in store for these young men and women.
But in other ways, my fellow graduates from the IIMs and I were prepared for a world that would not come for another 40 years.
For example, just last week I was at a meeting trying to solve a puzzle that internet companies like the one that I run are forever trying to solve -- finding the right algorithm to recommend to a user of Rediff.com who had just finished reading a news article as to what she should read next, when a young colleague, a recent graduate from an elite computer science college, piped up and said, "Sir, we should try something I just read about in a journal, a technique to extract topics from a body of text -- it proposed the use of hidden Markov models … I am not sure what that means … ."
I couldn't avoid suppressing a smile: I knew hidden Markov models because I, and the rest of my classmates, had been taught Markov chain analysis as part of the operations research course -- and that, too, with all computations being done using a Facit calculator, where you spin a handle to compute!
Now that we have super -- fast personal computers and things like the R programming language, I could swiftly ease myself into the new world (and show off to my younger colleagues). Markov models had to wait all these years for sufficient computing power to become available.
I remember many of us grumbling at that time as to what possible use could these things be to anyone.
This only goes to prove how pointless are those who nowadays cry loudly that curricula should be "tuned" to the "market".
If the IIM curricula of the 1970s, the time when I was there, had to be "tuned" to the market, it would have meant being tuned to the needs of the famous British managing agency businesses -- the likes of Metal Box, Guest Keen Williams and Binny -- none of whom exist today. Or it would mean being tuned to the needs of a clutch of new hopefuls, the newly minted public--sector companies like HMT and Bharat Heavy Electricals, to name two.
These public-sector companies were the early patrons of IIM graduates.
Indian family businesses, at that time, lived in a world of their own in the jute and plantation industries, casting nary a glance at "management".
To the British managing agency businesses, the word "IIM" did not mean very much -- what they valued was the school you went to.
Graduates of public schools like Doon, Lawrence and St Paul's could easily pip IIM graduates to the post for jobs at any of these outfits.
The public-sector outfits of that time, earnestly attempting to build a new professional business culture in India, hired IIM graduates -- but mostly in organisation development departments, hoping to make hiring less nepotistic, more merit--based and internal managerial relationships more egalitarian and less feudal.
I felt a shudder pass through my body as I imagined what would have happened to the IIMs if they had "tuned" their curricula to the needs of industry of that time.
As the convocation wore on, I could sense I was watching a new kind of news being created in Ranchi -- this time not of Maoists capturing young children and forcing them into their cadres, or of police "encounters", or of yet another case of a tribal female child being forced into marriage.
This time, the headlines were about 150 graduates of IIM-Ranchi being fully placed within a few days of the start of the placement season, at a median salary of Rs 12 lakh.
As I sat there watching each graduate step up confidently to the dais to claim his diploma, I could not but wonder what the thoughts in the heads of the assembled parents and guests in that hall would be.
A higher education institution gets started in a rented building in a state where practically every other young adult is unemployed and where the majority of the population eke out a subsistence agricultural life ... and, lo and behold, within a span of a mere four years we have world-renowned companies clamouring to hire the students.
Ajit Balakrishnan is founder and chairman of Rediff.com and author of The Wave Rider: A Chronicle of the Information Age. He can be reached at ajitb@rediffmail.com.
Lead image used for representational purposes only
Photograph: Larry Downing/Reuters
ALSO READ: The sons who won't leave home
