The genesis of the sheen

OFFBEAT

Take heart, there is life at the end of March. No, I do not mean that the elections will come and be gone soon thereafter, allowing the nation to shine more and more until things get unbearably dazzling.

End of March will mean the end of school exams; specifically, I mean the board exams the whole nation prepares for round the year.

Yes, the whole nation. The children actually taking the exams merely signify the tip of the iceberg. Below them come their families and backing them up is the entire private tuition industry.

And I almost forgot, at the periphery are the schools that are officially supposed to teach (they mostly don't) and prepare the students for the exams.

These exams are more important than any general Budget, mini or regular, vote-on-account or simply, lacking in accountability. They are also far more crucial than elections, be they parliamentary or state or the two rolled into one. It is through these exams that the future of the nation is determined.

It is wrong to think that the most important issue in the life of a child from the Indian middle class is being able to get into a decent college "" engineering or medical or plain, old liberal arts "" or thereafter, get admission in a decent management institute.

The future is made or unmade by how a child prepares for and fares in his school-leaving exams. If you have got it in you, you will do well "" either in the exams themselves or, thereafter, in the various entrance exams.

It is all part of the same preparation. Increasingly, the more sensible states are gearing their school-leaving curricula to preparing children for the top entrance examinations.

If you do well in the school-leaving or the country-wide college entrance examinations, you will be able to enter the portals of some of those hallowed institutions.

These are the ones that are fast becoming famous all over the world as the places that produce the people who make India shine, in India or elsewhere.

You will be quite wrong to think that what really matters is not just getting into one of these institutions but getting out of them with flying colours.

Getting in is the big thing. Getting through with a respectable score is a laugh compared to what it takes to get in. Many of these institutions give you more of a stamp, make you part of a recognised brand rather than actually help you learn.

The curricula and staff in many of these institutions are, at least in part, indifferent or worse. If you have got it in you to get in; you will have it in you to get out too, with respectable marks.

So, it is worth telling a child to essentially slog for four years, from classes IX to XII. If he can pull that off, he can more or less relax and enjoy life for the next three or four years, wherever he is, and then get down to really hard work again once he gets hold of a job.

Doing the latter is a lark; it comes with getting into the institution in the first place.

Unless you really botch up your grades, for which you need to be exceptionally dull, you will land a job through the placement interviews without any effort.

You will not be a part of those if you don't get into the institution in the first place and that will not happen if you do not do well in your school-leaving exams or the entrance tests that come soon after and preparation for which is a part of the preparation for the board exams.

Which is why I say that these exams are more important for the future of the nation than any number of historic Budgets or elections. India would not be shining today had its middle class not produced young people with the requisite skills. And those skills are really honed in preparing for the exams that are on now.

I was quite surprised when I read how the Japanese prepare their children. At the top of the heap is Tokyo University and at the top of that heap is the faculty of law. If you get there, you have made it.

You can be sure that a job at the ministry of finance or MITI or at one of those great Japanese companies will fall into your lap. Quite unconsciously, India has adopted that model.

It is a good model that will take India far, perhaps as far as it has taken Japan. In the late 1980s, fear was sweeping across the western world that it would be taken over by the Japanese the same way as they were taking over the Pan Am building or Universal Studios. But that fear has passed.

There is a fear in the west today that Indians with the right skills will take away all their white-collar high-tech jobs. That fear, too, will pass but there is no doubt where the battle to conquer the world begins in India and Japan "" while preparing for the school-leaving exams.

Over the last weekend, as I read the papers in the morning, a colourful flier fell out. It was a discount coupon from a well-known pizza brand, valid till March 14. I passed it to my son who had come downstairs late for a groggy breakfast after having slogged at his books through the better part of the night.

He was amazed at the stupidity of the pizza company. How can they run a promotion when our exams are on, he asked incredulously. They are competing against the other chain that has just come up in our neighbourhood, I explained. But still, insisted my son, who will eat their pizzas now?

I couldn't agree with him more. The pizza chain had got its timing all wrong. Its marketing wiz kids should probably take a refresher course at the Indian School of Business, which Rajat Gupta of McKinsey has so lovingly shaped.

Gupta, who went to the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi and shone, despite the place being no great shakes, as Murli Manohar Joshi said, getting a lot of people hot under the collar.

There is no doubt that the IITs shine, but that is because of the people who get in there and they get their first shine from the prelims that are now running all over the country.