Sunil’s post the scavenger’s son and the comments on the post relating to the role of education in ‘social upliftment’ triggered memories of a few young people I have met… I had written about them earlier – here it is…
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I recently met a few young girls during the course of some research in South India. It was a small town, two hours by bus from Madurai, a temple town deep South.
One of them came up to me after the group discussion and asked if I had an MBA degree. Her story amazed me….. From a family of six members, she had nurtured ambitions of doing an MBA one day. Her role model was a distant relative working in Madurai in a local company, highly respected for his wisdom and social work.
She was then in the final year of her BBA (Bachelor in Business Administration) degree. She spoke to me about the struggle she had to undergo to convince her conservative and uneducated parents to allow her to study further after finishing school. That was not the only issue; she had to travel to Madurai for this since the town did not have a college with this kind of facility. Of course, the option of staying in a hostel was unthinkable, the girl says, I did not even dare to suggest it…. Letting me study in Madurai and with boys is itself a big step for them….
So she takes a bus and travels two hours each way for this degree…. And she aims to study for an MBA.
To look at her, one would not have thought this girl had any fight in her. She was dressed in a simple salwar-kameez, with plaited hair and a round bindi. And her English was far from perfect. I know my English is not good, but I am learning, she says. It is very important because people think I am not good enough because my English is not good….. What kind of people are these, I wondered , who judged this girl on her English language skills and refused to see the sharp mind and the fire within ?
She was a bit self conscious but not at all diffident or apologetic about it. On the contrary, she was very articulate and confident. And she saw a bright future for herself…..
I wish her all the luck she needs to fulfill her dreams…..
Yet another girl I met was doing her M.A. in Tamil. I visited her home to interview her and was struck by tininess of the room which she and her parents and a sister and a brother occupied. This room and a kitchen even smaller, was home to them. Her father was a carpenter and her mother stitched blouses and other small things for neighbours in order to supplement the family income.
I was curious to understand her choice of Tamil as a subject for her M.A. and asked her if that would be of any help to her in securing a job. Much to my amazement and embarrassment, she reeled off a list of professions open to her on finishing her degree.
And not only conventional ones like teaching but areas like tourism and library management, which I, in my superior ignorance, had not imagined she would even know of. She had researched her prospects thoroughly and was very lucid about the life she saw for herself five years later….
They were clearer and surer about their future than I was at that time….
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And another post following this – Their future looks bright
But if as Dilip says in his comment on Sunil’s blog, Societal attitudes are resistant to the best efforts at education, what is the solution? What is the process for educating a whole society that believes that each individual has a place (based on his birth?) and is ‘destined’ to stay there…
Wonderful post Charu.
I studied in a government college (Anna Univ, Chennai (CEG-ACTech), and though it was the “top ranked” college in Tamil Nadu, it had a number of students from rural backgrounds, who had made it there from Tamil medium schools (I think reservations have really helped a lot of students). So i got to interact with many of them. Some of them really struggled through the demanding college work (that most of us from good city schools waltzed through)……but they were so determined to succeed, it was quite inspirational.
I cannot even imagine what would have happened if i had gone from my fancy convent education to a kannada or tamil medium college. Would i have succeeded? I don’t know……more likely, i’d have dropped out.
Sunil, an interesting thought: what would have happened if i had gone from my fancy convent education to a kannada or tamil medium college? Which is exactly the journey, in reverse, several friends we all had in college had to make. I think the greatest lesson I learned in Pilani was this, and it was a good one: that those “chomus” (the “vernacs”, you know) were not some dumbos just because they were poorer at English than us city-bred la-di-dahs. They were damned good students, motivated as hell, and proceeded to beat the pants off me at every subject I thought I was good at. And oh yes, fine guys and gals too.
oh yes the ‘vernacs’ actually work harder – in many cases that I have seen, they did not arrive at college with the same opportunities – and they had to work doubly hard to prove themselves… you are right sumil, “they are determined to succeed” – but sadly enough, proficieny in english is a major parameter for judging a person’s ability – and with such people I have seen that the problem is not with reading / writing but good spoken english…
Hullo Charu, Thought-provoking posts, both Sunil’s and yours.
I did my under-graduation in a self-financing college in rural Tamilnadu. Most of the students were from non-urban parts (mostly villages), and many of them were of the first generation in their family to do engineering. As Sunil mentioned in his comment here, reservation has helped these kind of people. Moreover, their parents really wish them to get a good education, an important step towards a well-paying job.
Charu
Excellent post and I agree with Dilip’s post above. Studying at VJTI the first year it seemed like the non-local gits could hardly get any coherent thoughts out, but these were the guys who topped the exams regularly, wrote the best papers adn original, and were overall just great chaps. Language and articulation, should never be any indicator of a persons stock. If that was the case, idiots like Salman Khan would almost come across as intelligent !!!