Degree Dilemmas

The day came and went when I had to choose the subjects I would be studying, the subject choice that would largely influence my future career. In India competition has risen faster than the rising sea levels. In a land of billion people, not everybody gets what they deserve. For this reason, I have been swamped with a library of text books that I am supposed to read, understand and finally put into some use – the use being getting good grades, getting into a good college and then getting a good job (and needlessly saying this, getting a good salary). This seems to be the order of the day. Almost everybody in my section, which is the Electronics section (Subjects: English, 2nd language, Physics, Chemistry, Maths and Electronics), wants to be an engineer of some sort or the other.

Gone are the carefree days, when one dreamed of becoming a pilot, astronaut, singer, cricketer or being less fanciful, a teacher. There are only handfuls in this land that pursue what they want to do the most – most of them end up having tragic stories in the end. The rest, like it or not, are forced to dwell in the misery of a wrong career choice. Well, joining the club of the potential professionals, I have decided to do engineering. One, because I don’t want to do medicine – 10 years of study asks too much persistence of me and don’t want to stand on my parents’ feet so long. Second, I am dead determined to chase my journalism dream. After 4 or 6 years (even if I want to do a post-graduate degree or an MBA course) in college, I can still take the mighty ‘risk’ of studying journalism.

It’s simply amazing how the top brains in the country are mostly in engineering. The lack of proper doctors and people in other service sectors is being reflected blatantly in our lifestyles. Recently, an infant declared stillborn by the nurses, defeated death and kicked back to life 7 hours later. Apparently, if the nurses had tried to revive the baby soon after birth, it would have been fine, instead of lying in the ICU and battling for its life. But like a sticky mush-mush of Bollywood masala, it gasped to life a while before the funeral. It’s a shame that students are forced to opt out of medicine for reasons of low salaries, insecure jobs and long working hours. In Stuttgart, my doctor worked at the most from 9 in the morning to half past five in the evening, with shorter days on Saturday and holiday on Sunday. Here doctors slog so hard, that invariably they need treatment themselves. It’s 24x7 work. No wonder, so few want to get muddled up in the world of white coats and stethoscopes.

The shortage of teachers is another worrying thing. India has a current shortage of about less than a million teachers. With a literacy rate looming below 70%, teachers are becoming the need of the hour. An experienced schoolteacher in the best school probably gets as much salary as a starter software engineer. Teachers carry on their shoulders the vital responsibility of education the next generation of the country’s people, but it is a pity how little importance it is given.

Well, there we go. That’s life. Incidentally, more engineers pass out of India’s engineering colleges, than Germany’s entire workforce. The choice has been done, sealed, packed, slapped into a plastic lunch box and sold. So much for having the right of choice…

pragathi