The Academic Progression

During childhood, I used to see my cousins and elder friends studying for their exams. Their total books used to be half my weight and if they were stacked up they would be equal to my height. I used to really get quite intimidated by this. Furthermore, their comments as to how they have to study for 10-12 hours per day used to really scare me. Where during those days, studying for even two hours, reading the light hearted Bal Bharti  Textbook, was a pain in the neck, I really wondered how I would be able to ever study so much.

Anyway, time passed by. I managed unknowingly with the help of coaching classes and parents (I won’t mention school teachers here. It will become more of a made up statement like the ones for the newspaper interview) . During college, I joined the chartered accountancy (CA) course. The exams in this course are said to be one of the toughest all over the country. As a part of this course, all students are supposed to enroll themselves for a an internship (known as articleship in the CA parlance) with a practicing chartered accountant. I did that too. During my initial days, I used to see my seniors talking about the number of hours they put in, the books they refer, the number of hours of lectures the coaching classes conduct at a stretch etc. Seeing someone reading a 1000 page book used to run a chill down my spine. I wondered if I had taken up the wrong course. However, even here , just a my school life, years passed by. Even I put in those number of hours as my seniors used to talk about and it came naturally to me. I cleared two exams and currently studying for the last one. I wouldn’t say it was a smooth sailing ride. There were obstacles but there would be no fun had they not been there. Obstacles taught me more than the straight path. The above story is not just mine. It is the academic life story of almost every student in the entire world. Only the courses are different, every person has his own different capacity and the method of approach to a particular subject is different.

However, the point I want to make here is how we humans have this capability to adjust to this academic progression. Of course, full credit is to be given to the way the education system has been designed. We were first taught A,B,C… and then we moved on to complex words, then to sentences and so on. Also as years pass by, the quantum of portion to be studied really increases. However, it is not just the design of the system that leads to this adjustment. There are many other facets to this. Firstly, I think its the competition spirit that leads us to do this. Also maturity sets in and we realize that we have to make your place in this competitive world, have a good life and earn well. So, it is an additional impetus to work harder. However, these are just reasons for studying for greater number of hours.

The actual capability to adjust to this academic progression is comes from the fact that we are used to seeing siblings &  seniors studying for long hours (and burning the midnight oil in the real sense) and we hear a lot about the mammoth quantum of studies . Studying for lesser number of hours or trying to challenge this age old tradition that “more the number of hours of study the more the chances of success “is like breaking away from the stereotype which does not really go down well. Its actually a vicious circle. It is just like the question of what came first – the egg or the hen. In this case, the question to be asked is what came first – large portion or the capability to adjust to the large portion.

Also, one of the reasons for this adjustment is the natural mutation which occurs in the human race. I don’t know much about this topic but it is said that each generation is better than the previous one and I get to evidence that when I listen to small children talking. 3-4 year olds talk and understand as much as I never could till I was 10 years old. Infact, my grandfather also gets shocked seeing the size of my books. He tells me that he never had such amount of studies and neither did he ever put in so many hours of studies. He says life was different back then. So, this progression has been over the years and as generations pass by, they are braced up to handle whatever comes their way.

P.S. : A lot of stress in this write up has been laid on number of hours of study in order to describe the term “progression”. In the Indian context, it holds true.

 

The Diverse Mentalities

India is known for its unity in diversity (really a cliche!!). People follow different religions, speak different languages, each region has a different culture and so on. However, in school we are never told, that people belonging to different castes and different culture even think differently or have different mentalities. That is something we come to know as we are exposed to real world and our experience bank starts filling up.

A few days back, my belief in the theory of different mentalities was re-confirmed. During a lecture in my coaching classes, the professor asked us to draw a flowchart. He was to dictate the contents to be written in each box. So, I used to draw the box and fit in the contents the professor would dictate. Initially, it was going fine but as we came to the third box, I realized that the contents to be written were exceeding the size available in my box. So, I had to write the contents outside the box. I happened to peep into my neighbor’s book after the entire flowchart was done. I realized that nowhere had his contents overflown from the boundaries of his box. I asked him how he had managed to fit all the contents properly in the box. He replied, he drew the box after the contents had been dictated. That ensured that all his contents exactly fit into the box and he had a wonderful flowchart on his page.

This shook some of my dynamics of living life till date. I, being a South Indian, come from a very conservative background. We always spend what we have and also save for future. Not that we are less ambitious but we always opt for the safer option. For e.g. employment over self employment, a bank fixed deposit over the stock market etc. No doubt, there are exceptions. There are South Indians who have done very well in businesses and stock markets (these are just my parameters of risk).

On the other hand, this friend of mine is a Gujarati. Both of us have born and brought up in Mumbai, India and have had the same kind of an academic background. However, the difference was that of culture. Gujaratis and Marwaris are risk seekers. They spend lavishly and also don’t mind treading the riskier path of self employment, wherein they try to earn what they have planned to spend. Risk taking is etched in their culture and it is being carried forward since generations. They always try to expand the horizons and ask for more than what is served in their plate (not in the real sense). Thats where the difference lies. The biggest example would be the Ambani family (promoters of Reliance Group of Industries) Of course, there are exceptions here too.

These differences will soon diminish because as such the Gujarati culture or South Indian culture is being replaced by “metropolitan culture”. Here, I think the ideology is picking up the best of both the cultures and making your mark. I have been trying to do so and hoping to emerge successful…..

Options – A precursor to decision making

I had recently been to a food court in a mall with a few friends. As usual, it was huge with lots of food stalls and kiosks. We had little time to spend. So, we had to decide what to eat quickly and place the order. Firstly, we decided to just have a look around to get to know the options available. We just kept walking looking around to the extent that after some time we felt that we had gone there for a walk. Anyway, we completed the full circle and out of all the options available, we settled down for a modest dosa and sambar. We were so confused with the options available and considering the lack of time, the usual dosa seemed to be a life saver.

I encountered a similar dilemma when I had recently been to Matheran ( a hill station in Maharashtra, India). Around 6-7 of us had been there for a two-day vacation. We had a fixed budget to adhere to. We were looking out for a place to stay. We went to each and every hotel to check if it suited our requirements. There were many that we found within our budgets. However, it took us a lot of time to finally zero-in on one of them. Also since there were many of us, everybody had a different point of view on each hotel.

In both the above scenarios, I observed that the major hindrance in deciding something was the prevalence of options. Had there not been options, decision making would never come into picture. There would be no choice.

This is not something that I have discovered. It is a fact that everybody is aware of. The entire world makes a big fuss about decision making. CEOs and professional consultants are paid crores of rupees to take decisions which could be a game changer for their organization. The reason why they are paid so much is mainly because decision making is really not an easy task. Moreover, it is not only the prevalence of options that is an hindrance. Hindrance lies also in the fact that at a time, all options may look lucrative. Decision making is not selecting an option. It is a task of selecting an option which is the best for the organization at a point of time and which would not be a cause of regret later.

Anyway, its great that there are options for a consumer. It is the basic reason why I think Mr. Prasoon Joshi, Director, McCann Erickson said “the consumer is no longer a king, he is the emperor.” However, the fact remains that options have also lead to confusion for the consumer who has to now spend more time before selecting any product or service. Its no longer the same as the good old days where a car was Maruti 800 and a mobile phone was Nokia 3300.