Quarter 6 - Week 8.5

'Tis the festive season of Diwali, and one of the side-effects of being in B-school is knowing that Diwali is like Thanksgiving in the US. India's mad spending spree happens now... so this is the time of the year that all merchants eagerly anticipate, in the hopes that their sales jump high enough for them to wake up every day in the morning with a good answer to "Why am I doing this business?".

While the rest of India is busy either bursting crackers, or frowning at those who do while holding the placards "Child labour/Noise pollution", some of us had the "privilege" of attending classes over the weekend. As it turns out, next week is placement week for the full-time grad students, so one of our profs in a fit of generosity decided to hold classes this weekend, so they could go and do well in placements next week. Of course, no one asked us corporate students about it, because those who don't want to attend classes, have the option to skip it. Unlike the full-timers, class participation / grades do not matter much to us... not like we're getting placed or anything. We're here for the LEARNING! New people, please get that in your head.. once and for all.. NO PLACEMENTS! ONLY LEARNING!

Social Entrepreneurship

While most of the previous weeks dealt with what are some of the more obvious problems with most of India and her development, from last week onwards, we've been looking into what are the options available to us if we want to make some noise. So this week too, was about understanding the internal working of political parties, the NREGA system, civil movements, and observing how the government is now including more people when they're making decisions, and how citizens themselves are becoming active. It's quite interesting to see that while India itself is apparently democratic, the process of getting into a party and standing for elections might not be. Apparently, in quite a few states, these "tickets" are auctioned off, or selectively given to people. Especially now, I can understand why politicians have "ulterior motives" when they come to power. It's mainly because if they've put in some money to get in, it is no longer upholding the intrinsic motivation to serve the country... it's more like an extrinsic motivation to make some money. No wonder they pull tenders here and there, give and take favours... the system somehow got a little screwed up and shifted from its original version from 60 years ago!

Now, they're looking into inner party reforms, people were approached to find out what would make a difference to them, and what are the things they want to stop. It's very interesting to see the difference between the mindsets of the upper middle class and upper classes, when compared to the others. As an example, the former would say that "Let's go for privatization! The government is inefficient, and it could use all the help it can get!". The latter would say that "Let things stay under the government! If it gets privatized, then the mediocre service we're getting now, we wont get at all!". Apparently, a case in point could be education. When education was only handled by the government, everyone got the "mediocre" quality... but now that there's also private players, elite students are going there... and the poor ones are in these schools. Immediately, there's a huge chance of ignorance that comes in. The two classes don't get to mix with each other, and they dont get to know what's happening on the other side. Not to mention, the other obvious aspect of the difference in education that is given to the two. Immediately, India becomes a land of two classes... where thoughts and actions are SO DIFFERENT from the other. It's a very interesting true-life example of what's happening.

The class went on to explore other aspects as well. I think this pretty much also tells us, why students come in to college on Diwali.