Stupefied by School

He thought education would give him the wings to fly, explore, change course, contribute more than what was expected of him. Instead, it forced him to choose between science, commerce and arts. Loath to pigeonhole his interests, Jaideep Sahni, writer of Chak De! India, recounts how he ended up making a series of unconventional career choices defying a flawed and unimaginative education system.

Stupefied by School

-Jaideep Sahni

I was 15 years old when I was asked to decide what I was going to do for the rest of my life. I’ve often wondered at the stupidity of this- how can a 15-year-old possibly make such a momentous decision? Is it a fair thing to ask at that age?

The second thing I’ve never understood is the way I was asked. I was asked to choose the direction of the rest of my life between science, commerce and arts. Can all the millions of wonderful options that life can offer anybody be really classified into three things? Science, commerce and arts, is that all? Fifteen years old, and honey, I already shrunk your life. Thanks.

Anyway I chose science. Not because of any deep passion for the subject but because of a deep fear that if I didn’t become either a doctor or an engineer, I’d become a failure, as everybody reminded me and every other 15-year-old I knew. So I found myself in delhi public school, r. k. puram, the national G-spot of iit-prepartion, not to get an education but an insurance policy. No wonder I knew nothing about science as I passed out and joined an engineering college.

But why did I join an engineering college? One, because I wanted my insurance policy to continue, and two, because I wanted to be away from home and have some fun. The first being taken care of, I worked so hard on the second that at the end of the first year, my attendance was 13 percent and I was banned from taking the exams. Oh, and I had taken electrical engineering, not because I was interested in either electricity or engineering, but because I had read Arthur Hailey’s Overload which I’d borrowed from the guy on the next berth in the train on my way to college. Now, one of the few nice things about private colleges is that they keep throwing you out so that you can get re-admitted and paying them more money. This meant I could dump electrical engineering and start all over again. So for the first time in my life, 15 months after I joined engineering college, I actually read the various syllabi of various engineering streams and fell hopelessly in love with computer engineering.

Ignoring the sniggers of my professors and sighs of the college chairman, my dad patiently as I took admission in the supposedly difficult stream of engineering (another hilarious Indian middle class myth, but that’s another story.) it’s funny but I topped the class, topped the course, topped the college, and started a life-long fascination with technology. Which brings me to the third thing I never understood about education-why doesn’t somebody tell the students about the joys (and frustrations) of various streams before they make their choices? Yes, I know there are counselors, and may their tribe increase every day and may they be paid in millions, but why isn’t there compulsory counseling everywhere? I ultimately did find a subject that I loved- but it was by pure chance. It doesn’t have to be.

So what am I doing writing movies and lyrics in Mumbai?

Well, before I started writing screenplays and songs, I used to make ad films, before which I used to work in a fantastic ad agency, before which I used to sell IT consulting to big corporations. But that’s the point: I might wanna make movies, write computer software, design user friendly embedded systems for public utilities, write songs, marry science and humanities in a high-tech low crawling NGO, learn to fly planes, turn FM radio on its head, use technology to make political parties behave, share with everybody how utterly wonderful film business is, and a zillion other things which I keep dreaming of. Some of these dreams may come true, and some, remain just dreams.

But does my education give me wings to fly, explore, change course, contribute more than whatever was expected of me? Which is the fourth thing I never understood about education- why is it so detached from our dreams? Why didn’t I have the option to dabble in wide variety of subjects while in college, so I didn’t have to spend a large part of my working life educating myself with each and every one of them with suspiciously funny results? Yes, it’s fun but it is also exhausting. It shouldn’t be.

I’ve always had this funny suspicion that we are a nation of engineers who wanted to be singers, doctors who wanted to be actors, artists who just wanted to be rich and famous, and so on. This is partly because we have always been a poor country and everybody decides their life not on their passion, but on the earning potential of their choice. And partly because nobody has ever advised us better. And that has made us a weird society where an ordinary citizen has no access to any sort of decision support systems if he suddenly wants to take his life seriously. A nation which at all times is running on half-steam, because a huge percentage of productive citizens are just passing time- because they are not doing jobs which they really like to do!

Now that there is a Knowledge Commission in place, where well- meaning people from all walks of life are presumably wracking their brains to improve our education system, I hope they give a thought to drastically increasing its flexibility and do this nation one huge favor.

And the fifth thing that foxes me about our education system: What is this fixation with higher education? What good is bothering about the IIMs and theIITs so much, since they are doing fine anyway? Shouldn’t we first bother about the millions of local schools and colleges all over, which instead of educating us are decimating us, taking us away from our instincts and dreams, with no chance of returning ever? Or about our unbending systems which instead of freeing minds, lock us in private little hells of failure in airless cells called careers where we spend the rest of our lives racing each other to places we never wanted to go to in the first place.

If it wasn’t so funny, I would’ve killed somebody.