In India's assembly line of students, they must all get to the same place to find the same jobs, but most won't. Demographic dividend, anyone?
Shashi Tharoor narrates this telling incident where an American interviewer once asked the Infosys founder N Narayana Murthy (NRN) about his son's future plans. NRN said he hoped his son would make it to the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). What about Harvard? Well, if he didn't go to IIT, there's always Harvard - the safety net, as it were, NRN said.
Which numerically speaking of course makes sense, given that acceptance rate in the IITs was less than a per cent, while you stood an 8-11 per cent chance of making it to Harvard instead - and perhaps picking up a Nobel some day, if not dropping out to rule the world!
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Created by Biswa Kalyan Rath, Laakhon Mein Ek is a uniformly dark, disturbing six-part show, which only gets progressively darker (quite literally, shot mostly in natural light), set in a Vishakhapatnam hostel
NRN's son Rohan did eventually go to Harvard, and that shouldn't surprise anyone, since the JEE (Joint Entrance Exam), arguably the world's toughest common test, has for long been the prime gateway for small-town kids to escape to a better life. I discovered this at IIT Kharagpur once, wholly surrounded by students chiefly from places such as Gwalior, Bhagalpaur, Bhubhaneshwar, and Ratlam.
As is the case with kids in an IIT coaching institute, preparing for JEE, in the Amazon Prime web series, Laakhon Mein Ek, created by the uniquely unpretentious stand-up comedian Biswa Kalyan Rath (screenplay co-written with Vaspar Dandiwala; story and dialogue, with Karan Agarwal).
This is a uniformly dark, disturbing six-part show, which only gets progressively darker (quite literally, shot mostly in natural light), set in a Vishakhapatnam hostel that appears as a cross between a religious seminary and a military academy. Mostly devoid of humour, the series is probably closer in shade to Aamir Khan's campus flick Holi (1984) than his IIT comedy 3 Idiots (2009), although this one also mainly stars three batch-mates - Aakash (Ritvik Sahore, wonderfully cast), 'Chudail' (Alam Khan, a complete natural), and 'Bakri' (Jay Thakkar).
Like sheep up for slaughter, the boys are first segregated between sections, from A to D, in descending order of merit. Did this ring a bell in my head? Hell, it jolted me out of my sleep. I went to a Delhi school that, for the number of students in it, and about a hundred of them making it to IIT every year, was rightly called the 'Factory' - with separate 'Ability' sections earmarked for the supposedly brilliant. You even wore different uniforms, depending on how many years you'd scored an 80-plus in the annual exam. The real world, to me, has seemed easy-peasy ever since!
The 'bhassad' or the dog-eat-dog world inside a frighteningly competitive concentration camp really begins after the Std X exams, when the grade level in Science - Physics, Chemistry, and Math, in particular - shoots up sharply, if not exponentially, and the kids (as in this Vizag hostel) have to strike a balance between their Std XII (CBSE) studies, and training for JEE-had.
The thing about post-Std X Math, and I can say this having struggled with it like a handicapped person, is that you either get it, or you don't. It is intrinsically linked to aptitude. This is often confused with intelligence; ego sets in, therefore. And so even the student - let alone the parents - stays in denial of one's ability to overcome differential and integral calculus, and aims to kill it at the exam eventually - by studying very hard.
That seems to be the case with young Aakash, from Bhilai/Raipur. My own situation was a little different. I jumped streams in school all the way until a month before my Std XII Boards! Math still remained around to haunt the hell out of me until Economics undergrad, and it's hard to forget the one time my childhood domestic help visited me a day before the Math annual exam in college - me, looking blank, sitting crestfallen, practically naked, with no electricity in my hostel room in Delhi's June heat. He instantly called up my mom to tell her she'd orphaned me!
So yeah, almost every Indian can somewhat experience the heat the helpless kids feel on Rath's show. If anything, their shared hostel rooms look much worse than most. As I'm sure must be the case with several similar mental monasteries in Kota, Rajasthan (the 'Maha Kumbh' of IIT aspirants).
About a decade ago, Nandan Nilekani, NRN's protégé at Infosys, sold desis a fantasy called the 'demographic dividend', arguing that the fact that India had the world's youngest population, while all other countries were ageing, was actually a great thing, since they'd be able to harness better an economy built on ideas. On paper? Surely. Look at where we are.
Just to give you a comparison, you need to currently score 100 per cent in your Std XII Boards to get into the course I took up in college! And this will only keep getting worse as the young population rises along with the assembly line of students from all over India - all of whom must somehow make it to the same place to find that same big-ticket job, which most of them won't. Demographic dividend, anyone? Looking at Laakhon Mein Ek, I thought I was staring at disaster.
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
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