[Assam] [assam] Responses to "An Open Letter to India's Graduating Classes".

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New York Times (May 28, 2012)


May 28, 2012, 7:48 AM
Responses to ‘An Open Letter to India’s Graduating Classes’
By HEATHER TIMMONS

Doug Mills/The New York Times
Students look on as United States President Barack Obama addresses them 
during a town hall meeting at the St. Xavier College in Mumbai, 
Maharashtra in this Nov. 7, 2010 file photo.
“Today, we regret to inform you that you are spoiled,” an Indian 
partner for a multinational corporation wrote in our “Open Letter to 
India’s Graduating Classes,” a bracing wake-up call for India’s new job 
market entrants. India’s graduates are neither as smart as they think 
they are, the author, Mohit Chandra, wrote, nor as ambitious or 
self-motivated as they should be. Their English skills are poor and 
they are unprofessional, he said.

The essay sparked a fiery debate about the quality of higher education 
in India last week, as mainstream media outlets, bloggers and readers 
offered responses and critiques. A somewhat unscientific survey of 
comments on the post, responses on Twitter and e-mails sent directly to 
IndiaInk at nytimes.com shows that about 60 to 70 percent of our readers 
agree broadly with Mr. Chandra about the quality of India’s recent 
graduates.

“I grew up in India, and the next generation is very disappointing,” 
wrote Sruthi from New Delhi in the comments on the original post. “The 
middle-class workforce is mediocre at best,” she said.

Indian graduates “lack the basic survival skills for workplace clearly 
and walk into a ‘professional’ world completely unequipped and unarmed. 
All they have at that point is a piece of paper certificate. I feel 
pity for these kids,” Sumita Sinha, who said she was an “Indian 
Institute graduate” now living in New Jersey, wrote in an e-mail to 
India Ink.

Many readers also added, though, that Mr. Chandra’s letter blamed only 
the students for their shortcomings, when a host of influences were at 
work, including a rote-learning, certificate-driven higher education 
system; Indian companies that stress blind obedience and pay salaries 
that are a fraction of what United States or European employees earn, 
and the prevalence of short-cut taking, and worse, in Indian 
corporations.


Namas Bhojani/Bloomberg News
Students gather on the campus of the Indian Institute of Management in 
Bangalore, Karnataka in this Aug. 7, 2003 file photo.
“I graduated 10 years ago from one of India’s reputed B-schools, and oh 
boy, I was so disappointed,” wrote an India Ink reader, Sach Bolo, from 
New York. Indian students may be ambitious, but the regimented Indian 
education model doesn’t create people who can think for themselves, he 
wrote. “Having worked in U.S. with American co-workers for last six 
years, I have seen people with average or below-average intelligence 
performing their job very smartly,” he said, offering up a 
spectacularly backhanded compliment to the American education system.

“Our education standards are going down day by day, starting from 
school up to university level, because every educational institution is 
just after money,” Nitin Sharma wrote on the Web site of NDTV, which 
carried the open letter.

Sidin Vadukut, a regular India Ink contributor, penned a response for 
Mint newspaper that also laid the blame on the Indian education system, 
not graduates: “a system that crushes [students] repeatedly, year after 
year, for exhibiting precisely the skills Chandra wants to see more of.”

“While I agree that our graduates are hardly manna from heaven, I also 
believe that they don’t choose to be that way,” he wrote. “They don’t 
transform into shallow, hierarchical, unethical, non-professionals 15 
minutes before they graduate.”

Not surprisingly, some education professionals in India defended the 
Indian education system. The Mumbai Mirror, which carried a piece on 
the letter, quoted an Indian Institute of Management professor who 
said, “If the Indian management style is unique or different, why are 
we trying to embody somebody else’s benchmark and then claim it to be 
right?”


Sam Hollenshead for the IHT
A student during class at the Hinduja College of Commerce in Mumbai, 
Maharashtra.
Mr. Chandra’s appeal to new graduates to ask questions on the job was 
held up by many as impractical or impossible. “If I had to count, on my 
fingers, the number of times a new graduate asked a question and a 
snide remark was passed as a consequence, I would not have enough 
fingers,” wrote the blogger The Older Graduate.

India’s “work culture has not sufficiently evolved despite two decades 
of liberalization,” Firstpost wrote in response to the letter. 
“Corporate environments – with exceptions that prove the rule – tend to 
resemble somewhat improved versions of their socialist era 
predecessors.”

Blogger Great Bong called the letter “hectoring” and not “nice,” among 
other things, in his critique “An Open Letter to Prospective Indian 
Employer.”

India’s employers have been spoiled, he added, “by an illusion that you 
can continue to make money by relying on cheap Indian skilled labor 
forever.”

And employers are not setting a good example for workers, he said. “If 
you expect your new employees to be honest and professional, set the 
standard yourself, dear Indian employer. That means no Satyam Shivam 
Sunderam, no immigrant visa hera-pheri, no cooking of books, no housing 
five developers in one single room in New Jersey, and other assorted 
kindly-adjusts that we know happen.”