Engineering in a nutshell… drives you nuts!

Note: If you are aspiring to get an engineering degree in India or you know someone who is, then please let them read this as a warning.

 

Reading maketh the man, writing the complete man. But in today’s world where society’s approval and respect has more market value than self-respect, the old saying has been twisted into: The degree maketh the man, the post-graduate the rich man, the doctorate the respected man.

Most Indian kids today are aspiring to be engineers! When it comes to Indian academics, it seems that “engineering” is in vogue while everything else is passé.

So, you are an Indian? Aspiring to be an engineer eh? Your parents will feel proud won’t they? So that they can manage small talk at the local party circuit without having to fake a smile to the next-door neighbour’s second cousin whose nephew is completing his thesis on the psychometrics of the common housefly? Or is it to increase/decrease the dowry anticipation when you finally plan to settle down with two & a half kids before you’re 29?

If you choose to take up this quest (for all the right reasons), be aware of the many hardships, trials and temptations that you will face on the way… so that you don’t sway. Your life will pretty much be: going to college (to answer the roll call), going for classes/crash courses (to get the gist of the syllabus and to collect study notes), come home and complete journal work (which is pretty much plagiarising someone else’s plagiarised work), eating and sleeping, not to forget studying (journal work which does consume 90 per cent of your non-college time isn’t counted as study time). But alas! Most don’t follow this brain-dead routine, and end up ruining their dream careers. They end up with failures (also called ATKTs or just KTs) which become such frustrating burdens at times that hanging from a cliff with an itch in the derrière will seem more pleasurable than trying to graduate.

From year-to-year, course-to-course and college-to-college, KTs are a common sight! There are a lucky few who pass (who are also termed as “all-clear”), the rest get anything between one to four KTs, and still others who attract more KTs to get year drops!

The new revised-syllabus is tougher compared to its predecessor. It takes one only old-school academic genius or a fairy godmother or a good amount of French-kissing gluteus maximus to get through unscathed.

Well, heed the advice I conceived from my vestigial wisdom and misadventures in Indian academics (a degree in engineering to be precise) if you want to. But one thing I can honestly ratify is that an Indian engineering student definitely learns how to organise morchas and appreciate various kinds of rock music (from old-school rock to heavy metal to nu-age & death metal) during his academic course. Even if he has never heard a non-Hindi-film song in his entire life, within two months of the course he’ll be a fan of Bryan Adams or at least he’ll head-bang to “Summer of 69″.

And by the time he is half way through the course the first line of Pink Floyd’s infamous “Another Brick in the Wall – Part 2″ will be etched on his tongue. Yes, every time the results are out there are a handful of lucky students with grins scattered among a large group of their unlucky classmates who are heard singing, “We don’t need no education”… they rarely know the rest of the song!

 

Note: All opinions are based on generalised facts. If I’ve hurt sentiments in the process… hoo-hah my work is done!

~ by Prick on February 3, 2009.