I’ll begin by narrating a few interesting threads from a discussion I had with my colleague in office today. He told me about this boy from his father’s native village who showed a flair for arithmetic at a very young age. He could do complex arithmetical calculations fairly swiftly. He was of the same age as my colleague, but was born into an extremely poor family. My colleague remembered that his father would often cite this boy’s example to tell him how poor he was at arithmetic. And therefore he was always envious of this boy. But all that was many years ago when they were both young kids. He met this boy after a long time when he went to visit his village after completing his tenth exams. And he asked him what he was doing these days. He recalled that when his village peer told him that he was pulling a rickshaw in Delhi for a living, he felt a strong sense of disgust at the inherent unfairness in the contrasting ways in which their lives had unfolded. And as he was saying this, I saw his eyes holding back tears behind his spectacles. That day he would have understood, probably for the first time, the value of opportunity.
We would have all experienced or known something similar at some point of time in our lives as well. And yet so often we mistake opportunity for achievement and then create an undeserving halo around ourselves. Little do we realise when the halo around our head gently slips and falls around our feet...a halo marking out the pit on the ground into which we are destined to sink for the rest of our lives. I wonder if it is because we learn to stop engaging with things other than the ones which find their way to us on their own.
When my colleague confided in me that one day he dreamt of starting a school of his own, I was immediately curious to know the contours of his plan. He said he wanted to start a normal kind of school...nothing to do with innovative teaching methods or anything...a school in a very traditional kind of mould, geared to give its students the skill and preparedness to do well in the existing board exams and entrance exams. The only thing which he was particular about was that the school fees should be low...catering to the needs of children born into families with income less than twenty thousand rupees per month. His reading was that there was a huge unmet demand for such schools in several small towns and villages across the country. Schools were either too costly for people from this income bracket to afford or at the other end of the spectrum were government schools which were in total disarray. His analysis that government schools were in such poor shape because anybody who has a voice and who can question the poor quality of delivery does not send his or her children to the government school did seem rational to me. He drew the analogy of low cost no frills airlines to explain the fundamental theme behind the kind of school that he had conceived. His observation was that there were many who could work their way around even an average quality of teaching and that access to a decent school environment was their only bottleneck. And how would this school compete with schools with much higher fees and consequently better quality of teachers and teaching, especially when the end objective was to deliver results on the same parameters like success in board exams or entrance exams? He felt that the school’s USP would be its students...there were many students from such low income families who were hungrier to do well than others. Access or opportunity, however basic it may be, was their sole bottleneck and his school would just fill the gap between an existing demand and an insufficient supply. Of course, it would not able to reach children from even poorer families but then wasn’t it better than doing nothing at all? Since the success of the school would depend so much on the results of its students...so it was a long timeline on which the idea and his methods would be tested. I thought it was then so important to constantly stay engaged with the idea that one wants to see happen...and I quietly wished me the very best.
Off and on, I meet so many young people who are restless to do something more than what has found a way to them on the back of the opportunity that they were born with and yet the restlessness does not spill over to doing anything concrete. Is it because they don’t stay engaged to their idea long enough and deep enough? Imran Khan spent fifteen years in political wilderness before he started drawing the crowds that he is currently drawing. I guess he stuck out his neck and simply stayed there long enough to start to matter.
The more I see the system from within, the more I realise the most important missing link. Like for example in the development sector, we have hundreds of policies and several of them are designed well. There’s no dearth of subject matter experts. There’s no anarchy either and what more, we have a system staffed with reasonably pliant people...the only missing link then could be will. There’s a crying need for people with will and intent to infiltrate the system both from within and without. Only if we could engage with the system...long enough to start to matter...
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