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| Anand Kumar and his students |
My brother from a different father and mother sent me a mail recently about a certain Mathematics tutor from Patna, Bihar, who would tutor students pro bono for them to pass the coveted Indian Institute of Technology entrance examinations. He hand picks a group of 30, motivates them, arranges hostel facilities, cooks healthy meals and literally drills them day and night to achieve 100% pass rate.
The students swarms in from remote and impoverished regions of the land to slog it out for about 7 months with the sole intention of passing the test. A pass, to them, is the panacea of their woes. A rewarding career and perhaps a post in a multinational company or even an overseas posting is a sure way to uplift their living conditions and their immediate loved ones.
The students swarms in from remote and impoverished regions of the land to slog it out for about 7 months with the sole intention of passing the test. A pass, to them, is the panacea of their woes. A rewarding career and perhaps a post in a multinational company or even an overseas posting is a sure way to uplift their living conditions and their immediate loved ones.
The spill over effect can be seen even to the relatives whose background and caste is irrelevant anymore. I can relate to the hopeful eyes of the illiterate parents who put all their hope, putting aside their difficulties and poverty, to educate their offspring. In the year that the documentary was shot, 29 of the 30 students passed their exams.
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| Audience with President Kallam |
A little melodrama occurs after that. You can watch it below if you have the time.
So what happens afterwards? The teenagers go on to IIT, get a comfortable job, parents continue their tortuous job albeit at a less strenuous pace. Then what? They get married, perhaps stay in a big mansion or migrate to a developed country and enjoy the fruit of their labour. They themselves would have offsprings who after growing up guarded against poverty and shielded from harsh reality of needing to acquire street-smartness and survival skills, would think that it is their birthright to demand for luxuries that their parents tried to offer to the kids. Whatever they missed, they did not want their children not to have.
On the part of the children, hard work and motivation would be alien vocabularies. They would talk about enjoying life. having a complete life, not to miss out on finer things of life and the now well renowned phrase of that it is their life and they can live any which way that they please!
In the immortal words of Confucius, wealth in a family would only last 3 generations. And the cycle of life would go back to square one!
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