Asra Yousuf

Over the past five years, Rashmi Bansal has grown on me as an author. Initially starting off as a fan of her  “Author’s note”, I gradually started getting used to her writing style- simple and concise, with a bit of Hindi thrown in here and there. Her stories are of people- people like you and me. The only difference between them and us is that those people chose to carve out their own niche out of their existence and mould their life and fortunes the way they wanted. Yes, each work of hers is a collection of stories about entrepreneurs- stories of how ordinary people made their lives and the lives of others around them extraordinary.

So when I started reading her latest offering- ‘Take me home’, all I was expecting was a daily morning dose of motivation to help me through my mundane day. But with each story that I read with each passing day, it was something else altogether that struck me. Take me home is book of 20 entrepreneurs from small-town India who have built companies with an annual turnover ranging from Rs. 100 Cr. to even Rs. 1000 Cr. It’s not just their humble beginnings that these men and women share in common but more importantly it is their attitude to never treat their shortcomings for what they are but just as another step along the way up.

I remember Rashmi Bansal’s first book ‘Stay Hungry Stay Foolish’ which spoke of 25 IIM-Ahmedabad graduates who refused the temptation of huge pay packages in multi-national companies and instead chose to be the employer instead of the employee. However, the fact that these 25 were IIM-A graduates formulated this notion in my head that it couldn’t have been particularly hard for them to go on their own once they had decided to take the plunge. After all they were graduates from the country’s best management institution, hence it was posit that they had brains, to add to that they were the cream of the country having been tutored and trained in the best place possible.And then I came across the stories of these 20, some of who either had nominal graduation degrees in irrelevant fields or had barely scraped through school education or worse still, were school drop-outs. Despite their lack of professional qualifications they had gone on to build business empires which required high-level of technical expertise, had been part of million-dollar mergers and had traded across borders providing global services.

C.V. Jacob left school after matriculation. However he went on to head his family’s construction business after having worked in the role of a civil engineer during the construction of a number of dams, tunnels and power plants. He did all of this without any formal education in civil engineering. He then went on to start a business of extracting oleoresins, a technically challenging industry and gradually built it into a Rs.1000Cr. company called Synthite without any formal education in chemistry or botany.

Similarly, Parakramsinh Jadeja dropped out of school in the eleventh grade to pursue his passion for sports but had to resort to work in order to support his family. Starting from a small jobshop in Rajkot which operated only one lathe machine to becoming the largest manufacturer of machine tools in the country, he took Jyoti CNC from a small business confined to the borders of Rajkot to a global empire with units in Germany and France.

Which brings me to the question I’ve been trying to ask myself. Is higher-education over-rated? Are we more restricted by it instead of being liberated by it? Are formal degrees the formula to professional success or is it all a big hype.

I remember the T-Shirt quote that once used to make me smile. Now I wonder whether it actually made sense. It read- “I was born intelligent. Education ruined me.”  Those IIM-A graduates had an advantage over the others- they had studied the economics of the market, they knew how to react to challenging situations, they had been trained to weigh the pros and cons systematically and make intelligent decisions. This advantage was, however, lacking in these 20 small-town entrepreneurs. But was it actually a disadvantage to them. I think not. When you don’t know exactly what is to be done or have no idea what Mr. Big-shot-so-and-so had done when faced with a similar situation, you tend to rely on your intuition, you tend to take risks, you tend to go to great lengths to find your alternatives.

At times, ignorance is not exactly the worst thing that could happen to you. It might just be the best. Because ignorance calls to you explore on your own, cross boundaries and test your limits. It encourages you to quit the safe zone and venture into dangerous territories, to leave your rationale, to drop your guard and never settle. Experience is the best education one can possibly get- an education better than one received through blankly staring into empty space during college lectures. CV Jacob makes me believe that you do not need to have a B.Tech degree in Civil Engineering for constructing dams and power plants and neither do you need a B.Tech in Chemical Engineering or a B.Sc. in Botany to extract oleoresins from spices.
It is sad that in the growing times we have come to value formal education so much that it seems to overpower our individual abilities and define our capabilities. An IITian or an ivy-league graduate is synonymous with intelligence and great expectations. A person’s level of intelligence and his capabilities are gauged in proportion to the national ranking of his university. Earlier it was the caste system that stratified our society; today it is education that stratifies human ability.
The sole purpose of higher-education is rendering knowledge. However, with the primary goal of qualifying for a degree in mind, the purpose seems to be fading into oblivion. For a majority of the generation, it is the degree that makes them waste 3-4 years at the peak of their lives not the urge for learning. They end up not with brains bulging of knowledge but with a false illusion of having mastered a field of study while in reality, they aren’t even close. So, why waste the time and resource to learn something which you might not even apply in future course of time. A school education gives you the much needed base to build upon and propel your career, then why uselessly vile away ones effort in the pursuit of a degree which inaccurately labels your ability.

Not to get caught on the wrong foot, I am not demeaning higher education in any way but simply trying to state that its purpose seems to be lost. If a degree is what defines an individual in today’s world then it is the human ability to learn and adapt that we are demeaning. Knowledge has no boundaries and your passion has no limits- combine the two together and there will be no looking back. Reminds me of the last line of the movie 3 Idiots- “Bacha kaabil bano, kaamyabi jhak maar kar peeche aayegi.” (Become capable first, success will be bound to follow).