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The land of opportunity!

If there’s anything that has been hard to come by in India – its opportunity! You have to fight out everywhere to get the ‘opportunity’. Whether it is a chance to speak out in the school assembly[Ref: Turning Point], or to get entry to one of the top engineering or management institutes in the country! I recently heard from my cousin that even MBA training institutes are allowing students with interview calls from only top-10 institutes to participate in mock-group discussion sessions. The others must only watch!

I have been a bit fortunate to have got a lot of opportunities early in my life in the area of personality development. My school provided lots of platforms – from the morning assembly to the school election – of public speaking, stage performance, and other personality development activities (like writing). Our local community (mohalla) too was an encouraging platform for such activities and we had a lot of enthusiastic people in there.

However, apart from these, other opportunities – opportunity to experiment, to play around with gadgets, to learn how to make money – and many other aspects you need to learn for a life – were missing. I realise this especially when I read about childhood of some of the American contemporaries.

Bill Gates could start a company at 22 because he could tinker with computer programming right since school days. Steve Wozniak could ‘invent’ the Personal computer because he got an opportunity to tinker with circuit boards right in his school days. Ray Crock could create McDonalds because he sold lemonade every summer in the Garage Sales.

It’s not that these opportunities are completely non-existent in India; I studied computers since Class IV, I had an electric experimentation kit since the age of 10, and our school even had an annual fest where we could put up stalls (It was jointly organised by our school’s alumni assoc ‘COBA’ and the school; the stalls were a bit expensive).

However, all these activities were always ‘second priority’. I guess my own parents were much more encouraging with me to pursue them – but the social milieu weren’t as encouraging. If you know since class IX that unless you concentrate only on studies for the next 3-4 years you are not going to manage an admission to engineering – you yourself think of cutting down on these ‘extra-curricular’ activities.

And, even if you have an attitude of ‘who cares’ towards studies – how far can you go with this ‘experimentatious learning’? Which VC in India will ever fund projects of dropouts as they do in the US? Which bank will bet its money on a freak who thinks he can sell more computers than a large corporation [Read: The Dell Story]? Even your relatives would look down upon you if you don’t manage to secure a decent educational qualification!

It is these aspects that make opportunity hard to come by in India. I read it at many places nowadays that India today, is very much like the US of the 70s – at the economic tipping point. But what represents the US (of the 70s or even today) is the abundance of opportunity – at every stage of life.

As children, the opportunity to experiment, tweak, play and learn in the process. As students, the opportunity to get decent qualifications without having to go through cut throat competition. As professionals, the opportunity to be able to find investors for their ideas! As elderly, the opportunity to a quite, peaceful and healthy living!

It is only when India is able to provide these opportunities to its citizen would I get the India of my dreams – the land of opportunity!

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