Ah, the great Indian education circus, notorious for its colonial baggage and its mugging culture, renowned for its prolific world educational rankings and famous for its caste system like approach which divides roughly 20 lakh students per year into 3 streams with no room for people who don't want to be a part of either of those 3 streams. A system that manufactures passionless and uncreative robots who predicate their self worth on an arbitrary 2 digit number. A system where teachers openly humiliate a student in front of his classmates for not getting good marks and tell him that his life will be destroyed if he doesn't perform well. A system where parents tell their 5 year old child that he'll never probably be make it as a cricketer, crushing his dreams. A system where a great painter never becomes a great painter because apparently painting is not a profession, because a profession can only be something which is included in the school curriculum. A system where marks are so important that learning has to take a backseat.
A system so productive that students pray to god that their exams get over as soon as possible so that they can run away from this torture. A system so inspiring that almost all great scientists and researchers have to leave India in order to make a successful career, we are very proud of people like Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadela but never think that Sundar Pichai had to become the CEO of Google because Indians don't have a company like Google. A system that produces lakhs of engineers every passing year but hasn't made any progress in the field of science and mathematics since Aryabhata discovered zero, India has also produced exactly the same number of Nobel laureates in the STEM fields since independence, ever wondered why all this shit happens? It happens not because Indians are stupid or unimaginative, it certainly doesn't happen because Indians don't know how to work hard, it happens simply because of the risk-averse attitude of Indians and the ulterior philosophy that 'academic success is possibly the only success one can achieve'. If students are taught to value their existence according to an exam score, things are bound to get f****d up.
"OH, so you have got a gold medal for roller-skating, f*** that, tell me how much you got in Mathematics?" This is how a typical conversation goes in India, from the very beginning of one's life, one is reminded not to have big dreams, not to even think outside the box, and not even dare to be creative. Wonderful sayings like "Padhoge Likhoge Hoge Nawab Kheloge Kudoge Hoge Kharab" are propagated, this saying perfectly surmises the Indian mindset, hell, even the school projects in this country are marked according to the student's handwriting and not according to his creativity. I have seen extremely talented people get embarrassed publicly just because they weren't mathematically very skilled per se, I have seen students lose their self respect because they couldn't score according to their parent's expectations, I have seen students leave their hobbies and passions behind just so that their teachers validate them. I have seen students breakdown because they chose a stream in order to make their relatives happy, relatives who don't even remember the child's first name.
Basically the Indian Education System is as superficial and superfluous as it gets. A country which once had universities like Nalanda and Takshila that the world looked up to is today struggling to make students not sleep during class, and why not? With teachers who became teachers because they had no other options, what else can one expect? When academic success becomes the parameter for an individual's self-worth, the iceberg isn't that faraway. Situations are so bad that a simple education policy which seeks to implement changes that countries like USA had done 50 years ago is blown out of proportion to make us think that it's a revolutionary idea.
So remember that a rat race is meant for the rats, so if you don't have an IQ score near to that of Stephen Hawking, maybe you're in the wrong race altogether, switch the track and see yourself reach light speed.
"I never let my schooling interfere with my education" ~ Mark Twain
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