Saturday, July 11, 2009

So whats the deal with these tuition folk anyway???

Times are tough these days for me.

What with spending(more like wasting) my mornings and a good part of my afternoons at my lame excuse of a college, I've to come back home and head over to tuition because I'm just not good enough to clear CAT(that's right, I am going to be 99%iler this year) on my own. After having spent a good 3 hours at the bloody tuition(which is probably helping me a lot right now), I suddenly notice that my day's almost over(yeah! I have to get up early so usually I end up sleeping by an early-ish midnight. Looking at my lifestyle, I wonder what it would have been like if there were no tuition classes whatsoever.

These classes, these "helpful" tuition classes, these classes which have been built to "hone" the talent of the student, these classes which suck up the hard earned money of the Indian middle class society, are quite frankly a pain in the haas(yeah, you get my meaning!).

If there were no blood sucking, corporate, profit making tuition classes, wouldn't everything be so simple. Most of the day of the average student who's gonna be appearing in a major, life changing entrance exam is spent in envy and apprehension over how good the other students are doing and comparing the progress of these other students to their own progress. Many students have come upto me and asked "Yaar! Tooh to phod raha hai! Top maar raha hai .Kahaan se padhta hai??Kitna padhta hai??" My reply is always a simple "I know" followed by a "It's the in born talent that's coming out in the tests man" and then to add salt to the person's wounds a "What are you doing these days man??"(since the person isn't doing much study and already feels like a bum because of that).

But not swaying from the argument here, as I write, with no tuition classes, there would be no pressure. Also evincing this is the known fact that tuitions cause students to work so much harder than they're gonna work if there were no tuitions to attend in the first place. So increases the level of difficulty set in the paper and since more and more students are working their asses off in the tuitions, the competition also doesn't lag far behind so much so that these prestigious Indian institutes have become the most difficult institutes to get into in the world !
10 lac people appear for IITs for a mere 4500 seats.
3.5 lac appear for IIMs for a 'oh so less I can't believe that it's even possible' 1000 seats.
Where does the competition arise from?? One might say that this is because of the changing mindset of Indian parents and Indian youth who look at engineering and an MBA as career saviours( me being one of these unsavory lot ). Another might quip, that the level of competition has improved because of overall improvement in the education and the fact that people actually give a care about their careers nowadays unlike the old days where a person would've been thrilled to be a BA or MA or other such 'is this actual study????' courses.
But I say that these reasons are so obvious that they may not have been needed to even be mentioned. The real underlying reason, the reason that has been festering in the mind but hasn't been given voice to by the masses is (and don't give me a 'Let me guess!') Tuition. After all, these problems that I've written of have become really distressing since the rise of the tuition. I mean just look at the facts, tuition came up in the late 90s - early 2000s and the exam difficulty and competition was suddenly off the charts. Because suddenly everyone started thinking that they could now clear these difficult exams by simply paying a 30 thousand rupees.

Now I have been criticizing tuition as if they were the spawn of Hitler and Mussolini consummating, but they do have some good points as well(I'm not one who leaves a passage with a closed discussion). They help us with the usual drag. (I'm not here to expand on that, everyone already knows too much about the good qualities of tuitions)

So don't hate me if I say that tuition is the worst thing that has happened in the past decade, well apart from the many terror strikes and the thousands of lives lost. I mean it in the best sense possible, I call it a double edged sword. But I certainly hate its guts for this Catch 22 that it has put our lives in.