A teenage wasteland

Guest Columns by Sauvik Chakraverti,

The Newindpress on Sunday, 2007-2008

A teenage wasteland

I was a teenager when I first heard Roger Daltrey cry ‘‘teenage wasteland’’ and it sent a chill down my spine. The teen years were the best years, and it seemed to me I was just wasting them in a formal education that was totally removed from the real world and got more complex and un-understandable by the day. I dropped out and started life as an entrepreneur. It is this early experience that has been invaluable to my later life. Today, my son has finished with high school and has almost finished with his teens. I write this for him and those of his generation, so that many will get out of this useless education and the chasing of worthless degrees, and step into the real world out there and earn their own keep.

Babur conquered Samarkand when he was just 13. As a Timurid prince, it had always been a cherished dream, for Samarkand had been Timur’s own capital. Babur had inherited Ferghana from his father, but when two successive rulers of Samarkand died within six months in 1496, Babur made his first career move. The conquest of Samarkand was his first in an illustrious career. The early age at which Babur accomplished this is worth noting, for it fits in neatly with the ‘‘when life ends early, it must begin early’’ theory. The life expectancy of a Timurid prince those days was short. Babur conquered Delhi at the advanced age of 43, with his young son Humayun as a general sent in advance to secure the Lodi treasury at Agra. It was a very young Humayun who obtained the Kohinoor diamond for his father. Babur died 4 years later, at just 47. I am 48 myself.

The Honourable East India Company Service (HEICS) also recruited the very young. Henry Vansittart arrived in India at the age of 13. As did Sir John Malcolm, who settled the Maratha territory. At his interview in London, one of the Directors of the Company asked Malcolm, playfully, ‘‘Why, my little man, what would you do if you met Hyder Ali?’’ To which the little man replied, in his thick Scots accent, ‘‘Sir, I would drraw my sworrd and cut off his haid.’’ He was immediately selected.

The great Charles Metcalfe arrived in Calcutta as a boy of 15. After the Mutiny had been suppressed, he was in charge of Delhi at just 27. In this capacity he acted as Governor-General for 2 years and it was said that he made a better Governor-General than his successor who arrived from London, Lord Auckland. When the Company started training its recruits in Haileybury College, the lower age limit was 15. If MNCs in India start recruiting at such an age and impart in-house training, many bright young teenagers would be saved from the BA-MBA ‘‘paper chase’’. The HEICS recruits not only conducted business, they also administered vast territories, raised taxes, provided justice, built roads and canals, and conducted systematic surveys of the land. Today’s MNC recruits have a much easier job. Recruitment should be early in life.

Of course, Babur and the HEICS chaps were ‘‘educated’’ in the deep sense. Babur himself trained his young cousin, Haidar, aged just 9, ‘‘in the arts of calligraphy, reading, making verses, epistolary style, painting and illumination… such crafts as seal-engraving, jeweller’s and goldsmith’s work, saddlery and armour-making, also in the construction of arrows, spear-heads and knives… in the affairs of the State, in important transactions, in planning campaigns and forays, in archery, in hunting, in the training of falcons, and in everything that is useful in the government of a kingdom.’’ HEICS recruits came from boarding schools where they were taught liberal humanities (John Locke was their prophet), classical philosophy and history, games and sports and later, at Haileybury College, the rudiments of political economy. If all this could be imparted to a 15-year old then, it must be possible to do so even sooner today.

What our school system does today is prolong adolescence. In my time, school ended at Class 11. Today, it is Class 12. Then comes the mandatory BA (for everyone must be a ‘‘graduate’’). However, neither the Class 12, nor the BA, lead to any occupation, profession or vocation. There is therefore the need to study even further. I have met numberless 24-year-olds who are still ‘‘students’’, hence unemployed, unmarried, and dependant on their parents. They also have no experience of the real world. They are ‘‘old adolescents’’. This must end.

In a poor country, where life expectancy is low, schooling must be brief and meaningful. It must equip a very young person to flourish in the global free market: to ‘‘find a calling’’, and seek knowledge relevant to that calling. The young, through short courses, can learn even medicine. Parth Shah of the Centre for Civil Society studied pharmacology before shifting to Economics. He often says that 90 per cent of Indian diseases are common infections that can be treated by paramedics who study just two years. Instead of chasing engineering and medical degrees, it would be better for the young if they could practice and learn on the job.

Paramedics of today will study more later. And engineering trainees in engineering firms will grow with their firms. Remember, we had IITs and IIMs in our socialist heydays, and little job creation or useful knowledge resulted from them. Socialist India was low on technology and the economy was moribund, so there were very few business opportunities for trained managers.

Let us also not forget that the free market economy offers innumerable ‘‘callings’’, far more than the doctor, engineer, babu, lawyer, banker, accountant limit set by the socialist education system. There will be VJs, musicians, fashion designers, models, photographers, admen and copywriters, chefs and bartenders, journalists, sportspersons, go-go dancers, tattoo artists and, above all, zillions of entrepreneurs. Such a world will require disaggregated, de-homogenised, compartmentalised, and un-uniform schools of knowledge, very different from the high schools of today.

The writer is the author of Antidote: Essays Against the Socialist Indian State, and its sequel, Antidote 2: For Liberal Governance. He can be contacted at sauvikc@epmltd.com.