Rising to the potential

Give the person a fish and you feed the hunger for a day. Teach that person how to fish and you satiate the appetite for a lifetime.

This age old wisdom, albeit slightly tweaked, demonstrates the importance and positive effects of education. Of course, we are in the post-millennial age, and we are talking about the quality of education. Specifically – quality of academic education.

Thanks to the industrial and research revolutions, and then to effects of post-modernism, the excellence of education has enhanced significantly worldwide. Sparing the under-developed countries, most nations now have institutes of excellence leading and inspiring their most valuable national asset – the youth – to newer skies.

Let’s give due credits to the millennials and Gen-Z though. It’s not just the highest quality of education or faculties that is pushing the envelope of quality education. The quality of aspirations of these young guns is probably as much a driving factor. Their orientations go above and beyond the greed of making heap loads of money. They want to make a ‘difference’ – not as activists, but as pioneers!

There are plenty of examples to this effect: Sundar Pichai. Some of Google’s controversial policies notwithstanding, a 40-something faces the Congress of most powerful nation with a straight face. Matthew Mullenweg of WordPress – to say that websites are now created by moms and pops due to this guy’s foresight would be an understatement. Advait Thakur – a barely 18-year young, young turk leading a successful IT empire in India. Then there are the likes of Sunita Williams and Kalpana Chawala- a totally different breed of ‘I-will-achieve-to-what-I-set-my-eyes-on’.

(Okay – we left Mark Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella et al deliberately).

Then there are those accomplished, well-settled NRI desis – many from technical backgrounds – returning to their homeland, to their native places specifically, to change the life-quality of their villages and towns.

There is a common underlying factor in all these examples, and the ones we cannot accommodate here. Education. It has unlocked the doors – to the burning desire to ‘be’. The fire was already there, quality education has stoked it. Engineers, astronauts, business tycoons, techies, writers… these are not titles any more. But the outcome of people learning how to fish!