My love-hate relationship with Hyderabad
I have always been very proud of calling myself a Hyderabadi. May be its just the easy way out to answering questions about my "native place" :-D, but seriously... I love the place. But there have been times when I've felt like I could've done better and I can't help blaming it a bit on how Hyderabad functions. Although majority of the population speaks Telugu, North Indians have been settling here since forever, thanks to a huge Hindi(Urdu) speaking population and now the IT magnet that it has come to be. But to me, its still a wanna-be cosmopolitan.
I'm gonna be fair here and not think about Mumbai or even Chennai for that matter. But its a known fact that Bangalore has progressed much faster even though we started out pretty much at the same level. There is not a lot of difference today between the volume of business generated by IT in both places, neither is there is a difference in world-class education. If Bangalore has IIM, IISC, Hyderabad has ISB, IIIT, NIFT, NALSAR and so on. But there is still a huge difference in the outlook of the people. The native population is a very conservative lot.
A few days back I was having a conversation with a friend from Mumbai. I was telling him how I came about to be an engineer. I was telling him how more than 50% of Hyderabadi engineers came about to be so. If a kid is "bright"(typically in state syllabus this would mean the kid can chant the vedas and his math textbook with the same accuracy), it'll become his family's mission to somehow try and push him into one of the IIT's. For all you know, the kid performed well in his sixth class final exam in the hope that his parents might buy him a new video game. But instead the cable TV gets cut and he finds himself in a dungeon called "IIT Foundation Course". From now on, the entire universe around him makes him believe that he was born to be a geek. That's it, sports/dance/TV/girls/all other not-amounting-to-engineering-skills hobbies out the window. I can go on and on about this but to no avail.
The point I am trying to make here is that the immense potential for creativity in Hyderabad is dying. India Inc. certainly needs a lot more quality engineers to move forward but not at the expense of murdering creativity. I used to be of the opinion that the IT revolution is responsible for this, but no. No matter what stream, today, you cannot runaway from technology. I have learnt that the hard way. It is common nowadays that people from various backgrounds end up coding. But that's ok, the industry demands it and you get paid, so why not? Generally, people from other parts of India have made a more informed choice of career compared to those from Hyderabad. The simple reason being lack of exposure and acceptance. Commerce graduates are often looked down upon in Hyderabad as if its the end of the world. This is not done!
Very specifically, I'd like to see the following changes:
- State syllabus has to change. Just mimicking CBSE/ICSE should do.
- Career counseling should be made a part of school curriculum. Typically kids who want an off-beat career, start looking at options after 12th. But its already late.
- Internships/Industry training should be made compulsory in engineering!
These problems you might think are generic and the whole of India suffers from it. But no, in Hyderabad, it is even more so. I am very proud of the fact that Notion Ink chose Hyderabad to develop their famed Adam. I hope colleges in Hyderabad will draw inspiration from this and start encouraging real engineering projects, industry alliances and entrepreneurial incubation centers.
