IIT Alumni 2006 Global Conference- My Views
Posted : December 24, 2006 at 6:29 am [IST]
The President inaugurated the Pan IIT 2006 convention in Mumbai on Dec 23, 2006 that will discuss for 3 days the initiatives and projects to transform India with focus on governance, knowledge economy, entrepreneurship, poverty eradication and advanced technologies. An ad says, ‘Participants include over 40 IITians who have contributed towards nation-building.’ A question flashed in my mind and morosed me. Have the rest of the thousands of IITians passed out from IITs not contributed? Many IITians could have become more distinguished ones, if the circumstances in which they worked would have been more conducive. If I just start thinking about some of my own friends, each performed differently. Some who were more distinguished in the performance in IIT couldn’t do that great in real life. Dhingra, Budhani, Shikhar, and Agrawal couldn’t become distinguished. Why can’t the conference such as this one look into the factors that make a person with all the potentials just an average one? How can the system produce the ‘distinguished’ ones more and in abundance?
Another observation is about the focus of this and other conferences. Why should not IITians just focus on making their own IITs more distinguished and comparable to Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon with regards to scale, the quality of teachers, contributions to industries and society, innovations and researches?
And if the IITians have some real spareable resources, why should they not help the schools and colleges, and their own village and small towns that they came from before joining IITs?
Next year I shall be celebrating the golden jubilee of my admission in IIT, Kharagpur in 1957. It gives me an immense happiness that I am still continuing to contribute in my own ways with small little ideas in my writings.
IITs must add more value to social grid: Kalam
Tharoor at the Pan IIT 2006 meet in Mumbai
George Soros participated in Pan IIT 2006
- Indra
Category: Employment/Education |
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