Things Ravi Pratap Is Up To

I awake from my blogging slumber to record a very significant achievement in the life of my better half.

Just this past week, on the 26th of July, 2007, Vidya successfully defended her Ph.D thesis at Washington University in St. Louis. After 6 long, arduous years of a life dedicated to a single research problem in Chemical Engineering, she now rightly carries the right to be addressed as Dr. Vidya for the rest of her life. Dr. Vidya, if you’re reading this, let me just say - congratulations on getting done and reaching the very pinnacle of academic education!

I have to admit that I really didn’t know much about what it really took to get a Ph.D before I came to know Vidya, and didn’t give it much thought either. But when you think about it, can you imagine dedicating 6 years of your life working on solving a single research problem that has probably not been tackled before? Never giving up in spite of all the dead ends that seem to crop up every now and then? Finding ways to stay enthused and energetic about it even after frustrating moments that nearly killed the resolve and drive in you to do research? Having all kinds of people lecture you about doing a Ph.D when clearly you’re the one actually doing it and they are the ones hypothesizing?

I’ve realized that it takes an extraordinary amount of courage, grit, and determination to earn a doctorate and I’ve seen it all in Vidya as she went through the toughest of times in getting to where she is today.

Congratulations on earning your doctoral degree, Dr. Vidya. You have truly earned the 2 letters in front of your name.

Although much of this blog is about the things I do and think about, I have always refrained from talking publicly about my love life. Well, this time I am making an exception to announce a big event in my life

On January 26th this year (Republic Day), I’m getting married to my girlfriend of 3 years and the love of my life, Vidya.

Here’s a picture of the two of us outside her apartment in St. Louis:

The wedding’s in Bangalore and I’m currently enjoying the excitement in the family and all the usual chaos that accompanies every Indian wedding!

While we’re on the topic of my travels, perhaps I should mention that I recently got back from another business trip, which took me to a new corner of the globe. Having never been to the Far East (as a matter of fact, never east of Calcutta), I was naturally pretty excited when told that I would be required to make a quick trip to Korea in connection to a project that I’m currently working on.

As I began preparing for the trip, I was a little startled by the number of people who asked me the question, “So are you going to North or South Korea?”

North Korea?! What business would anybody ever have in North Korea, what with Kim Jong Il, Taepodong missiles and a non-existent economy? I was going to Seoul, which is in the the Republic of Korea, also known as South Korea.

I landed in Seoul’s Incheon airport along with two other colleagues from Hillcrest, after a 14.5 hour flight which took us over the North Pole (no, I wasn’t able to see it much as we flew over it - cloud cover was thick). And yes, what you hear about the airports in South East Asian countries is true - they’re light years ahead of all the other ones in America and Europe. It is true that they’ve been built more recently so I guess that isn’t a completely fair comparison

The first thing that struck me about Korea was how the highways and toll gates seemed straight out of America. Even the symbol for an Interstate highway is the same as in the US!

As we approached Seoul (Incheon’s actually about an hour away from Seoul), I noticed apartment buildings that seemed a lot more like the ones you see in Mumbai. There was something about it that felt like Mumbai, except perhaps with much better roads. I remember thinking to myself that when the large Indian metros fix some of their infrastructure problems, they’ll probably look a lot more like Seoul than an American city like, say, Chicago. Even the highways ran pretty close to actual dwellings which is why there was fencing at a lot of different stretches along the highway, possibly to prevent people and animals from getting directly on the highway without a vehicle.

My trip to Seoul lasted about 36 hours. The main purpose of our visit was a business meeting that took all of a day and ended with dinner at a traditional Korean restaurant where I put on my bravest front in trying out the myriad dishes that were brought out in front of us. We sat cross-legged on the wooden floor and ate using stainless steel chopsticks, a fact noted by our Korean hosts who seemed rather impressed.

Being a person who believes in being adaptable and experimenting with new cuisines, I definitely did my share of trying out Korean food that I had never heard of before. Some of it was definitely good while some others were definitely an acquired taste

It wasn’t really a long enough trip for me to sorely miss the food that I’m accustomed to, but I do remember yearning to eat food that was regular fare for me, instead of just seafood all the time. It’s interesting that in a foreign land that I knew nothing about, American food gave me the comfort that I usually seek from my own culture’s cuisine when in America.

My feeling at the time are best described by a conversation at the breakfast table with my colleague, Dave.

I had filled my plate up with the usual scrambled eggs, toast, etc. and was sitting down to devour it when Dave said to me, “Hmm, you don’t seem to be trying out any of the Korean food at the buffet.”

As I put butter on my toast I told him, “I’ll save being adventurous with the food for lunch and dinner. I need my regular American food at breakfast!”

Hello, gentle reader.

Hmm, this is almost beginning to feel somewhat unfamiliar. Clearly, it’s been a long time since I sat down to organize my thoughts into a blog post. And to think I made a resolution in the general direction of trying to actually write far more often!

One of the challenges of writing after a significant length of time is that of deciding exactly what to write about - a problem prolific posters rarely have (or so I imagine). But, this blog is, after all, about what I’m upto so what could possibly be better than me regale you with stories of my exploits around the world

My last post (in June) was actually composed aboard an Air France flight to Chennai and at that time, I was on a business trip to India (Bangalore, to be precise). On that trip, I also happened to turn 26 - an event that gave me a fair bit to think about.

For one, I’ve begun to realize that for the first time in my career (which, I admit, isn’t really saying much given how long I’ve actually been out of graduate school), I work with people even younger than I am. There was something cool about being the hip dude fresh from school with all the boundless enthusiasm. But wait, all of a sudden, I’m interviewing all these college kids, telling them what to do on my team, and attributing some of their tendencies to being “a little green!” Wow, life really has moved pretty quickly since I last noticed how old I was!

The plus side to being a little older is that I’m probably taken more seriously in business settings (from what I’ve seen). This is not to say that college students are not taken seriously but it’s just more likely that they have had less experience with real-world situations and thus, not the first choice to head a team or be given complete independent charge of something new (this tends to be skewed in startups, though).

If you’re a college student reading this, it’s probably disheartening to find that out but I want to say again that this is just a very general approximation. There are numerous exceptions to this, of course, and a lot depends on you and how quickly you learn and adapt. When you’re fresh out of college, you’re also extremely moldable and so what you do in the first 5 years out of college will very likely have a huge impact on what you do in the next 20.

Speaking of being fresh out of college, I will confess that one of the images that I saw of myself was that of being a laptop-toting globetrotting professional hopping from one continent to the next. To my rather naive self barely out of my teens, it seemed that the definition of success was just that - donning a cool-looking suit, travelling business class, with fingers typing away at something obviously important.

That was then, of course. I’m old enough now to be able to see through all the glamour and actually not be swayed much by tales of all these consultants and investment bankers raking up the frequent flyer miles (and their bank balances) and attending cocktail parties with the CEOs of the biggest corporations.

This reminds me of the time when I was doing my Masters at Wash U and I attended this information session by McKinsey. The chap giving us the presentation was an alumnus and was doing a pretty good job of selling us all on how consultants are above us mortals. At one point, as part of the list of benefits of working for McKinsey, he said something like, “McKinsey works only with Fortune 500 corporations and their senior management so if you come work for us, you’ll be rubbing shoulders with the CEOs of these companies.”

And it works beautifully on college kids, most of whom are not quite sure of what they really want to do and are easily seduced by dangling the carrot of an ultra-cool, highly “bragworthy” lifestyle in front of their eyes (yes, I was one of those people too). I have yet to come across a single person of my general age-group who is not swayed even slightly by such presentations, or for that matter what they hear from their friends in B school. It almost always is the case that they start thinking about why they can’t be consultants or investment bankers themselves

Now, I am not quite the aforementioned laptop-toting, important-looking business professional (and thank God, too, because I surely don’t want to spend most of my life just hopping from one timezone to the next), but I have in the recent past been sent to India on business a few times and needless to say, I love it.

I love the experience of just being in India; of seeing my parents and brother more than just once a year; of working with a dynamic Indian company to build a team of the smartest engineers; of living life in the new India, albeit for a week at a time; of reliving moments of my life growing up in Hyderabad; of noticing things about India and Indians that I never quite saw before. That, and some other perks that come with flying on business - check out the Lufthansa Business Lounge at Frankfurt airport to see what I mean. The bathrooms there are so clean I think I could sleep in them! Until my recent trip I used to think that business class was a ridiculous way to spend too much money but I know now how much more pleasant the whole experience of flying 21 hours non-stop can be!

While it may seem to me that I’m too old for one club (the 18-24 age group), it looks like I’m too young for another - the general age group that people travelling to India on business seem to fall into. At least if you go by my experience at Hyderabad’s airport.

I was making my way to get in line to check-in at the business-class counter when a guy rushed up to me and said,

“Sir, economy check-in is that way.”

“But isn’t this the line for business class?” I asked, somewhat puzzled.

I noticed a look of incredulousness on the guy’s face. But he quickly recovered.

“Oh, please go right ahead, sir.”

I smiled and continued to make my way to the check-in counter.

I don’t know if it was because I was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt that made the guy stop me but that was the moment that I thought to myself that being 26 was really not as much of a deal as I was making it out to be!

During my brief layover in Paris’ Charles De Gaulle airport, I figured getting online for about 30 minutes would be a nice way to wait at the gate for my flight to Chennai. 6 Euros and 2 minutes later, I was connected and going about some of my tasks when I chanced upon a headline on the BBC News South Asia.

India to implement caste quotas

I blinked for a second. I started feeling the rage build up inside me. Maybe this was something I was dreaming up? I looked at some other headlines popping up on Google News.

India to hike lower-caste quotas despite protests (Boston Globe)

India to hike lower-caste quotas despite protests (Reuters)

Govt to implement 27% quota for OBCs from June 2007 (Times of India)

Oh it’s happened alright. Inspite of ear-splitting level of protests in the country. Inspite of all the raging debates that clearly indicate the Government is implementing what is arguably the most idiotic and ineffective solution to a genuine problem without in the least giving a thought to whether it even makes sense. And to make things even more ironic, we have all the political parties in complete consensus! If there ever was a more blatant disregard for public opinion, this was it.

You’d think that given everybody, from the CEOs of India’s largest and most successful corporations to political analysts and economists to students in colleges, has made clear their opposition to the idea (and presented convincing arguments), it would make the Government stop and think. Perhaps engage in working out a solution that actually achieves what it aims to do instead of merely being an extension of 50 years of other such short-sighted laws passed “to correct historical wrongs.” [1]

But we forget that Indian politics is a dirty game of vote banks and divisive caste politics. How does it matter if all these people who’re protesting right now (mostly urban, educated elite that can’t take advantage of any quotas - a relatively small fraction of the population) are going to have an even slimmer chance of getting into the publicly-funded educational institutions? How does it matter that the Union Minister for Human Resources Development, Arjun Singh, who started all this is clueless about the actual percentage of the Indian population that will benefit from such a measure?

Now if you were a politician who only cares about being voted back into power (like Mr. Arjun Singh) when the elections come around next, would you give a damn about the protests from people who won’t make a difference to your re-election? Does it matter that what you’re doing doesn’t actually solve the problem of providing equal opportunity to disadvantaged classes at all? Does it matter that all this will only drop standards in these top institutions and further divide India along caste lines? Does it matter that you’re actually doing all this in a bid to mask the tragedy that primary education in India is and your complete failure in being able to fix it? Certainly not. You will do everything it takes to put yourself back in Parliament the next time round, sound logic and India’s welfare be damned.

Any way you look at it, the fact remains that reservations are completely the wrong way to undertake the cause of improving universal access to education. To quote Pratap Bhanu Mehta, who resigned from the Knowledge Commission set up by the Prime Minister, in his open letter to the PM:

As a society we focus on reservations largely because it is a way of avoiding doing the things that really create access. Increasing the supply of good quality institutions at all levels (not to be confused with numerical increases), more robust scholarship and support programmes will go much further than numerically mandated quotas. When you assumed office, you had sketched out a vision of combining economic reform with social justice. Increased public investment is going to be central to creating access opportunities. It would be presumptuous for me to suggest where this increased public investment is going to come from, but there are ample possibilities: for instance, earmarking proceeds from genuine disinvestment for education will do far more for access than quotas. We are not doing enough to genuinely empower marginalised groups, but are offering condescending palliatives like quotas as substitute. All the measures currently under discussion are to defuse the agitation, not to lay the foundations for a vibrant education system. If I may borrow a phrase of Tom Paine’s, we pity the plumage, but forget the dying bird.

Even 10 years from now, somebody that I meet, in their curiosity about India will ask me that same question, “Does India still have the caste system?” And I know that the answer will be no better than it is today. That, to me, is the saddest part.

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[1] A lot of different people have written about why reservations are the the wrong solution to the problem of providing equal access to opportunity to economically and socially disadvantaged classes. Of note are Atanu Dey’s recent pieces on the India Economy Blog.