Bill, Larry, Sergey and Murthy are among the few who have exemplified this cult that’s growing at rate faster than the much talked about Indian GDP. Here’s a lighter look at an oft-plagiarized Indian version of the tale.
PROLOGUE:
India’s obsession with degrees is well known the world over. If you were to stand on a street corner and throw a stone, chances are a little over 13.6 (after much calculation) out of 10 that it would hit a person with the letters next to his name. Stats may seldom fail to impress, but how would you possibly break down the ‘technical + business knowledge’ mantra of the new millennium?
An IITian friend of mine openly declares- “I’m technically challenged.” To say the very least, there are plenty of these ‘differently abled’ fish swimming back and forth in the technical pool. But then, the only fish that do swim with the flow of the stream are the dead ones! We have arrived from hiding, the TCs (Technically Challenged) cry out loud. The cult is growing, and a community on the Orkut web site is the proof. The time is probably ripe for the Indian Government to issue licenses to start ‘institutes of technology for the technically challenged’. These institutes would not need labs, obviously. The sole requirements would be classrooms, a few dispersed chalks and yes, MBA aspirants (Beer and Business Administrators alike) to fill up the benches. Like any other disease, TC also comes with its set of symptoms. So who do you think you are?
1)You know the types of brakes, parts of a brake, are a mechanical engineer, the composition of the brake material and the forces acting on the brake pads. But when you sit on a bike, you guess between the front and the rear brakes.
2)You think that The Tower of Hanoi is a tower in Hanoi (Courtesy: Microsoft).
3)As an electrical engineer you can draw and label circuit diagrams faster than current can flow through it. You pick up the phone and call the electrician to fix the geyser.
4)You classify chips as junk food.
Due to constraints in space, we have withheld any further instances. For the complete list of the 4267 disabilities, refer Volumes 3 and 4 of Eggs in a Nutshell.
[In case you answered ‘yes’ to any of the above 4 instances, please make a bold assumption that you could be classified a TC.]
EPILOGUE:
The new age investment banker is truly a jack-of-all-trades. He is not only in the top 2% of the MBA entrance exam crackers; he also features in the top 50% of the engineering entrance exam crackers. A beer guzzling globe trotting fella, he boasts of a 4 yr vacation he took when the wind blew him through the technical course. Sadly so, that didn’t happen in business studies, he admits. While he conditioned himself to talk to lathes and computers while on vacation, what came as a rude awakening was that business required talking to people! Our man can also be seen living in a swanky 3-bed room apartment (fully furnished with an Air Conditioner), wears Jockey inners and Nike outers, owns an American Express and drives around in a Ford. After a couple of years of hard work, the technically baked business pie is ready to lay rubber on the tarmac for the next 35 years. A hop, skip and a jump away to the next big paycheck (with the tax deductions in mind), our man has successfully combined obsolete and irrelevant technical knowledge with business know how. The Great Indian Corporate Czar is in the making (breaking).
Elsewhere, at the Daimler Chrysler headquarters in Germany, a man in his 30s is hard at work on the Merc SL 600. Further insight reveals he is a PhD. in Fuel Injection Systems. “As a PhD, don’t you find it rather bizarre working in a garage”, we ask.
“I wanted to work in this garage. So I had to do a PhD.” he says with a smile, in his
heavy German accent.
(appeared in Srijan 2006, the annual mag of NIT-H)
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