I was sitting in my hall one day when one of the person in my family remarked that less than 50% or somewhat around that mark of seats in Engineering colleges got filled up. I was a bit shocked. I know that Tamilnadu’s engineering colleges are super waste, but I also know that their marketing departments are perfect, and I also know that people in Tamilnadu are fools, they will never realize that learning knowledge for the sake of learning and curiosity will lead to real learning, and learning for money or fame or status in society will lead you no where. I expected engineering colleges to keep fooling people like politicians will do to us till our civilization ends.

If by some way people are discovering that putting your kid in engineering means you are just funding a rich guy who wants to cheat you to have a luxurious lifestyle by riding on your hardship, then people are slowly opening their eyes I hope. Though I don’t think a revolution will take place.

I did not believe fools to become non fools. Try telling a God believer God doesn’t exist, he won’t believe you, try telling him you had breakfast with God today, he still won’t believe you. So how can Tamil people suddenly believe most engineering colleges are a spoof? I felt it as an impossibility. I did ask my college group in WhatsApp, and to my surprise my friend said it’s true, colleges are asking students to pay only 20-25% of original fees demanded, they are begging students to stay, and not leave for cheaper courses that would still get you same salary like B.Sc. Another friend who is H.O.D, said some departments in colleges are vacant, that kind of stunned me.

The staffs in colleges are also very poor in knowledge. Once a lecturer or professor was revered. I still remember how people in my parental generation talk highly of their professors, about the researches and books they have written, how their professors like knowledge and rose from ashes to upper echelons of the society. I did have very good teachers in my college Panimalar Engineering too, but they vanished. It looked like those who totally failed professionally and had nowhere to go, those who would be slave to management and never questioned it stayed. Still among those lambs that stayed, some were good, thought us well, but were they people who could turn humans to engineers? I really doubt.

The management during the time I studied was headed by a guy who once sold liquor illegally (but he was trying to change, shed his past I think), he was a hit man of our former chief minister M.G.Ramachandran (MGR), it makes me wonder how people with impulsiveness, violence, anger and subjugation which are result of not having a strong mind can build institutions that claim to create strong minds. Though my college was run by son-in-law of MGR’s thug, I don’t think he was powerful enough to resist the ways of his in laws. I still remember my HOD saying in class that he was watched by thugs who reported his moves to the management, he also lamented that teachers were afraid of them.

Engineering is a practical subject, you need to experiment a lot, being an electronics engineer, and a first class pass out, and best outgoing student from my college, I still don’t know how to solder diode to a PCB. It might be astounding, but it’s the truth about Indian, and Tamilnadu’s educational system.

This how our electronics lab worked, if you brown out a component, you have to fill on a notebook saying you browned it out, I am not sure if they charged you for the component. In short if you hit a little failure, you were subjected to some bitter process. In that case how do you think one will have the spirit of experimentation? How can one be practical guy? Is engineering a theoretical subject or a practical subject?

Let’s assume that the college was so poor it could not let people brown out components in lab, then how come the grandsons of our college founders have expensive cars that cost’s the worth of possibly lakhs of IC’s? How come they have expensive lifestyles? How come we’re studying in colleges where the kids of management people drive in Mercedez, and possibly apply for Rolls Royce, but we can’t even afford to buy a Mercedez a year even today, after 20 years of our being a “professional”? Think people think!!! And they say colleges is like a ladder that lets you climb above it.

Thinking that I am an engineer in 2004 and going into HCL as proud first class graduate, and finding that I can’t type fast enough on a computer is not a joke. I had to do that by traveling in Chennai’s buses that were crammed and leaked in rain, at least if I had traveled to HCL in Mercedes and discovered I was not an engineer, I might not have complained so much.