An Open Letter to Kapil Sibal Union Minister for Human Resource Degradation
Dear Mr. Kapil I-shall-destroy-IITs Sibal,
I have many questions going through my mind. But lets start with this one, what exactly are the functions that fall under the regime of HRD (Human Resource Department is it, still??). Is it just education? And in that too, just IITs? Or do you presume that in India, education means just the IITs? If not, please explain this obsession of your ministry with the IITs, tenure after tenure. First it was, whats-his-name Arjun Singh and now you. Just because our PM is a man of integrity and honesty (which, somehow implies he shouldnt speak, come what may!!), doesnt mean you should take advantage.
Now, whats with this mentality of not trying to improve things that dont work, rather solving all your problems using the only things that work. The one working thing in your case are the IITs and you tamper with only them to do each and everything, be it inclusive social upliftment (reservations), lack of good doctors in India (medicine at IITs), education to the politicians children with double-digit IQ levels (Show as much maturity as your white hair suggests, Mr Sibal and youll find how easy it is for such people to get a fake board certificate with whatevermarksondemand, despite the fact that they would never in their wildest dreams, even in the fourth level of Nolans Inception, be able to ace JEE exam), reducing the stress level in 12th (Stress levels? If you cant take the board exam stress, dont get into IITs in the first place simple! Now, if you think the nation can function without someone taking the stress, aha! we sure are looking at a superpower nation soon).
I am sure soon you must be having plans to solve pollution, poverty, population and corruption problems and your IQ problems as well through IITs.
Now coming back to the point, you talk about including the 12th class scores for IIT entrance. In case you dont know, here is a news flash for you, India has around 25 state boards, plus the CBSE and ICSE. For a Tamil Nadu student, the highest marks can be 99.8%, while in Uttar Pradesh, it hardly touches 90%. Also, CBSE is a high-scoring board. I wish you all the best in your attempt to normalise these to bring them at par. I suggest you give the task to the folks who conducted the online CAT last year. They are well-equipped and experienced in dealing with the guilt of messing with lakhs of aspirants anyway.
Also you have suggested introducing medical education into the IITs. I wonder if it is your way of bringing all colleges at par. Good one though, its always easier and cheaper to degrade the level of a couple of IITs (jugaad, we call it), than to raise that of a gazillion things with crumbling buildings, barely graduate faculties and with lavatories with a single microscope functioning as laboratories. Or, maybe out of pity on the IIT students, to give them some action by the on-campus presence of female medical students. In that case, a big THANK YOU on behalf of all my juniors. They eagerly await the arrival of medical batch. Some worried souls in the final year who might be passing out in 2011 are seriously considering getting a degree extension in case you postpone the implementation to 2012. Please dont postpone it to after 2012 Daruwalla tells me the world is gonna end in 2012 anyway your education ministry hasnt taught us not to believe him.
Whatever the reason, if we needed someone just to tell us superficial ideas read off from American university brochures, we could have made any Tom, Dick and Harry or Shivraj Patil our HRD Minister. Why did we pick a Harvard graduate? And how credible does your degree sound if you cant understand that whatever works in US might not work in India in that exact same format.
I havent seen you in any corruption charges either. I wonder why youre still stuck around in politics?! With that Harvard Law degree, you could be making good money out there. At the worst, you would be letting some criminals escape; at the least you would not be screwing an entire upcoming generation of India. I read somewhere that you cleared the IAS exam and didnt join later, I admired your guts back then but now I so wish you had joined, you could have been an ambassador to some country like Nepal (is it a state of India already or still independent country?) or Afghanistan or some babu looking after the CWG games etc, at least sparing Indias future from your wrath.
They say Youth Power is Indias greatest power. I say let Kapil Sibal be done and well talk. If publicity is the only reason you are doing all this, I would be ashamed of your dumbness and say Rakhi Sawant and Shiney Ahujas maid have better publicity strategies. Go into Bigg Boss for Gods sake! They are casting mentally imbalanced people anyway and I am sure that if Vindu Dara Singh and Rahul Mahajan can get in, you sure will. People will vote for anything, didnt we elect you already?
As much as I would hate to burst your bubble and be responsible for another psychiatrist losing a potential client, let me tell you, that a brand name (IITs or something else) is not the entire story. Good students and the faculty make an institution what it is. Now with your weird policy for IIT entrance, weirder for faculty recruitment, add to the reservation, the standard is bound to get low. Are you aware that more than 80% of the students who get terminated from or get academic backlogs in IITs are from the reserved lot? Oh, you have an innovative solution for that as well, relax the passing criterion for them and give them degrees somehow; after all we have been oppressing them for ages. Let me again introduce you to the reality, companies coming for the recruitment are NOT dumb either. They will start asking for category in recruitment, even if you pump up their GPAs by relaxation criterion and bam!! You have jobless IITians! Now in the market and your beloved foreign countries where you and Anu Malik get most of your innovative, original ideas from, will not see this as the reserved lot, and all this will only degrade the brand name my senior IIT alumni have worked so hard to build.
Ever heard of primary education, and children in rural areas not even having access to it? Passing a Right to Education (RTE) bill and giving a press conference about it can keep you in the media for a week but to actually make some change you have to implement it. Mid-day meals website is selling Viagra under your noses. I am not sure if mid-day meal fall under your domain. No, maybe not; after all, mid-day meals are not an IIT activity. You are just busy looking into which coaching the JEE topper was enrolled with.
By the way, are you also suffering from a short term memory loss? Werent you this guy who said in an interview to Karan Thapar, IITs are precious; I will not interfere with them? Or are we both using different dictionaries to look up the meaning of interfere and precious?
If you ask me, A. Raja, Madhu Koda and Suresh Kalmadi are much better than you. They are just taking away Indias money, not its future. You should be ashamed of yourself after reading the next line, but IIPM students have better sense of right or wrong than you do. And yes, I am saying this despite being fully aware that they are the ones who take admission in IIPM even after reading all the false claims.
I have many more things to say to you, but am keeping it short, considering you might be very busy going though the list of students who qualified JEE to take admission in the 15 (or 16, 17, or 20, or whatever number you increased it to since I started writing this article till I publish it) IITs. Checking which rank holder got which IIT and what department, thinking about launching a CBI enquiry into it. Do that! Because the (self-proclaimed) emerging superpower India needs its best crime investigation agency (CBI) and HRD ministry to do nothing better today. While we are at it, I got a B in a course in my 3rd semester, could you ask CBI to look into it, please pretty please!!
A voice straight from the heart of an IIT Alumnus
Dear Mr. Kapil I-shall-destroy-IITs Sibal,
I have many questions going through my mind. But lets start with this one, what exactly are the functions that fall under the regime of HRD (Human Resource Department is it, still??). Is it just education? And in that too, just IITs? Or do you presume that in India, education means just the IITs? If not, please explain this obsession of your ministry with the IITs, tenure after tenure. First it was, whats-his-name Arjun Singh and now you. Just because our PM is a man of integrity and honesty (which, somehow implies he shouldnt speak, come what may!!), doesnt mean you should take advantage.
Now, whats with this mentality of not trying to improve things that dont work, rather solving all your problems using the only things that work. The one working thing in your case are the IITs and you tamper with only them to do each and everything, be it inclusive social upliftment (reservations), lack of good doctors in India (medicine at IITs), education to the politicians children with double-digit IQ levels (Show as much maturity as your white hair suggests, Mr Sibal and youll find how easy it is for such people to get a fake board certificate with whatevermarksondemand, despite the fact that they would never in their wildest dreams, even in the fourth level of Nolans Inception, be able to ace JEE exam), reducing the stress level in 12th (Stress levels? If you cant take the board exam stress, dont get into IITs in the first place simple! Now, if you think the nation can function without someone taking the stress, aha! we sure are looking at a superpower nation soon).
I am sure soon you must be having plans to solve pollution, poverty, population and corruption problems and your IQ problems as well through IITs.
Now coming back to the point, you talk about including the 12th class scores for IIT entrance. In case you dont know, here is a news flash for you, India has around 25 state boards, plus the CBSE and ICSE. For a Tamil Nadu student, the highest marks can be 99.8%, while in Uttar Pradesh, it hardly touches 90%. Also, CBSE is a high-scoring board. I wish you all the best in your attempt to normalise these to bring them at par. I suggest you give the task to the folks who conducted the online CAT last year. They are well-equipped and experienced in dealing with the guilt of messing with lakhs of aspirants anyway.
Also you have suggested introducing medical education into the IITs. I wonder if it is your way of bringing all colleges at par. Good one though, its always easier and cheaper to degrade the level of a couple of IITs (jugaad, we call it), than to raise that of a gazillion things with crumbling buildings, barely graduate faculties and with lavatories with a single microscope functioning as laboratories. Or, maybe out of pity on the IIT students, to give them some action by the on-campus presence of female medical students. In that case, a big THANK YOU on behalf of all my juniors. They eagerly await the arrival of medical batch. Some worried souls in the final year who might be passing out in 2011 are seriously considering getting a degree extension in case you postpone the implementation to 2012. Please dont postpone it to after 2012 Daruwalla tells me the world is gonna end in 2012 anyway your education ministry hasnt taught us not to believe him.
Whatever the reason, if we needed someone just to tell us superficial ideas read off from American university brochures, we could have made any Tom, Dick and Harry or Shivraj Patil our HRD Minister. Why did we pick a Harvard graduate? And how credible does your degree sound if you cant understand that whatever works in US might not work in India in that exact same format.
I havent seen you in any corruption charges either. I wonder why youre still stuck around in politics?! With that Harvard Law degree, you could be making good money out there. At the worst, you would be letting some criminals escape; at the least you would not be screwing an entire upcoming generation of India. I read somewhere that you cleared the IAS exam and didnt join later, I admired your guts back then but now I so wish you had joined, you could have been an ambassador to some country like Nepal (is it a state of India already or still independent country?) or Afghanistan or some babu looking after the CWG games etc, at least sparing Indias future from your wrath.
They say Youth Power is Indias greatest power. I say let Kapil Sibal be done and well talk. If publicity is the only reason you are doing all this, I would be ashamed of your dumbness and say Rakhi Sawant and Shiney Ahujas maid have better publicity strategies. Go into Bigg Boss for Gods sake! They are casting mentally imbalanced people anyway and I am sure that if Vindu Dara Singh and Rahul Mahajan can get in, you sure will. People will vote for anything, didnt we elect you already?
As much as I would hate to burst your bubble and be responsible for another psychiatrist losing a potential client, let me tell you, that a brand name (IITs or something else) is not the entire story. Good students and the faculty make an institution what it is. Now with your weird policy for IIT entrance, weirder for faculty recruitment, add to the reservation, the standard is bound to get low. Are you aware that more than 80% of the students who get terminated from or get academic backlogs in IITs are from the reserved lot? Oh, you have an innovative solution for that as well, relax the passing criterion for them and give them degrees somehow; after all we have been oppressing them for ages. Let me again introduce you to the reality, companies coming for the recruitment are NOT dumb either. They will start asking for category in recruitment, even if you pump up their GPAs by relaxation criterion and bam!! You have jobless IITians! Now in the market and your beloved foreign countries where you and Anu Malik get most of your innovative, original ideas from, will not see this as the reserved lot, and all this will only degrade the brand name my senior IIT alumni have worked so hard to build.
Ever heard of primary education, and children in rural areas not even having access to it? Passing a Right to Education (RTE) bill and giving a press conference about it can keep you in the media for a week but to actually make some change you have to implement it. Mid-day meals website is selling Viagra under your noses. I am not sure if mid-day meal fall under your domain. No, maybe not; after all, mid-day meals are not an IIT activity. You are just busy looking into which coaching the JEE topper was enrolled with.
By the way, are you also suffering from a short term memory loss? Werent you this guy who said in an interview to Karan Thapar, IITs are precious; I will not interfere with them? Or are we both using different dictionaries to look up the meaning of interfere and precious?
If you ask me, A. Raja, Madhu Koda and Suresh Kalmadi are much better than you. They are just taking away Indias money, not its future. You should be ashamed of yourself after reading the next line, but IIPM students have better sense of right or wrong than you do. And yes, I am saying this despite being fully aware that they are the ones who take admission in IIPM even after reading all the false claims.
I have many more things to say to you, but am keeping it short, considering you might be very busy going though the list of students who qualified JEE to take admission in the 15 (or 16, 17, or 20, or whatever number you increased it to since I started writing this article till I publish it) IITs. Checking which rank holder got which IIT and what department, thinking about launching a CBI enquiry into it. Do that! Because the (self-proclaimed) emerging superpower India needs its best crime investigation agency (CBI) and HRD ministry to do nothing better today. While we are at it, I got a B in a course in my 3rd semester, could you ask CBI to look into it, please pretty please!!
A voice straight from the heart of an IIT Alumnus
