NASSCOM McKinsey say 75% engineering graduates are unemployable. You come across Computer Science graduates who wouldn’t be able to name more than one operating system. You have engineering graduates armed with advanced diplomas in C++ unable to write a half decent program. Not just that, the management, principals, directors and faculty members of several engineering colleges prophetically proclaim, “aadhe bachchon ka to bhagwan bhi bhala nahin kar sakta”.

It’s not that the powers that be do not realize the problem. You have a plethora of experts proclaiming unemployability to be a bigger problem than unemployment. You have the Central government rolling out a massive skill development program. The irony of it all is that the engineering and management colleges supposed to churn out professionals are actually getting reduced to degree vending machines producing largely good for nothing engineers.

The malaise is deep rooted. The government having pulled out of higher education, the doors are wide ajar for private players. Too many people having too little to do with education are now owners of engineering and management colleges. You have brick kiln owners, thekedars, zamindars, netas and all and sundry owning professional colleges. Not that I have anything against vernacular businessmen and strongmen, bahubalis, owning colleges – just that the dedication to academic pursuits falls by the wayside when the only obsession is to recover the investments made and create a cash generating machine for generations to come.

The quality of faculty, the quality of management get superseded by the considerations of how can the AICTE requirements be met at minimum cost.

The arrangement works for everybody. People in power understand the trend that BTech is going to be the next BA/BSc. Only the guys who absolutely cannot afford to pay the fee of technical universities even through loans or stretching their finances will be the ones settling for less than a BTech. The demand is going to explode. All you need is a couple of colleges and the financial security of your kin is secured for the next 100 years.

Unless something gives or unless something earth shattering happens, we are staring at no less than a crisis where we churn out maximum number of engineers and managers who could only be employed as glorified clerks.

The problem of unemployability is far more severe than we currently assume. The only hope is for the customers, the students and parents, to wake up to this reality and start demanding more usable curriculum and opportunities for professional development. The closer we inch towards total capitalism, the more active, we’ll need the customer to be.

It gives me great pleasure to share that eTutelage has been nominated in TATA NEN Hottest Startups Awards, link here, but more than that, the support of our friends and well wishers has been overwhelming.

We are getting good wishes and congratulatory messages from far off friends, peers, old classmates, friends of friends, eTutelage team mates, site visitors and customers. It is an overwhelming feeling and we are savoring every moment of it – more so because entrepreneurship can be painfully lonely at times.

Thanks everyone for your support. It means a lot to us all and it gives us the strength and conviction to plough along when the going gets tough.

For those of you who haven’t already voted, voting is on, you can either go online and vote or send HOT 374 to 56767 through your mobile phones.

A different nature of post but it’s tough to continue remaining silent.

Another round of serial blasts in Delhi – human blood and flesh on the streets, severed limbs, wailing women. Strong condemnation from the PM and the powers that be. “It’s a dastardly act”, yeah, so insightful. “The perpetrators will not be spared”, yeah right. Can we ask Mr Prime Minister which jail are the perpetrators of the earlier bomb blasts being punished in.

The pattern is so predictable, it’s sickening. People die, PM whimpers a condemnation and then everything goes back to normal. Till we have another set of serial blasts.

And then, to add insult to the injury, they talk about the “Spirit of Delhi (or Mumbai or Ahmedabad or Bangalore or Jaipur)”. The truth of the spirit is that people have no choice but to resume their normal activities to earn their livelihood, get by and complete their share of their personal and professional obligations, duties and responsibilities. They have no other option. If I have a business meeting in Cannaught Place, I have to go there, knowing fully well that if the terrorists have decided it to be the day of mayhem, I could be one of the casualties. It’s not spirit, it’s helplessness.

Whether you like Bush’s policies or not, whether you like America or not, you have to agree that the cavemen have not been able to do anything on American soil ever since 9/11. More than a couple lessons to be learnt on how to tackle homeland security.

Compare this with India, we are probably the only country which does not have an anti terror law despite being one of the top most victims of terrorism. Not just that, the government fiercely opposes any proposal to bring in any such laws – the center’s refusal to ok Gujarat anti terror law a very recent example.

Several prominent members of the PM’s cabinet actively support the organization everybody knows to be behind these acts of terror, “It’s a cultural organization”. Correct. Now will you, Mr Minister, care enough to explain what kind of culture espouses exploding bombs in crowded places? I guess not because people who get killed and will get killed in the blasts to come will never be of your kin.

The nuclear deal is done. The surging economy, the India miracle, superpower by 2020 – a whole lot of you-know-what. No one is going to respect us as a country if we cannot protect our people, if we continue being a corpse collector whether it is the embassy in Kabul or markets in Delhi or temples in Jaipur. We can never be a a super power as long as it is so ridiculously easy to kill us.

Another word often bandied about whenever these blasts happen is “the people’s resilience”. Resilience, my friend, is to get up when hit and reply in the same coin. Resilience is not getting hit again and again and wiping the blood only to be bloodied again. Resilience is not picking one tooth from the road only to have another one punched out.

Platitudes don’t help Mr Singh, action does. Tough action.

Real people are dying here. Families are being destroyed. Kids’ futures are being ruined. Are you going to wait till eternity to do something apart from throwing banalities? Or is it that our worst fears are true, these deaths don’t matter to you, these people don’t count?

Abhinav Bindra won the first ever individual Olympic gold. Oh yes, I missed to suffix the self aggrandizing “for India”, especially, after the magnanimous chest thumping by all and sundry from the Indian sports establishment and plentiful rewards by state governments by dime a dozen. That Abhinav would probably never travel in a train what with a 200 Cr (INR 2 billion) Hotel gift from his dad has no relevance for Lalu who declared a lifetime free pass to him on Indian Railways, and neither does the fact that there could be a lot of sporting talent in the villages of North Bihar which, unfortunately gets used up in ensuring daily survival amidst perennial floods and dilapidated infrastructure.

Union Sports Minister MS Gill grandly congratulated himself and every Indian. Nice thoughts sir. Now, can we also talk about weight lifter Monika Devi who was stopped from boarding the flight to Beijing just hours before citing a failed drug test after which she was cleared. All through the day the athlete kept insisting on TV channels that it was some foul play by some IOA officials who did not want her to go. She was duly cleared of the dope charges but the bus, or rather, the plane had already left. Even if there was no foul play, it does throw a fair amount of light on the state of affairs in Indian sports establishment. Even if it was a mistake, it was one which ruined an athlete’s sporting career – even if it was inadvertent, the accountability should be fixed and the guilty be brought to book. Accountability, now did it not vanish long back along with the dodo?

Abhinav has done all of us proud. The nation of a billion finally got an Olympic gold, individual. It’s a moment of glory which needs to be savored. But the kind of self-congratulation we saw two days back – it is kind of obscene.

In some sense, Abhinav’s success is a lot like the successes of other Indians in several other fields. In almost all the cases, it is the individual who wins, not because of the system but despite it. Be it sports, be it technology, or even education, only those Indians succeed who can fight it through the system. In that sense, every Indian victory is actually an individual victory.

However, it’s not all dark and gloomy. These individual victories will give us the faith that we can win and also the momentum to all ambitious Indians striving out in their chosen fields. Someday, when we have had a critical mass of individual victories, may be, we will set out setting up a system which actively assists the pursuit of victory and not just goes berserk in self-glory whenever some isolated strong willed person imbued with immense talent and loaded with tremendous grit carves out a rare triumph through his own sweat and blood.

Congratulations Abhinav. You did all of us proud.

Actually, the India bit is a tad unnecessary. Test prep for a global test like GMAT has to be the same, Timbuktoo or Tinsukia.

Coming back to the question, what’s the best way to prepare yourself for the desired high score (cliched, I know – no one wants a low score !!!) in GMAT. For that matter, what is the best way to teach yourself anything new be it horse riding, bodybuilding, a new language or even how to write a blog. Simple, go to someone who is an expert and ask him to be your guiding angel for a while.  Imagine learning bicep-building from Arnold or business building from Bill Gates or Larry Page or Richard Branson, imagine learning basketball from Michael Jordan or acting from Al Pacino.

Yes, it’s not going to happen, not at least to the mere mortals unless you happen to be born into one of these families and, then by some strange coincidence, you too take a liking to the same field of endeavor.

Let’s now come back to the relatively less ambitious task of scoring a perfect 800 in GMAT. The best bet would be to catch hold of a guy who is an expert; pray, cajole or somehow convince him to be your guiding angel (try, for instance, making him an offer he can’t refuse !!!) and then follow exactly as he says.

The idea is to seek guidance from an expert who also has the time and inclination to help you understand your own unique combination of skills and attitudes which make you pre-disposed towards a certain score and helps you work on those improvement areas, again unique to you, which can result in the maximum improvement in the score with minimum time and effort investments.

As long as the Perfect Test Prep engine (as discussed in the previous posts) does not attain a high level of maturity, plain old guru-disciple model is the best bet.

Yes, find yourself a personal guru.

If you cannot, do something that approximates the classical guru-disciple dynamics as closely as possible.