What did MU teach you?

The other day I was on the Intercity Express back home to Thane (Hurray for Fridays!). Window Seat, as always, so I can watch the delightful sights of Lonavala and Khandala and exercise my memory cells trying to recall the stations from Pune to Thane in order. A window seat also means two things, bad and good – one, you smell like the Indian Railways – the odour only a long-distance traveller by Indian Railways will be familiar with, and two, you are oblivious to the chaos around you inside the compartment. Perhaps I will write about that too, sometime.

But that evening, one voice pierced my bubble of solitude – a loud, know-it-all, too-clear voice. You know, the kind with a bloated sense of self-esteem. I couldn’t see, but the disembodied voice matched the stereotype of a 20-to-24-year-old male. He was lecturing a family who (by a terrible error in judgement) had asked him his opinion of doing Engineering from Mumbai University. Presumably Munna/Chutki had just finished 12th and was thinking of an engineering education.

“… yes yes, Vivekanand is good, but only for Computers and IT – don’t even touch the other courses… Somaiya? Hmm – ok-ok, maybe the Computers course is passable. But the college infrastructure is very bad, I tell you! So don’t take chances, because infrastructure tells you so much about the quality of the faculty and the esteem that students hold it in!” As a Somaiya alumnus, my first instinct was to locate this individual and splatter my veg cutlet on his face. But veg cutlet is one of Indian Railways’ few redeeming features, so I kept myself in check and listened to more pearls of wisdom that filled the compartment.

“… Engineering is no joke! You must be very clear about what you want from life! Don’t take up Mechanical when your inner self is an Electronics Engineer! Ask yourself a dozen times about your real goal in life! Engineering will give you deep a technical background….”

“Eh, what?” I asked myself. I replayed the conversations I had heard for so many weeks in the monsoon of 2000, Admission Time for me. Exchanged between anxious parents, students, sagacious seniors, wily officials, these snippets of conversations testify admission-time is a mad mad world.

“Vivekanand IT course is HOT this year!”

“There is a trend for electronics over the past year!”

“Keep at least three backup colleges!”

“SP College gives full marks for practicals – always! ‘Go’ for such colleges.”

“College is always more important than the course!”

“Course is always more important than the college!”

“College and course – both are equally important!”

“There is a rumor that Datta Meghe will ‘become’ A-grade institution! Take it aankh-band-karke!”

“Take any college you get now! Thursday the courts will decide to have another fresh round most probably; you will get into Thadomal Mechanical then!”

“Me? I’m applying for both Engineering and Medical. Whichever declares results first, I will take!”

I’d love to hear other gems that you’ve come across, dear reader-from-Mumbai-U. But you get the idea. This is the kind of rational thinking and deliberation that goes on among the student community and their parents during admission. And I wonder if the tens of thousands of engineering students of Mumbai U will find out what they want to do in life until they’re 30, have a family, kids, a sucky job, loans, insurance premia and bills to pay. Maybe realization will strike in a local train with five shoes on your shoes, in an overcrowded BEST bus under someone’s underarm, or at home staring at one of those bills I talked about, wherever you may be, but not before 30. So how the hell are you going to find out what engineer my “inner self” is at 17?

Mumbai U engineering is an underworld in itself. There are “tips and tricks” to survive. There are “means” to get ahead. There are “things” that can happen that are beyond your control. There are “people” to know. Every student who goes to the US for Graduate School, invariably shoots off multiple emails in his/her first month, about how “different” and “sahi” and “great” the “education system” is there, that “Rahul, you cannot even imagine”, and that “Rahul, you should have been here, yaar!” (Referring to the time I gave up three top-20 Univ M.S./Ph.D admits and chose to stay in India).

They’re right, after all. There is no “external examiner” who comes to conduct your vivas at the end of the semester seeking bloody revenge, because your professor went to the other college and failed a dozen students for the heck of it. Or a semester paper where 60% of the questions may be “out of syllabus”. Or a student may fail in all subjects for two, three successive semsters and still make it to the next year. Or assignments are routinely written by one student and replicated, xerox-like, by the other 100 students: 12 assignments each for 6 subjects each twice a year each for 4 years. Or a senior may graduate and return a month later to teach the final year students, one year his/her junior. Or professors insist on students writing the entire program code (often spanning hundreds of lines) *by hand* in their journals. Or…. I wonder if a group of brave students with photographic memories could come together and write a book like “Inside Mumbai University BE – The Real Story” or similar. Pulitzer and Nobel guaranteed. The list of atrocities committed in Mumbai U are among the worst kept secrets in the city – everyone knows about it, no one talks about it.

You’d expect people who’ve had an education like this to be hopelessly maladjusted towards life post-Engineering. How could such dunderheads ever have any hint of technical knowledge? How could they ever compete and become a success in Corporate India? Why wouldn’t half of them join the actual Mumbai underworld in sheer frustration?

But you know the truth? Mumbai U ranks just behind the IITs and in front of a few NITs in terms of perceived value in India (of course, great emphasis on “perceived”). Mumbai U Engineering grads have gone on to become undisputed successes in Industry – and the West. They’ve managed admission to the best US schools, have studied at the IIMs, risen up to high positions, managerial and technical, in large organizations, have founded startups and made tons of money. How?! What have they learnt from their Engineering days? What gives them a shot at survival, much less an edge over others?

Maybe the entire environment in Mumbai University is the World in miniature. Think about it: in the World, people with positions of great responsibility are more often than not stupid. (The Dilbert principle – people are moved to the position where they can cause least damage). That how things are in MU. It’s the people who’re able to manipulate these unfortunately powerful gentlemen, who “get ahead”.

Get maximum work done in minimum time. Results matter, no matter how you get them. That’s Corporate India/West for you. Is it any different from the mass copying for assignments? Every student joins multiple classes for every subject, and turns that subject into a well-rehearsed, highly-optimized play of questions and answers. What does that teach us? Playing the “system” so well, even the “system” cannot beat us. Ditto for Life.

We don’t have the kind of lab equipment that the IITs have. The majority of the staff would fail an intelligence test that the cockroach behind my washbasin could pass. (btw, cockroaches are supposed to be very smart, so it isn’t as sarcastic as you think). We have a syllabus that is changed every five years (or is it ten?). This, even for a fast-changing domain like Computer Science. We learn to put up with this. Those of us who eventually garner technical knowledge, do it on our own, without having things spoonfed to us via a textbook, or even being motivated via a splendid set of lectures from an inspired teacher.

Here’s a joke from the Readers’ Digest from years ago: What is the essential difference between a scientist and an engineer? The scientist was to know How Things Work; the engineer just wants to get the Damn Thing to Work! And that’s what we do, par excellence.

Because MU imitates life, there is no real line that divides the “World” and “College”, in that there is no sense of college being a “protected” environment. DJ from Rang De Basanti said, “College ke andar hum zindagi ko nachaate hain , aur college ke bahar zindagi humko nachaati hai”. Nah. Not true for us MU-ites. Hamara Zindagi se mukabla college mein hi shuru hota hai.

Flip side? Zero Innovation potential. The chances of a Mumbai U passout coming out with a pathbreaking product, process, startup or the like, is very low when you compare him/her with an IITian. Beat the system, get ahead is the mantra we’ve been programmed with. The vast majority of jobs demand just that. That’s where MU-ites score.

And that’s why the gentleman in the Intercity Express got it all wrong!