Schooling in India was boring and my goal used to be to get away with doing as little work as possible
Jyoti Bachani
Tucked away in my harmonium box was this physics homework notebook from my high school years. I never did any homework beyond the first chapter. Schooling in India was boring and my goal used to be to get away with doing as little work as possible. However, paper was precious. If a notebook had unused pages, it was repurposed. For the next school year, the remaining unused pages would be used as scratch paper and the notebook would become the ‘rough copy’. It would also be used for games like knots and crosses or the ever popular Name-Place-Animal-Thing. This one was repurposed for notes for the few summer music lessons on the harmonium. It brings back memories of my academic journey from then, onwards.
I ended up majoring in physics for my undergraduate, at St. Stephen’s College, despite not doing any homework in high-school. The reason for picking physics was the same, do as little work as I can get away with. Yeah, physics came easily to me. I was admitted to Hindu College first. As I was waiting in the long line to pay my fees, the two people just ahead of me in the queue, were friends, talking amongst themselves, about how St. Stephen’s admissions results were going to be released the following day. I overheard their decision that if they were admitted to St. Stephen’s, they would withdraw from Hindu to go there instead. If someone was prepared to go through the additional hassle of waiting in long lines to pay fees again, it must be because St. Stephen’s was the better college, I thought to myself. Despite being intolerant of waiting in lines, I decided that I too should do the same. That is how accidental was my choice of the College.
Once at the College, the first few weeks were for our seniors to ‘rag’ us in order to impart the appropriate level of snootiness be worthy of the place. Any of the freshers who asked ‘where is the canteen? Hostel?’ or whatever other campus places they needed to be at, were repeatedly given the same standard answers by all the seniors. “The canteen is across the street, the Cafe is here” or “The hostel is across the street, the Residence is here” and so on. Hindu college is literally “across the street” and the intensely competitive rivalry between the two colleges is legendary, and perpetuated with such socialization each year. True Stephanians won’t even say Hindu college, because it’s just ‘the college across the street’, even if you hang out with your best friends who go there.
My mother’s aspiration for me was for me to be a doctor, as she had wanted to be. I am terrified of medical clinics and hospitals to the extent that I avoid seeing a doctor even when I am suffering.
My mother had refused to let me go to Birla Institute of Technology and Science in Pilani (A town in Rajasthan) to be the engineer I wanted to be, despite my getting admitted through a pretty competitive process. Sending a girl away from home to live in a hostel and be an engineer made no sense to her. My mother’s aspiration for me was for me to be a doctor, as she had wanted to be. I am terrified of medical clinics and hospitals to the extent that I avoid seeing a doctor even when I am suffering, preferring to consult my medic-cousins or relying on home remedies. Her later aspiration for me was for me to work with the State Bank of India (SBI). Her logic for this was that SBI has a branch in every village and town, and I could keep my job even if I married someone who transferred anywhere in the country. I did qualify for the probationary officers program of SBI but I turned it down. By then I had done a summer internship at Grindlays ANZ and had a job offer for a full time job on completing my MBA. As part of the final campus placement season at the end of my MBA, I was also very aggressively wooed for an officer’s job by Citibank’s Aditya Puri and Jaitirth Rao, who went to great lengths to explain how their bank was far better than Grindlays, and how I was a fool to settle for that job without considering Citi. I took none of those jobs, choosing to join Tata’s instead, to come abroad. I would return to India to join Citi in less than two years, with them helping me return.
Years later, I finally got to attend the engineering school at Stanford. I can be super patient and stubborn in staying with what I want. At the time, I didn’t know the difference between attending Foothill College or Stanford. Foothill is a local community college that only awards 2 year Associate degrees, just after high school, and from where students can transfer to a four year college to complete their undergraduate degrees. Stanford is a major research university, with 7 different schools, with a world class reputation. My criteria for choosing school was location and since both a located in close proximity, I was happy to go to either. Luckily, even before Internet, these places had systems to prevent stupidity, like mine. Foothill just did not have anything suitable for me to enroll in, so I ended up applying to Berkeley and Stanford. My preferred school was Berkeley, because, there was a Dosa restaurant close to it, while the closest one to Stanford was a forty minute drive. I wasn’t even a foodie but Dosa is soul food, and for a new immigrant, a connection to comfort. Sadly, I didn’t get accepted there, so had to settle for Stanford, which was the best thing in retrospect. Stanford ignited my love of learning. For the first time in my life I was able to freely choose what I wanted to study, explore classes all over campus, do homework and struggle with academic challenges hard enough to put me in my place. Study group friends and I working together could not crack some of the problems, despite hours of wrestling with them. Through the process of experimentation and elimination, I finally found ‘my thing’.
It is a surprise that I ended up as a professor, spending so much of my life in academic settings. A casual remark made by a client back in the day when I worked as a strategy consultant was crucial. I was in Germany, working for Opel, a car company, then recently acquired by General Motors. One of my jobs on that project was to explain Decision Analysis, in brief, to the cross-functional team of twenty five German auto executives, engineers, techies, accountants, designers, marketers, etc. At the end of the day, one of them complimented me by saying that I had done a good job. He said “you can take something complex and make it accessible. You should be a professor”. At the time, I laughed it off, telling him how much I loved my job as a consultant. I thrived on the novelty and challenge of being in new and different situations every few months, I liked working with all the different people I met, and it paid well enough to feel like daylight robbery to me.
A few years later as I became a mother, it made sense to not be on the plane headed to a different country on a weekly basis and not be living out of a carry-on bag in a hotel room, as the life of a strategy consultant demanded. His compliment came back to suggest my new path. It fit, as I still liked doing strategy and if others could travel to me, I would get to stay in one place and raise my son as I wanted to. My son was literally born the week I was supposed to be at the new student orientation, at the London Business School, where I earned my final degree, a PhD.
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Earlier, I had given up my PhD at Stanford, in order to be a dutiful wife who supports her husband’s career. I had enrolled in the program and finished all the required coursework but had yet to start any major research. My ex-husband was graduating from Stanford and had failed to land a job in the US, but found one in Europe. For the first few years of our lives together, I worked as a programmer while he was studying at Stanford. My employer sponsored us for the Green card based on my ‘scarce’ technical skills. I had saved up enough money, thanks to our graduate student life, to be able to afford to buy us a small condo in Fremont or a house in East Palo Alto. I was keen to do that but to him it made no sense. He said he didn’t know where we would end up when he starts his first job. I deferred to his judgement as he was the economist and the one who handled the money, a task I have no appetite for. If we had bought a place then, I could have retired on it, as the appreciation would have amounted to a lot more than any income I have ever earned. However the decision to not buy a home back then, was when I decided to give away the accumulated savings to Stanford. I had learned all I cared to about programming and was getting bored with it by then. Even though I had an MBA from India, back in the day there was no recognition of that degree by the US employers. India was far away before the internet brought it closer. It was common to be told ‘your English is so good’ by those who interviewed you and held positions of power within local companies, but wouldn’t know where Delhi was on the map.
I was enrolled in the PhD program at Stanford, when my then husband insisted on taking his first job ever, in Europe. I preferred that he wait for a job locally and in the meantime take whatever was available, say teach at Foothill or take a corporate job. His criteria was to be at a branded school. I remain suspicious of branding from my MBA marketing classes about how brands are mostly manipulative. He was clear and I felt I had to be supportive, because that was the implicit social conditioning of my upbringing.
A circle of sharing for Black Lives Matter had an unprecedented 165 colleagues joining one zoom call, just to listen to each other. I still don’t have words for it but was moved by the ‘I can’t breathe’ song I shared.
My own aspirations were rather modest, the most important one being to be a stay-at-home mom. I used to miss my working mom when I was a kid. I had my first job while in high-school, teaching middle schoolers at a local tuition center. I was happy that my husband was finally going to work and I could take ‘a job to keep me busy’. Career was not a word in my vocabulary, but working is in my blood. He promised that we would come back from Europe in a year, and Stanford does allow a year’s leave of absence from the PhD program. As I had already completed the required courses for it, I decided to take the Master’s degree for the fun of a graduation. I love celebrations. The year in Europe turned into longer so I was never able to return to the PhD program at Stanford. Part of me was also intimidated by the sheer amount of hard work required. The Masters there was hard earned, in sharp contrast to the ‘easy’ though highly competitive MBA from India. In India, the education system is exam-driven and I knew how ace the exams, without letting that ‘educate’ me in any way. Stanford was different. At Stanford, all exams were open book, with no proctoring, and an honor system based on trust. I deliver best and engage well when I am trusted, so it worked for me. Plus, there was freedom to take courses as varied as Democracy, Power, Linear Algebra, Probability Theory, Ethics of Decision Analysis, Voluntary Social Systems, or German and history, all still valid for a degree from the engineering school.
It’s only in this pandemic that for the first time I realize how teaching essential work is. We have been discussing ‘Return to Campus’ for the fall semester. The students want to have the college experience and the return to normalcy. The administrators have declared that we will be open even as we figure out how we will deliver on the county health guidelines. For now, one day at a time, is the best way to get through. A circle of sharing for Black Lives Matter had an unprecedented 165 colleagues joining one zoom call, just to listen to each other. Moving to see how it impacts different folks and their unique responses. I still don’t have words for it but was moved by the ‘I can’t breathe’ song I shared. College is a microcosm of the world outside and a lot more is going on than I can keep pace with.
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Dr. Jyoti Bachani is an Associate Professor of Strategy and Innovation at Saint Mary’s College of California. She is a former Fulbright Senior Research Scholar, with degrees from London Business School, UK, Stanford, USA, and St. Stephen’s College, India. She translates Hindi poems, and has edited a poetry anthology called “The Memory Book of the Poetry of Diaspora in Silicon Valley.”
Courtesy: Medium (Posted on June 9, 2020)
