Engineered

It is one of those precious weekends where you can actually not feel guilty about being eternally lazy. Not to say that the good-ness of a weekend is determined by the stupor it can induce, it just feels nice when you don’t have to put your mind to impending quizzes, submissions or presentations. They can all wait for another day.

But the purpose of the blog is hardly that. It arose out of a random thought a few days back – the eternal debate of how grade focused we have become. Become, have we? I asked myself. I would rather be more inclined to believe that we always grew up on that. Always egged on by parents and wellwishers to beat the nearest competitor, to score more marks than anyone else in the class. We were made to believe that eternal glory rested in the reportcard, and life depended on those little digits in red in your marksheet.

It’s a topic which has been beaten to death many times over, but what put my thought back into it was the first concern that came to my mind as we started getting the final marks for each of the term II subjects. Would I get an A in this course? How many people would be above me? What is so-and-so’s total? And then I suddenly checked myself. I was shocked by my own narrow-mindedness. My parochial outlook towards a pursuit as pristine as academic (yeah, I belong to the old generation that way) left me very disappointed. In myself.

And as someone reminded me later, “all you PGPs seem to care about is grades.” “Engineers”, I corrected her, “we have always been that way.” Not that I was very proud of what I said, but I kind of hoped that she wouldn’t generalize the engineer’s malaise to those of us who haven’t emerged through four years of a cauldron of the engineering zero-sum game, where someone’s good grades means someone else’s bad ones. “And since grades seem to matter,” she finished, “congrats on the good **** grade.” I sensed the sarcasm but preferred not to say anything. When you know in your heart that you are guilty, it is impossible to convince yourself, or anyone, otherwise.

Even during those last days at IITK, during those endless discussions on the rainy late April days, we used to reflect on this, and we concluded that this is probably the saddest part of learning. We knew that we were all good, but to actually feel that condescending twinge of success because you managed to present your exam paper better than others – I guess our education failed us there. Or did we fail our education system?

I had decided back then that when I go into further studies, I would do it for the learning and not any more for the grades. But I haven’t managed to distinguish myself, either in grades or in the pursuit, so it turns out that everything is back to usual. It is the same race we all run, chasing those elusive alphabets and numbers, and any victory is at the cost of someone’s loss.

Sad as it is, I am now engineered that way.