Educate the educators:

As a teenager about to embark on higher education, one looks to institutions like IITs and NITs to give a good foundation. The 12th standard or 2nd P.U is a busy time. With a child trying to enter a professional course we have started buying more newspapers so that we could look at the notifications from the Institutes intimating about availability of admission forms. Very few institutions publish such information prominently. One have nevertheless obtains these forms because of word of mouth or some such form of communication. God bless the first person who accidentally stumbled on the fact that the forms were available!!

A partially online registration process is available for AIEEE, but not for the elite IITs.
Having gone through all the forms now, we find that each form requires a different size and format of photograph (one even insists that the photograph be black-and-white only). The print version of the form for AIEEE has 3 pages devoted to listing the places where you can get the form which we already hold in hand!! This is a sheer waste of paper.

If this is the first exposure to higher institutions of learning, can we expect people to want any elegant process? They start with cumbersome procedures and grow in that atmosphere. It is very likely that user friendliness or customer service is not etched in their minds. After all, they have received a shoddy deal when they were customers.

Having become a graduate, a common aspiration is to enter the IIMs or some reputed management institute. If you had written the CAT in 2005, you would have gone through the agony of writing it twice. In 2006, people who did not know the right answers to begin with would have graded you.

I sometimes wonder if a formal management education is at all useful except for fixing that halo around your head. I have learnt many nuances of business from Balu, my neighbourhood Bhelpuri vendor who also has interests in the Idli business and sugar juice venture and can give me hands on business lessons. What is more his succession plan is already in place.

Hope 2009 brings in more cheer and useful learnings. Happy New year to all of you.