An, another story in The New York Times about the craze in India to get into an I.I.T….
The opening paragraphs:
ANUPAM KUMAR, 17, is the eldest son of a scooter-rickshaw driver. He lives in a three-room house made of bricks and mortar and a hot tin roof, where water rarely comes out of the tap and the electricity is off more than on…….”It’s becoming very important to explore other planets because this planet is becoming too polluted,” he said with deadly seriousness…His mother, Sudha Devi, a savvy woman with a 6th-grade education, cooled him with a palm-frond fan.
His father, Srikrishna Jaiswal, who made it through 10th grade, flashed a bemused smile. “He has high-level aims,” he said.
…Of 198,059 Indians who took the rigorous admissions tests in 2005, 3,890 got in, an acceptance rate of under 2 percent….
My thought was of course that it is a story of a poor boy who has unrealistic ambitions, but, of course, 1 billion people, so you have a whole array of lives to choose from:
[On June 16, sitting at his tutor’s house, Anupam learned the results. He made it into the institutes, with a rank of 2,299. Classes start in mid-July.]
Good for him! Unfortunately, stories like these mask the quantitative reality that 40% of Indians are illiterate (versus 10% of Chinese, even taking into account Communist tendencies toward exaggerating social statistics, which post-socialist India probably shares, it is a big chasm). You can see state-by-state literacy rates if you are curious about variation. I can offer a personal anecdote which I think tangentially relates to this issue of an enormous range in South Asia between bestial destitution and intellectual ambition. I only recently learned that the eminent physicist Satyendra Nath Bose was a lecturer at Dhaka University between 1921-1945. He is of course the gentleman for whom bosons are named after (You’ve probably heard of the “Higgs boson”). Now, I have spent some time on the grounds of Dhaka University as I have or have had many relatives associated with that institution as students, faculty or staff. My earliest memories are of the neighborhoods around the campus, and last spring I took in the buildings, smelled the air and stepped past the wretches curled up outside of its gates. It is frankly unfathomable to me that a man who collaborated with Einstein could have been embedded in environs so permeated with a scarcity of basic human necessities. It is romantic fodder for biographers and newspaper articles, but is a sad commentary that genius that could span continents could affect little change nearby.
Posted by razib at 02:35 AM