I would also like to add – I don’t blame the parents for this either. They are under equal amount of pressure to secure a good future for their kids. Who’d want his / her kid not to be at the top? The aim of every human being is to get prosperous, in the fastest and most convenient way.

Just think of it – the whole world is like a zero sum game, everything just adds up to zero, all the people well off are well off because they have been superior (mainly by luck) in their “performances” at some stage – and all the people suffering are those who have not reached where they should because of being edged out by “performers”.

Frankly, say there were no “competition” to become well off, then everyone would live an equally happy life right? Why should a rich person get more resources than someone else? Purely because of shortage of resources, and the demand always being higher than supply – the prices always suit the people who are richer. And the assumed easiest way to be richer, as of today, seems to be to be educated well.

I would say that is weird, because only a small percentage of those who attempt to get rich by strong education end up being rich. Most people try hard, but fail in that attempt.

It is the very nature of human beings to try and push for greater excellence that drives them to compete, and make things harder for themselves. Just like the prisoner’s dilemma (check wikipedia for what that is, if you aren’t an MBA ), while we all know that we can all choose to “not work so hard” and still live happily IF we all work in unity, we still work harder by the day to beat competition, and so does competition, to make life more difficult for each other!

A simple case of how some things went wrong in India – IT companies found such a good business model of providing services to foreign companies by employing cheap labour in India, they stopped trying to make people more innovative. With a lesser of an innovation mindset, more people started taking the supposed easier option of joining IT Companies, rather than trying to build more industries in India. And it appears so easy (or rather non risky) to get a job in reputed firms that you don’t see the point of risking into your own venture!

The bottom line according to me, is that we need to set up more research centres, we need to incentivize more people to go for research, to start their own businesses, and we need to change our mindset from finding the easy way out and doing the “regular thing”, and atleast try to do something on our own – not everyone’s made for it, but many people who are indeed made for it are staying away from it! One way in which that can be done is by bringing in more Venture Capital – something the leading Indian companies should do regularly now.

I believe that we not only need to update parents with present education scenario and challenges but also tell them about new vistas of job opportunities. Manyatimes parents keep limited options (like doctor or engineer) in front of students. This means that they feel areas like law, fashion design, sports, teaching are insecure for their child. We need to eliminate such notions of them.