organizers last year got like the CEO of JP Morgan and the police commissioner and this year they got a massive goofball in me however now that I'm here I'm going to tell you about the world's most interesting educational story cool before I start I want to play a game all right what I'm going to do is I'm going to take you through a bunch of SE seemingly random Indian celebrities and I want you to tell me what all of them have in common can we do this ma'am can we super let's do it this uh
young and I must admit extremely Charming Bollywood actress this veteran politician this acclaimed Economist and this emerging young cricketer anyone oh lovely he's right they're all Engineers by educ ation cool right in fact let me share with you some fascinating Insight ever since our independence in 1947 we produced zero Nobel laits and SS the US has 100 plus 26 Olympic medals that's it just 26 Olympic medals and China produced 100 in the 2008 games alone however however there is something we produce more than the US and China combined anyone's guess right number of Engineers now
who am I and why and how do I know so look he's laughing he's he's an engineer himself so who am I and why and how do I know so much about this story so so I spent my initial years of growing in Saudi Arabia right and then my parents packed me back to Bombay and Li of better education and in school I made two big mistakes do you want to know what those mistakes are yeah okay so the first mistake of my life was that I was good at studies okay the second mistake of
my life was I was particularly good at math now in India when you commit these two mistakes you end up committing a third Mistake by default which is you get into engineering which is exactly what I did now um in engineering life I I I kind of realized early on it wasn't quite my thing right so I founded this t-shirt startup in case you can't recognize me that's that's me without all the beard so I found this t-shirt startup to vent my frustration and uh for which I was listed as one of India's top student
entrepreneurs later on I moved to the city of Bangalore where I spent a solid 2 years essentially selling chai no here's the thing about Bangalore all right Bangalore is full of Engineers okay and they are not just Engineers they are Engineers frustrated with their lives no it's not funny so one in every 20 it employees uh in Bangalore contemplate suicide at some point of his life it's crazy right now what happened next is I quit my job because I was curious like how did such a diverse country like USS get so obsessed with one thing
producing engineers and looked like nobody before me tried answering so I quit my job and then something magical happened some 300 people across the globe contributed 14,000 Australian dollars in a record setting crowdfunding campaign to help me the goofball compile a book okay so over the next two years I found out about a lot of interesting people places and events that help shaped what I call one of India's greatest obsessions now it's going to be difficult for me to take you through like two years of research in a couple of minutes right so what I'm
going to do is going to take you through some of these people some of these places and some of these events okay are you ready can we start okay so the first person I'm going to tell you about is this very very interesting character who goes by the name Thomas babington mcau now mcau was a born genius he had an estimated IQ of like what 180 to 190 he had the tremendous ability to learn any language within a fortnite okay so the bridge told him dude like you know India is one of our newer colonies
and one of our more important colonies why don't you go there and you know help figure few things for us so he said India there is no way I'm going to India so then the bridge said dude can you please do this for us so moli didn't have a lot of friends okay and he was dearly attached to his sisters so he pleaded with a certain Hannah saying that Hannah these guys want me to go to India can you please come I don't want to go alone so Hannah said and I quote I see India
only as a country of Filth and disease so this is what the bridge did next they said okay fine we'll give you £10,000 which in today's time translate to half a million pound now face it if somebody gave me half a million pound right now I'd be to go to North Korea right so uh so this guy uh forcibly got his sister to India and he roughly spent four years in India did not bother learning a single Indian language went back to the Britain Parliament okay and on 2nd of February 1835 made a very momentous
speech which I'm not going to quote entirely but I'm just going to pick up one line which kind of summarizes the spirit of the entire speech moli said and I quote we need to teach Indians English if we do not teach them English they are going to waste their youth touching a cow's ass this is what he said and taada that's how English education came to India now what does English education have to do with the life of India's Engineers right couple of things one a vast majority of India's Engineers are actually unemployable do you
know why anyone from the industry they probably know why what what's lacking the most anyone lovely yeah close enough poor so they don't call it that they call it poor communication skills right poor communication skills in Endo for you know poor English and come on English isn't a natural language right it's an acquired language so English became a class in India it didn't just become a language secondly this very important it Revolution to which so many of Indian Engineers owe Our Lives to and also our first foreign trip to happened in India and not in
China you know why because of our familiarity with English just because we were acquainted with English could be you know able to code easily and also talk to our clients in Europe and America cool right now now that I mentioned America let's discuss the Indian Engineers tremendous success story in the US tech industry so beat this right two of the biggest Tech Giants in the world are today run by Indian engineers and you know they actually owe their life to a very specific moment in history that moment is actually as specific as this 4th of
October 1957 7:28 p.m. okay so what happened on 4th of October 1957 7:28 p.m. is the Soviets launched the first human satellite in space the Sputnik and the US lost lost its mind you know the US and Russia always have had this Indian student type uh have been like two Indian students right always want to do better than each other so so so the Americans lost their man and they said dude we need to do something man so they changed their entire immigration policy and they invited the best of scientists the best of doctors and
the best of Engineers from across the globe now Engineers back in India were pretty brainy are rather still pretty brainy i' would say and they were frustrated with India's socialist regime back then because it didn't allow them to do much the government controlled practically everything so they had two options okay one was to go with a best friend forever BFF as they say these days BFF Russia ought to go to America with whom we didn't have the best of relations at least back then but what happened was something curious most Engineers ditched their best friends
Russia and all went to most of them went to America instead can anyone tell me why anyone no M English because we were comfortable speaking in English like the Americans did all all of them moved to America and rest his history right the earliest bunch of Engineers who went to America did extremely well not just for themselves but also for America and then paved the way for future Engineers to come from India so much so that kids these days actually take up engineering so that they can go to the US that's the easiest ticket to
the US right in fact you won't believe this and I'm not exaggerating okay there are communities in South India there are communities in South India that educate their sons in engineering send them to the US just so that they can command high do because Us return has a lot of command supposedly in their Community a lot of doy right now moving from the US coming back to India and to my favorite three-letter word the iits now see now if you're Indian I'm not going to bother uh you know introducing the I to you but what
I'm going to tell you instead is how America an American news broadcaster once introduced the iits to its uh uh you know viewers in America and listen to this carefully okay listen to it carefully it said and I'm quoting we import oil from Saudi Arabia cars from Japan television from Korea and whiskey from Scotland so what do we import from India we import people some really really smart people and all these people seem to share a common credential they are all graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology or the iits as their known now when
us Compares something to oil you know it has to be valuable right and in fact it's not just valuable to them valuable to our society to the extent that once this affluent woman in Deli accompanied by her equally affluent father took her son to the then director of of I Delhi and uh requesting for an admission of course so now the father got slightly embarrassed so he left the room the father left the room and and then the director saw this kid's uh report card and he said I'm sorry ma'am I can't get your kid
into the iats however I can get him into the Imperial College of London which he eventually did now you know what's fascinating about the story the characters involved does anyone want to take a guess as to who the characters are I'll tell you Indira Gandhi Pandit Neu and Rajiv Gandhi the most powerful family in the country can be denied admission into the iits now where I'm coming from is uh what happened gradually that you know in a society that reaks of corruption in everyday life the iits became one of those very few meritorious institutions for
the Indian middle class you know for their social upliftment that is one second what also happened is for the longest time the iits were essentially iits or other engineering colleges were essentially the only institutes which offered quality education of any kind right So eventually you know the Indian middle class decided to put their kids into the iits or take up other engineering courses now uh if something Bollywood has taught me okay is that every great Obsession has an equally fascinating Chase be it women or be it engineering so my journey took me to a lot
of these places of which I'm going to tell you about two two very interesting places the first one is the city of Hyderabad so these images that you see are from one of the student hostels I managed to get rare access to I'll tell you why rare because these kids are disconnected absolutely disconnected from the outside world I'm not kidding if the aliens were to invade us right now they would be the last people to know guys and uh girls aren't allowed to talk to each other they suspended they're caught talking right the sole purpose
of their life is to study and get through a good engineering College in fact you won't believe this and it's you know the funniest part is whatever I'm saying may sound funny and that's the funniest part this guy left all his belongings and ran for his life out of the campus nobody knows where he went nobody knows what he did he just ran out of this madness seriously now from uh uh Hyderabad let's go up north to this interesting city called kpur okay now in kanpur there is this small locality that's called coaching Mandi because
there are so many coaching classes there so the locals call it coaching Mandi so then I got talking to a local panala and I said uh you know can you tell me the origins of this place and history and how did it start so he told me there was this old Professor who started coaching kids into engineering colleges and graduate everyone followed and it became like a big business I'm like cool so tell him where can I you know see the old man he said and I quote and and for these up guys Mur a
murdera it's like one of those things right that that keep happening in fact not just that uh so this place is actually uh you know a hot poot for gang wars between coaching professors who shoot each other dead out of rivalry right just kidnap and shoot them dead but this isn't really the sort of death that worries me the most let me tell you what does now this young girl could you know like most teenagers have had her share of man crushes listen to her whatever music could have been part of this audience today or
seen this video later on YouTube but the sad part is she's no more right and she's no more only because she didn't want to become an engineer and she isn't really alone India has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the world 20 kids kill themselves every day mostly due to academic pressure in fact God Knows by the time my talk is over some kid somewhere must try you know killing himself or killing herself crazy Society we live in right anyway let's get out of this Gloom and uh I'll show you one of my
more relatable illust ations from the book so here you see a young boy called moan zakaral who back in 2003 goes to his parents and tell them tell them that Mom Dad you have this fantastic idea I want to create something called as a social network and I think it's going to change the world obviously Indian parents think that he's possessed probably by a ghost get a hav done get him into an engineering college and today moan zakaral is probably a mid-level it manager contemplating suicide in Bangalore but but you know every story has a
villain no every story has a villain so I was trying to find out the biggest villain of my story and I searched for really long and guess where I found it right behind me with a cute and innocent little face you know what that is are schools now Indian schools no matter how you look at it is easily the biggest human resource tragedy in the world I can assure you but the biggest tragedy actually lies in its design right now if you look at it how did our schools come into being no our schools are
actually more than 400 years old so the Empire 400 years ago basically needed three kinds of people right they needed clerks to manage their territories military guys to protect their territories and they needed Factory workers because industrial revolution had just started and what are the kind of skill set that these Factory workers or these three kind of people require no creativity these are required skills no creativity listen into instructions right so it is actually no coincidence that our schools are model on a factory like exactly how a factory is modeled right right from if I
can give you analogy right from The Ting Ting of the Bell right in the factories to symbolize that you know it's lunch you all can go get out of factory and go and eat your food to the grouping of kids it's based on the age and not the learning ability test and the point of a test is not to assess a kid's strength and weakness but to actually certify him as okay or fail just like in factories now it's clear if if we don't really fix our schools India has the largest student base in the
world and if you don't fix our schools all these kids are going to look the same boring dull and uninspiring right now unless we fix our schools in India you will always become an engineer first and then decide what to do with your life and with all the chaos tragedy death blood the the life of India's Engineers will continue to remain the world's most interesting educational story thank you so much