The examination as a rite of passage in India and unemployable Engineering Graduates

Failure in middle-class India, in an everyday sense, is best captured as failure in exams. As an astute observer once put it, if agriculture in India is a gamble with the rains, middle-class life in India is a gamble with exams.

The examination as a rite of passage defines failure and success in middle-class Indian society. Entrance exams to various institutions are virtually the central ritual of Indian education, and childhood is devoted to entering one of these institutions. The very epidemic of tutorial colleges and coaching institutions testifies to the fear of failure. I have heard many a student sigh over missing the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) entrance-qualifying mark by 1 percent. The logic of the exam has taken over the definition of failure and success. Ramchandra Gandhi, the distinguished Indian philosopher, once related a story about his uncle introducing three of his distant cousins to each other. The uncle said, "This is Ramu, gold medalist," then turned and said, "This is Murthy, first-class-first." He then paused eloquently and said, "This is Shambhu." The silence that followed was deafening and self-explanatory. Exams-and success or failure in them-define the identity of the Indian middle class. They identify the grammar of failure and achievement.

The examination as a metaphor defines the logic of success and failure. A scientist explained the success and the limits of Indian science in terms of the metaphor of the exam: "The exam," he said, "demands the one correct answer. There is no place for doubt and ambiguity. Indians are successful exam givers. As a result we have become a nation of convergent rather than divergent brains. We love the right answer, whether it is the spelling bee or the science problem." Dissent, difference, and discordance do not quite fit into our picture of science. Another scientist, an astronomer, commenting on our sense of success, said, "Indian scientists succeed as summarizers, never as inventers. We produce the perfect synthesis, the brilliant summary, but never raise the interesting or unorthodox question. Indians were rarely original." Another scientist listening to the conversation told me that "the tragedy of Indian science is that there is no idea of the mistake. Indians produced that immaculate conception of science, a science without mistake. You can read all the annual reports of the Council for Scientific Industrial Research and you will never see a reference to a single mistake."

The recent epidemic of concern about the fact that not one Indian university or research institute ranks among the world's best captures the official sense of failure. President Pranab Mukherjee himself testified to this sense of failure when he mourned the fact that no Indian institute of technology or management qualified for the list of the top 100 institutions in the world. The Indian response to failure is to immediately set up a committee of enquiry, and the spate of committees that followed was an index of the concern about failure in science. Unfortunately, sociology speaks of failure in systemic terms of cause and effect. Our sociology looks at systems. Folklore looks at lifeworlds. A lifeworld has an element of subjectivity, of humor, of ambiguity and irony that make failure something deeply livable. One's evocation of the joys of failure is caught in the very classification of people in terms of exam results. A successful person has always been referred to as a "first-class-first." Mediocre people carry the stigma of "B.A. pass" in terms of the world of exams.