Silk Route

The Great-Indian-Middle-Class-Formula-For-Success, the ruin of many a bright kid in India is a secret formula that many Indian parents hold dear and instill into unsuspecting children right after they’ve learnt to walk, talk and handle basic Calculus, which for Indian kids happens at age three.

It is a multi step program each of which is mandatory to be eligible for the next one:

a) Be a topper in school. Yes, every kid needs to be a topper. Special emphasis is on Math, Science and scoring more than Sarala’s kid even if you can run faster than him. Running means nothing.
b) Score above 90% in your X standard. 89.3 is acceptable as long as you are willing to bury your mother.
c) Get into the respectable Pre-Universities, and even more respectable tuitions. Here you will master the fine art of rote learning; a skill that will be critical for an entire two years of your life; and useless thereafter.
d) Ah, step D. The glowing beacon of pride in this program : Divide yourselves into Doctors and Engineers. As long as you can’t be Amitabh Bachchan, you have to be a doctor or an engineer.
e) (On the Engg stream) Get that campus placement into Infosys. Why are you not learning any puzzles by heart goddamnit, didn’t you learn anything from pre-university? There is always time to learn what Engineering really is about. Our country needs more software engineers, not software engineering!
f) Get “onsite”. America, UK, short term, long term. We don’t care. I did not feed you all these years to see an empty passport. And get one of those green cards, it will be very useful for the next step.
g) Fetch a bride whose parents claim she is convent educated, fair, slim, god-fearing and family oriented on bharatmatrimony.com. Hey, look son, this site is great! It only has girls who are like that. All of them. Wow! They must have a very stringent admission process.
h) Get to work boy. You have nine months. You need a child who has an American passport. Your time starts now.

Ah, how well settled you are. How successful! All you have to do for me to make sure you are, is invite me to America to look after your kids because nannies are very expensive. This is just like alchemy. You start with an Indian and end up with atleast three Americans. It works!! So what if you never *learnt* anything during engineering. So what if your real talent is imitation, not innovation. So what if nothing else gets nurtured or fixed in India except sub standard assembly line engineers who provide cheap labour. So what if you’ll hate how your kid is being brought up. Look at the money son. Look at how much money you are making. It must proportionately increase your happiness. It will son, just don’t think about it too much. Go buy something. Preferably at Walmart. That way we can return it after we are done using it. I will go, I can talk to all the other Indians in that line. It gets boring here sometimes.