An open letter to the IIT Graduates

http://www.sachingupta.co/2012/11/an-open-letter-to-iit-graduates.html

by saching90 • 13 years ago

56 41 13 years ago

roasm• 13 years ago

While I'm not an IIT alum, this call to arms is relevant for all of us, the readers of HN. We are (grossly generalizing here) a fortunate group with the choice that we can make our communities better with our work.

aviraldg• 13 years ago

I've read hundreds of essays about this, and India's "brain drain" and written several myself. What is common to all of them is that they forget to take into account the background of most IIT grads - middle class and lower middle class. So, it's way more important for them to get high-paying jobs and to help their families out, than to stay in India and help improve it. That will happen, with time, as the standard of living keeps increasing and the same financial pressure doesn't apply to new IIT grads.

manojlds• 13 years ago

Only thing I don't agree is the timeframe. This hasn't been happening for the last few years alone. It's been the case for over a decade at least.

mahoganyslide• 13 years ago

I'm a first generation Indian American (born and raised in the US), but this still felt like a call to arms to me personally, right in the gut. As I'm now entering a stage in life where I've really started to ponder the significance of family and lineage, I can't deny that there's a reason behind why I was blessed to have been born in the US: my parents left a life of few means for a foreign country in order to provide for their family members back home. I wouldn't be typing these words if it weren't for their struggles. It's a little odd that, while proudly bearing the "Indian American" label and caring very deeply about the US, I don't give much thought to the very serious issues India is facing right now.

Generationally speaking, I'm not even that far removed from India. Maybe I have an existential debt to pay? Regardless, this open letter reaffirmed a notion that has been lingering in the back of my mind for some time: the big problems, the ones truly worth fighting for, can only really be found in places less fortunate. The $64,000 question is whether or not I can cultivate the necessary courage.

On another note: the letter also casts an interesting light on the role of elite institutions, or on anyone in a position of power really.

kercker• 13 years ago

Some problems mentioned in this article also exist in China. Many young Chinese complain about the society, but do nothing to change that situation. I think a letter like this should be sent to the graduates of every universities, not just prestigious ones like IIT in India, or Tsinghua in China. Because history is not made by some elites, history is created by people of all ranks.

seanmcdirmid2• 13 years ago

Then let's not forget Beijing University class of '89...

mayanksinghal• 13 years ago

Could you elaborate a little more, I am curious!

quanticle• 13 years ago

This is a lovely essay, with some heartwarming sentiment, but at its core, it is misguided. He fails to ask, "Why are IIT grads so certain that they'll find better jobs outside of India than they will in India?" And the answer is twofold. First, the corruption and bureaucracy of the Indian government makes it very difficult for entrepreneurs to get new businesses off the ground. Second, India, like many other Asian countries exerts social pressure against non-conformity and risk taking, both of which are required for entrepreneurship.

You want to start a business in India? Good on you. Now you have to fill out hundreds of forms, pay bribes, wait for years for approval to go through, and then get shut down anyway because some local politician decided he just doesn't like you. As if that wasn't enough, there's the culture. Indian culture, like many Asian cultures, looks down upon non-conformity and risk-taking. If you're a newly minted IIT graduate, how exactly are you going to go home and explain to your mother that you turned down that great job in America from a prestigious western firm and instead want to work for a "start-up" (a word that all too many equate with "bum" or "layabout")?

While India is changing, the combination of government regulation and social pressure still makes it very hard for new IIT grads, who are often from modest means, to do things he's advocating.

EDIT: modified introductory paragraph to better reflect the content of the argument.

cmadan• 13 years ago

For a web startup in India, all you need to do is fill out an application to register as a proprietorship or partnership and start hacking away. The proprietorship form takes about 30 minutes to fill out and is processed in two weeks and you don't need to pay a bribe.

Once you scale up such that you need to change from a simple proprietorship to something more structured such as a private limited company you can hire a lawyer to do that for you. You could incorporate in India, USA or Singapore - whichever one suits you. I know startups in all three of these categories.

As for the non-conformity and risk-taking - I think that is exactly the point the blog author is trying to address - someone has to be the first one to stop conforming to the societal roles and IITians should lead the way.

nsomaru• 13 years ago

Why would people incorporate in the States/Singapore?

saching90• 13 years ago

What you are saying is correct in some sense, yes there are a lot of hurdles and the going is not easy. But there are people who are doing things, there are people who are changing things.

Yes our system is not perfect, yes we are very corrupt, but one tends to forget that India is a very young society. We were liberated only 66 years ago from almost a century of foreign rule. But in just 6 decades we have made remarkable progress.

But having said that we can't just wait for things to become better. There needs to be someone who has to take the first step, who needs to be in the front of the formation, those people may not win the war but they lay the foundation for it. I believe just complaining about the system does not help.

khitchdee• 13 years ago

India has a thriving startup culture. See http://yspages.com/browse/company/ for a list of about 5000.

intended3• 13 years ago

What is missing in the letter, is the frank admission that this is a mission which requires the toughest, brightest, bravest and most tenacious of IIT alumni.

The "system" here is extremely harsh, byzantine and dangerous.

Satyendra Dubey, an IIT-K grad, died because he was exposing corruption in the golden quadrilateral infrastructure project.

My Ex-bosses who returned to India from the states to found a startup, were greeted by local MLAs who wanted a cut to allow them to enter the new premises. (They gave the MLAs the figurative finger and had to find alternative arrangements.)

If you want to complain about laws and regulation, India is the stuff of legend. Recently the way service tax is calculated was overhauled. Hoo boy.

We have an issue with the grey/unregulated economy. Small scale businesses, think a little guy in a village which is up and coming starting a rent-a-car business, often don't pay any tax.

Since the GoI can't go after them, its going after people who use these services. Firms now pay their share of Service tax on services received. They also must pay the portion of Service Tax the service provider is supposed to, and apply for a refund. And if the rent-a-car group doesn't have a Tax ID number, well - you wont be getting the refund then. (essentially this is to force people to register) That's just one clause of the Service Tax Act.

Then there is the work culture, and the strange tendency of people wanting to be philosopher lords.

I do not say its not doable - it is. Every day people manage it, but it must be made clear, that getting people back maybe one thing, they also need to be able to maneuver, finagle, and bull their way through a jungle of difficulties. We need Frontiersmen, more than we need Entrepreneurs.

philsnow• 13 years ago

Can you say anything more about this tendency to want to be "philosopher lords"?

paddy_m• 13 years ago

This is silly, what does anyone owe a country? With few changes a letter like this could implore Americans to serve their country by joining the military. Governments compete and economies compete for smart people, apparently India isn't attractive to many of IITs graduates. I think that is India's problem, not the graduates'.

alphamale992• 13 years ago

See it from a perspective of somebody dying next door,you just leave because you get better job somewhere else.

India's problem is 700 Million people are fighting to survive.Its insane, the best brains leave the country and the looters loot as much as they want, its the brain drain causing so much damage.Imagine a family left to die for itself because all the family worked hard to get their son engineer,now the engineer turns around and says thank you.I got to go, I cant provide for the family,I have to live my life.

I will say open letter to all the ivy league univ's come solve world problems because you claim you are the best. Dont turn around and say its government problem.

This world needs a better human race with conciousness, there are over a billion people without food n water.

Most of the point the author is trying to drive that point not nationalist idealogy.

yummyfajitas• 13 years ago

Why does the IIT grad something more than any other human?

mehulkar• 13 years ago

"India has more than 50% of population below the age of 25 and more than 65% hovers below the age of 35. It is expected that, in 2020, the average age of an Indian will be 29 years."

The graduates are India.

intended3• 13 years ago

Try it this way - your suggestion is a variant of winner takes all. So for example if someone said that "its a problem of the science field that mathematicians and physicists are going into hedge funds" we would have to live with whatever outcome is being achieved.

Speaking from a sheer utility point of view, this is not a best case scenario. From a Libertarian view, people are following incentives and making their choices, but its obvious an imbalance is being created.

This imbalance may be unglamarous and solutions to it non-fundable, but it is one that MUST be addressed.

realrocker• 13 years ago

Well, Indian Tax dollars do pay for the heavily subsidized education in IIT's. So it's definitely India's problem.

arocks• 13 years ago

IIT is a brand in India and in most parts of the world. It opens several doors. In the past, IITians have been highly entrepreneurial and continue to do so. Some of the companies [1] started by IIT Alumini like Infosys, Flipkart, NIIT are quite well known success stories.

Again, contrary to what the letter might suggest, studies have shown that every IITian creates about a hundred jobs[2]. Unlike most technical institutions in India, IITs have startup incubation centers in the campuses which give funding for ideas based on sound business models.

Anecdotally, I do come across a lot of IITians in the startup space who claim to have the idea for the next Instagram or Facebook. But, I am happy to see that today IITians have embraced entrepreneurship compared to the brain-drain scenario several years back.

I only wish that brilliant students from other technical institutions had the same unenviable opportunities that an IITian has.

[1] http://www.quora.com/Which-companies-startups-have-been-foun... [2]: http://www.rediff.com/money/2008/dec/11iit-every-iit-ian-has...

alphamale992• 13 years ago

My open letter to all ivy league univ guys from the world.

India's problem is 700 Million people are fighting to survive.Its insane, the best brains leave the country and the looters loot as much as they want, its the brain drain causing so much damage.

Why they are able to do so much corruption? Is it not brain drain, because the good guys are retiring and the next lot are leaving the country.

Its taken a dangerous turn these days with corruption in the range of 100 billion dollars,people will die in millions because they cannot afford food in a decade,(think food subsidy corruption),they cannot afford gasoline (high prices),they cannot travel , they cannot eat , do you think the less privileged will survive? If this continues for too long,you can imagine the plight of poorest of the poor.

The core problems india or for that matter world is facing of hunger/human trafficking/arms race/drug trafficking ....these are the problems.

Try to solve these problems ivy league univ guys, then you can claim you are the best lot of us.

We have this amazingly intelligent lot who dont care about how the world suffers, I question the rationale of not solving big problems if you are from big ivy league university.

We are better human race than we are displaying , kindly come forward and save the millions.

catchmrbharath2• 13 years ago

I think one of the reasons why startups are hard in India is the people's 'willingness to pay' is pretty low. Everybody wants things to be better, but nobody is willing to pay for it.

Consider the case of flipkart. If flipkart, at some point of time decides to not provide free shipping, then people won't buy from flipkart. They are ready to go to some local shop and buy the same thing, grossly ignoring the time they spent in doing that.

Having gone through the campus hiring process, I saw none of the Indian companies investing in something like interviewstreet for their hiring process. Most of the Indian companies asked you to write code on paper or answer multiple choice questions. They are not ready to take into account the logistics that has to go in to have such a system which would have costed the same as using interviewstreet.

Hence most of the Indian companies are mostly incorporated in the US, and the engineering is done in India. When Indians realize to pay for something that is valuable, then there might be some change in the startup ecosystem here.

itsbits2• 13 years ago

i donno when is the last time u went to your campus...but now most of the companies hire interviewstreet for their hiring process..and few of them are Indian companies as well...

catchmrbharath2• 13 years ago

I attended my job interview this semester. So I have seen very few companies use interviewstreet. They sometimes use some automated grading systems, but they have to be deployed on the institutes servers. This has led to a lot of delays.

sigkill• 13 years ago

>...thing, grossly ignoring the time they spent in doing...

I fully agree. There is no concept of inherent value of time because it isn't quantifiable. I saved 1 hour by paying $5 to get it shipped, so what? What am I going to do with that one hour anyway? I don't have any hobbies that I find more valuable than the $5 I saved. I would just end up watching TV. I will not think of the discomfort it causes me to travel by public transport, or the operating cost of my personal vehicle (it seems that fuel is crazy expensive there nowadays!). Plus, if I go out to get that, it doubles as an outing too.

Obviously the 'I' above isn't me but the average mentality that I have come across.

cplat• 13 years ago

I couldn't agree more. The bulk of the crowd I've met hardly even use the original version of the OS, let alone all the commercial tools (and that includes Photoshop). With IT ethics so bad, it's difficult to be profitable just targeting India.

devdas• 13 years ago

Time is cheap. Also, most people in the major cities won't have to go very far. People in smaller towns will either bite the bullet and pay for shipping, or pick up books on a trip to a major city.

itsbits2• 13 years ago

Actually the motto many join IITs are to get a big job with big pay...they join there for that as a sole reason..even thgh many would want to do something new and innovative(as i being one of them), just the dreams of my parents or family repel them taking such task where there is a very less chance of success...IITians are grown for a sole reason..end up with big pay...but i see some change now a days...

denzil_correa• 13 years ago

The author has another blog post [0] where he writes and I quote

    If you are not from a premier institute and you have to 
    work three times harder to prove yourself, but if you 
    have that prestigious degree you are welcome aboard even 
    if you don't have it in you.

Inadvertently, he has pointed out the actual problem. Sure the graduates from IIT's are sucked into "brain drain" but what about the rest large chunk of population who are as good if not better but don't have the brand label? The Indian society largely ignores (or in certain cases even castigates them) for thinking "out of the box". It is this section which needs to rise to the modern world and act with rationale rather than orthodox societal norms. For example, Arunachalam Muruganantham (now dubbed as the "Tampon King") was abandoned by his own wife, daughter and fellow villagers while developing a low cost (33% cheaper) sanitary napkins for lesser privileged women. In addition, the Indian government did not incorporate his solution into their national program. In this case, Mr. Muruganantham had the drive to go beyond all odds and get the job done. In a country where taking up "Arts" over "Science" is considered as being "weak in education", the number of Muruganantham's India has lost as a result of archaic societal norms would be a very good question to ponder upon.

[0] http://www.sachingupta.co/2013/01/you-aint-from-iit-you-aint... [1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-tampon-king...

rwbt• 13 years ago

This article reinforces the current problem in the indian society. You need to have a brand label attached to you to get a decent job. First off, India has 16 IIT institutions and they accept less than 10 thousand students each year. Also, the process of admission is based on an entrance test which is not perfect. More than half a million people write the entrance test and only less than 2% of them are given admission. So you can see how valuable the IIT label is to students (which the author isn't shy boasting). The people who get an admission are usually very smart and they go on to find decent enough jobs. But, the rest of the huge chunk of students are denied any good opportunity and many equally smart people who don't get into IIT have a hard time finding any decent job.

IITs are way overrated in my honest opinion. Sure, they are good, but not by any means the only hope for a true innovative society in India. True innovation comes from the ground up and solving real life problems. Most of the people from IITs I've seen are very elitist and have no interest in at least working for Indian companies, let alone usher in a new era of hope and change.

atishay811• 13 years ago

I live in India. Don't own a startup but have been studying the market. A lot of things make India tough: 1. People are taught not to pay - When computers started proliferating India, it was almost 100% piracy. Apart from OEM bundled Windows it still is. TPB in India is the standard. When you ask consumers for money, they want a physical good because virtual should be free just like it has ever been on TPB. Apps do not sell. 2. Insane justice system - If someone just stole what you did and started selling it, it would take twenty years to to get justice. And that may not even happen if that person is influential. 3. Strange tax laws - The indirect taxation policy has loopholes. People can steal taxes, play bribes and remain a monopoly. It is not everyone's cup of tea, but those that are good at it are very rich in India. A lot of the rest promote leaving India as a good option. Fighting is also not what everyone can do.

Having said all this, a lot of start ups are bubbling in India. Maybe a few years down the line, doing a safe and legal software business would be as profitable in India as in the States even for the middle class.

k_infinite• 13 years ago

"We have power to choose, the resources to create our own paths and the capability to shape our own destiny. There are people out there, who spend their whole lives living it not as they want to, but as they have to. We on the other hand, surf an open field, with an option to steer whichever way we want. But alas most of us take the easiest path. We don't realize we are meant to lead and not follow, to create not consume, to innovate not duplicate and lastly to be the cause of the change and not be an insignificant part of it."

This resonated with me. I took the liberty and made some kinda-minimalistic-style wallpapers for myself, if anyone interested, here they are: http://imgur.com/a/cXMf6 If you're not comfortable with this, just leave a comment and I will take them down. Cheers.

askar_yu• 13 years ago

"How sad it is that there is not a single startup like Google, Facebook or Twitter from India, even though they are being powered by Indians in the silicon valley"

I have a lot of respect for Indian IT workforce, having worked closely with Indian RnD at my previous company. I think nobody disputes Indian contribution to IT sector be it in US or anywhere else for that matter.

But coming across statements like above, I often shake my head amused. I've even had conversations with people who tried to convince me that it's the Indians behind all US's success in CS/IT and that it's the Indians that are powering Microsoft and NASA, and what not, you name it. Coming across statements like that I've wondered do they really believe that or is it just blowing smoke...

intended3• 13 years ago

They believe it, its information/experience asymmetry, and likely some willing suspension of disbelief.

hideo• 13 years ago

I think there are two opposite angles at play here.

A) Some people who make these statements are asking questions from a talent perspective - i.e. "if these guys are good enough to solve hard problems in the US, why can't they put their skills to use in India?". This is a valid question, with a multi-faceted answer. By and large it comes down to "They can, but it's really hard because... <various issues>".

B) Some people who hear these statements co-opt them into their own semi-jingoistic quasi-xenophobic narrative of a land of geniuses of time immemorial being held down by various modern external forces. They see it as just another factor.

I suspect this author is from category A. This is a very valid question and I know TONS of people (not just the youth) working hard to try and break these issues. Entrepreneurship in India is hard, and trying to cut it without 'influence' is almost impossible. We have many problems and this is just one of them. People are working across the board to solve many of these problems.

Unfortunately, people from category B are a very vocal lot. You're very likely to have run into them because their opinions are abrasive and they stick with people. Shake your head at them and move on - They just crave attention. Or if you want to have some fun ask them about how we invented zero - it's their favourite topic.

known• 13 years ago

Indian education system is designed to create employees, not employers.

dominotw• 13 years ago

I recently interviewed at AirBnb and one of the first question the interviewer asked was if I did my undergrad at an IIT. This was a regular while guy in San Francisco. And I am not a fresh grad, I have been a programmer professionally for over 10 yrs. I thought it was insane that he choose judge me by that metric where there were so many other metrics he could go off of.

An open letter to the IIT Graduates

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