The Big Fight

The big fight? How big it was can be better left to the audience, but one thing was certain. The fight was indeed over a trivial issue. The issue? It was the “system”. Let me introduce to you the topic of this debate-event first, which was named at par with some Sumo wrestling competition.

The topic was: CIVIL ENGINEERS AT IITM ARE ADEQUATELY PREPARED FOR PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE.

I doubt if such a topic can hardly lead to a so called “big fight” but believe me this fight (whichever way one viewed it, big or small)  was at least interesting (especially in the later half when so many people started shooting so many questions at one another). And no it was not much of a mess. You could still figure out what was going on. It’s a different issue that this debate lost track most of the times form its topic (but then this was how it managed to be interesting, what say?).

I think someone did take an attempt at defining what exactly did “adequately” stood for. But it was just an attempt. It was left in the air and soon everyone peacefully forgot about the whole concept of adequacy. The debate soon shifted to how effective was the current ‘system’in preparing Civil Engineers who could be found useful by the Civil Engineering Industry. The for-guys firmly believed the ‘system’ was perfectly alright and was doing its job judiciously. One of them (who happens to be my classmate) even stated the mission of IIT and tried to make it clear the system was in sync with it. Alas, no one tried to make it clear what ‘system’ was being talked about. Some thought it meant the Civil Engineering Department consisting of the faculty while some thought it also included the students.

The word ‘system” sounds so good. I wonder if there really exists a system which is perfectly alright! This is such a basic thing. There’s nothing called perfect in this world. Everything has a flaw. The for-guys overlooked this fact like anything. The against-guys overemphasized the flaws like anything.

The debate took a slight deviation when suddenly ‘competition’ was quoted as a system-flaw by one of the against-the-topic guys (who once again, happens to be my classmate). He beautifully quoted Swami Vivekananda to support his hatred towards competition. Is competition that bad? It would have been better if he would have actually gone ahead and explained why competition was bad, than hiding behind a quote which was supposed to be blindly accepted. He did try to explain his stand about competition, albeit very vaguely and definitely at the cost of deviating further from the topic, by talking about suicides (which, according to him were mostly due to competition!!). I wonder if it was the same reason why Swami Vivekanand disapproved of competition. And I wonder if my friend had ever heard of something called “healthy competition”. May be a course or two in management could give him broader perspectives at things.

One more interesting point that was emphasized by the same friend of mine was about the teacher-student relationship. This one is indeed interesting but again not much related to the topic. The deteriorating relationship was quoted as yet another system flaw. For a moment even if this is accepted, who is really to be blamed for it? There was a Prof from the Geotechnical division who was absolutely sure that the only cause for all the flaws, were the students. He would have been surprised if somebody could have told him about one Prof from the Hydro Engineering Section, who very frankly had admitted in one of the first few classes of his (that was my third semester) that he didn’t give a damn whether students took interest in his course or not, they learnt or not. He had stated it very clearly that it was his job to teach and that was it. Statements like this hardly go anywhere in boosting a good relationship between us, the students, and dear Profs. Yes, agreed not all of them are same, but then the point it: Stop blaming the students like hell. Will you?

‘Attitude’ was heard throughout the event once this word had been introduced. Everyone seemed to agree there’s some problem with the attitude of the students in general. Is that a problem? Really? The truth is that attitude is merely a symptom of a deeply rooted problem. I wonder why both the teams saw symptoms as the problems themselves. What is the problem then? Where lays the flaw?

A fourth year undergraduate on the against-team disclosed a simple fact. The students (almost all of them) who are doing Civil Engineering in IIT are not doing it because they were interested in this particular branch of engineering but because all they wanted was to be in IIT and could not find a better branch out here. This is the problem. Here lays the flaw. And this is the only flaw that really matters for ‘adequate preparation for professional practice’. A Prof can always blame the lack of his students towards their branch and a student can always ask him without any hesitation that how come all sixty of his classmates who actually cracked a sexy tough exam, leaving behind thousands of  others, suddenly lose interest in Civil Engineering. Did they really had any interest in Civil Engineering at the first place? And here comes the symptom; that sucking attitude that profs just don’t like. What else can they expect of those who know they are the best students around in India and yet give a damn to their branch?

The tragedy is that hardly anything can be done internally within the system to sort out this problem. The source of this problem is external. And any change in the system is hardly going to produce any result. If the outside world suddenly needs loads of Civil Engineers; if the people who are not a part of this system go crazy over Civil Engineers, everything will automatically turn alright. We can have debates and more of them and I am sure they are not going to lead anywhere unless the limitations of people inside the ‘system’ are understood. And that can be done only when the real problem is identified from among the symptoms.