A Learning Experience

Recently, I was asked by a sufficiently senior colleague to lecture at a local business school on the following subject:

• Interest rate swaps for corporates
• Valuation of bonds

The colleague just sent me a mail and asked me to do the needful. For a few minutes I ruminerated on the subjects and shared a few laughs with a couple of colleagues and forgot about it. Then there were some reminders, first from the school and then from the colleague whose seniority ensured that I spent the afternoon of my birthday, in front of a classful of students.

I had been given a slot of 3 hours on a Saturday afternoon. The Monday after that the class was to take an exam, which I didn't know till the end of the class was just internal. This obviously made me slightly concerned. Numerous attempts, after the commitment had been made, to elicit the details of the syllabi were fruitless. I dragged myself into office on a Saturday morning- which by itself is an achievement, and put together a few slides.

I arrived at the school- a short walk from my office, with a disk onto which had been lasered a couple of presentations, a few cheat sheets and a few Excel calculators. I considered the effort on my part superhuman. I searched for the lady who had been coordinating and found her to be a naturally eager student. She took me to the class and I found that there were two half asleep girls. They were sent out to bring the others in and when a quorum of close to 15 had been collected, the class began.

It was the first time I had lectured and I was apprehensive to start with, but once I had swathed myself in chalk dust, I found the going to be relatively easy. The class was a usual mix. The eager nerds, who asked clever (but completely irrelevant) questions and noted down everything you said; the regular back-benchers trying to look intelligent but disinterested (legs sprawled wide with fuck-off written on their faces); intelligent looking women (high Mach types), chin up, and nodding selectively; front bench Romeo with his sweetheart, shoulders drooping, heads tilted towareds each other, and scribbling into each others' notebooks... nothing out of place, it would seem.

But what took me by surprise was the complete lack of interest that the insitutute's authorities seemed to have in the running of the show. There seemed no apparent curriculum which covered derivatives, or even fixed income valuation- which I consider absolute musts in a masters course in finance. Further, I was given the liberty to ramble, with only my personal reputation at stake, with the freedom to cover whatever I felt comfortable with. Needless to say, I had no role whatsoever, in framing questions for the test. What they will be quizzed on in the exam is anybody's guess. Probably repeat questions from the year before's test. Most of the students had books on their desks which seemed from another century, and obviously no faculty ever asked me what I had spoken about. When asked about other fin electives, it seemed that they were being taken by persons who were visiting "faculty" like me- with the entire curriculum being left to their convenience. In fact, I recollected that some of those names as being people who have nothing to do with finance (IT head of a asset management company), and much less to do with academics.

I almost felt bad for this bunch, knowing fully well what they were up against in the real world. A few months hence, they would find them selves out on the streets, looking for a job- many with expensive student loans to service, and running helter skelter, fed up and frustrated. I know for a fact that many of my friends, clients etc spend their Sundays taching at these places, with varying levels of commitment, talent and expertise. Even as they sat through the class, they seemed worried about Monday's exam on "Wholistic Approach to Management", which I can only assume would have been taught by someone like me- probably highly stoned.

There must be over a hundred such schools in Bombay alone. I am told a few hundred in Delhi and surrounding places. Even after the recent IIPM episode, I don't think either parents or students are very discerning about the quality of education they receive at such places as long as the looming unemployment is postponed by another couple of years. However, at some point such things catch up and many deserving people find themselves in positions which are at best pitiable. And that makes me wild- because that one should pity a fellow human being- that thought is evil. An education system, which has made all the difference in my life, should drown someone else's dreams so conclusively is really sad.

The problem I feel is that people in India are not demanding enough. In all spheres of life, we need to stand up demand the bang for our buck. And why not! We pay the taxes and get terrible roads, we pay for state funded healthcare, but have to go to expensive nursing homes, we pay our taxes and yet choke to death in our cars which get flooded during the rains. We the people need to stand up and say - Hey!!!