The social media! Much blamed, much derided! At times hidden therein are nuggets of wisdom! Let me give you an example. Meet G. N. Naidu. He was born on March 23, 1893. Yesterday should have been celebrated as his birth anniversary.
Not many (including me, till yesterday) would know him. Yet I would now like to assert that he is the Pioneer of the Start-up Spirit in India! Not only was he good at re-designing, he invented the four stroke combustion machine on his own!
Wonder of wonders, he enjoyed merely primary education! In a way, he is the forefather of the "jugadu spirit", though in a positive way! This inventor industrialist from Coimbatore, Tamilnadu initiated the first electric motor of India!
He was a wizard of the electrical and mechanical engineering fields. In the field of agriculture, too, he initiated hybrid cultivation. His scientific spirit and interest in the technological development that would be both practical and affordable got him the moniker the "wealth creator of India".
Such versatile geniuses are pretty rare. Often using such star dust is attacked formal education as "sine cos theta/is absolutely useless, beta!" which is a huge fallacy! Not everybody who bunks his education midway creates a software empire! Not every engineer or doctor who gave up his field to pursue films gets the chances of an Atul Kulkarni or a Mohan Agashe! To become a success in business, it is not necessary to fashionably mock or dismiss formal education in an intellectually lazy way, right?
Mumbai must be overflowing with starlets (most often with a most unfortunate present and future) and dreamers (who believe that everybody becomes a Dhirubhai Ambani)! The faith that students who spend hours (or is it, the whole time!?!) outside classrooms are informally learning through peer interaction is either naive or shrewd avoidance of academic responsibility because a person who insists on academic rigour indulges in an attempt which only attracts inconvenient notoriety!
I am sure, if I were to ever write the biography of G. N. Naidu, I would find out how he was an auto-didact, somone who through sheer hard work, taught himself difficult concepts. Not everyone is so lucky though! Hope the dazzling career of G. N. Naidu does not get used as a precedent, as a myth to dismiss formal education, a dangerous falsehood in the era of the AI when foreign universities are making excellent education available here in India!
Pratima@ The "Edison of India", too, like his original namesake, would believe in constantly improving/updating himself, I suppose. He must be studying, reading, analysing a lot to manage all his contributions. I do not know enough to state why he could not carry on with his education beyond primary school. May be, he, too, would have been another JRD if he were to follow formal education!
Quote of the day: Genius is, Thomas Edison famously defined it as "1% inspiration and 99% perspiration."
Word of the day: fallacy Fallacy is a failure in reasoning or a flawed argument that renders a conclusion invalid, often appearing plausible but mistaken.
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