Some freewheeling thoughts on JEE, IITians, “Others,” etc.

Attached are some of my free-wheeling thoughts on (i) the supposed superiority of JEE and of IITians (i.e. the people who were so great as to have cracked nothing less than the JEE!), (ii) the “other” (by definition inferior) people coming out of the other engineering colleges, (iii) examinations and their nature, including the board examinations and JEE, etc.

This piece of writing actually began its life as my short reply to Prof. Ravinder Kaur’s article in Times of India about a week back. I liked her article but also thought that there was a bit of a subtle background about it that had to be made explicit. But, my “short” reply kept on growing. Then, rather than edit whatever it was that I had jotted down, I decided to post the whole thing as is.

See if you have patience to go through it (and also retain the points I make in it, once you do finish reading it!!) The points I make are my personal and honest opinions, though the writing is far too loose to be called by any specific name such as essay, article, crtique, etc.

I may change the writing itself later on, but am not likely to change my basic judgments and opinions about the issues I cover here–and they are quite contrary to popular opinions and judgments.

The URL for the article goes to a PDF document at my personal Web site (i.e. not at WordPress site) because WordPress service has been positively bad for uploading files today. The article is here: http://www.jadhavresearch.info/pdf_documents/About%20JEE%20IITians%20Others%20etc%20v2.pdf

My New FEM Course (Corporate Training)

I am designing a new course on FEM, to be offered privately in India. It will emphasize fundamentals, and try to supply (or bring out) the physical interpretations behind the mathematical formalisms.

More details: It probably will be directed to the working engineer who has already used existing commercial package(s). The initial idea is to split it up over about 6 week-ends, 4 hours per day of the week-end (say Saturday and Sunday each). However, minor details like that may change. I just wanted to give an idea of the length of the course, the time available for class-room interaction, that’s all.

I do seriously mean to offer this course in near future. So, corporate training queries are most welcome, i.e. queries from the companies in India, preferably, from those who are in the Mumbai/Pune region. Please see the attached brochure here

However, as of today, I cannot entertain queries coming from isolated individuals. Instead, queries from groups of students (at least 5-6) are what I am looking for.

There are no plans to do a Webinar out of this any time soon.

Another important point: Engineering colleges in Mumbai and Pune (other than COEP and IIT Bombay, that is) may please excuse me from inviting to deliver this course at their institute at the rate of Rs. 75/- to Rs. 125/- per hour for the entire class in all, for typical class sizes of 60 students, and a student population that is overwhelmingly rich or well-to-do, but dumb, and worse: outright unmotivated to learn engineering. (Such colleges should also spare me having to explain to them why I am declining such a good money-making opportunity.)

To close, I would welcome serious queries from established corporates such as Tatas, Mahindras, Bajajs (run by COEP graduates), Firodiyas (at least one run by a COEP graduate), Thermax, Kirloskars, GM, GE, and so on. This list is purely indicative and does not indicate my personal preference of the companies to whom to deliver my course. But yes, inasmuch as these houses spend so much money on pure “corporate image” advertisements, absolutely worthless HR development seminars (I have attended some), women’s empowerment workshops, etc., it would seem worth it if at least some of the business houses named here spent at least some money on a superlative, world-class training program on a productive theme, and, as a by-product, in the process, helped me make money too.

I would appreciate if you brought this post to the notice of the appropriate decision makers. (Newspapers, media people, and the better people staffing the government “monitoring” agencies: thanks in advance for doing as much for me.)

Thanks in advance.