A Student's Experience of Dr. Harish Hande's Lecture

When we were informed about the lecture naturally we thought it would be like one of the many we were forced to attend .These lectures are like compulsory electives, you don’t have much of a say when it comes to attending them.  As we sat there waiting with the presumption that this lecture would be as interesting as watching paint dry .Dr. Harish entered the room and he was introduced and asked to speak … the way every lecture normally begins .I was already sleepy when he started speaking. As moments passed I found myself subconsciously paying apt attention to every word he was speaking. There was something different about this lecture. It was like we were the disciples of a preacher who was preaching the ways to do good to mankind.
He started with humor, he spoke about his experience in the electronics lab in his 1stsemester, he explained how the professor in the lab used to “rag” him.He used to come to check the circuits 10 minutes before the lab would end and pull out all the wires saying that they were not connected tight enough, and when the report was submitted he used to throw it out of the window and ask where the report had gone, when the student answered outside he used to say “Follow it”. He referred to his hostel mess as the “research and development lab” where they were the lab rats.He then told us about his viva voce in his final year. He said that it was like the final frontier for any person, meaning, once you have faced it, you have the confidence that you can do anything in life. The way you are humiliated by the profs for those 2 hours and 45 minutes, nothing else can phase you more. All this felt relatable and it made us feel like we were all seated and our senior was sharing a light moment with us and like this, he gained everyone’s complete attention without addressing the topic of social entrepreneurship .He playfully remarked about the wide choices an IITian has when he graduates- to go for either an IAS or a MBA or a PhD and nothing else.While humoring us he suddenly said something that jump started the thought processes which were in deep slumber till then. He said that we are all pampered products of subsidy .That rattled my cage a little more, he further explained that we are studying in such an institution and paying such low fee because there is a farmer out there who is earning Rs20 a day, our fee is subsidized because the poor people out there pay taxes.The electricity you get is priced as such becausea coal miner earns Rs30 per day. He then asked us what we have done in turn for the people without whom we would not have been able to afford such an education. He stressed that our true benefactors lose out everything and more when they invest in us.
This fact was true but it was also something my heartwas not ready to accept, the words literally were dragging me out of my comfort zone. I was having trouble accepting these facts, it felt like a confrontation was underway between my brain and my heart. I was always made to believe that now that I was in an IIT I would secure a good suit and tie job in an MNC with an AC cabin etc. and that by doing so I was contributing to the growth of the country, and suddenly a person comes up to me and says that you are not contributing to the growth instead you are just feeding on it. This was not what I had in mind while attempting JEE or rather I was made ignorant of this fact. My heart which was fed tales of woo by the society told me otherwise, it argued that you are the cream of this country you are the chosen ones and all other such rubbish that was only taking me further away from the truth that we have failed this country . Later my head won after being provided the proper arsenal by Dr. Harish. He said that some of the employees in his company were middle school dropouts and they performed the tasks brilliantly whenthe cream of the country( we IITians)  often could not even comprehend the problem. He said that he had stopped taking IITians as trainees in his company for the very reason that we do not know how to solve practical problems. And the reason we do not know how to solve these problems is that we do not know or rather do not want to know what these problems are. He says that we do not know our country or its problemsand that we are oblivious to the fact that thereare such problems even in our modern and developed states. Also we have introduced a certain hierarchy which we are more than happy to blindly accept. We think we are better than everybody and our job is to hand out instructions in the form of plans and PPT’s to the so called  lesser minds who will carry out the manual labor and complete that which we have virtually created. Dr. Harish made us realize that this was one of the reasons we do not excel in the real world. He did so by narrating his experience with two undergraduate teams one from the IIT’s and the other from Oxford. At first the IITians were given the chance to create an efficient thresher, after one month of excuses like “Sir, welder kaam nahi karta hai”, “Sir, ye village mein equipment theek nahi hai” etc. they failed to complete the task. Then the undergraduates from oxford were given the same task and they performed brilliantly ,he reasoned  that this was not due to some kind of gap in intellect but rather it was because the IITians gave paper plans to the welder and told him to make the thresher, whereas in the other team, the undergraduates from oxford included the welder in their discussions and they worked with him instead of asking the him to work under them. He was a part of their team rather than being some random welder who works for them earning daily wages. Something which again struck the right notes in the brain to make us think on the right track. Why have we forsaken the poor of our country? Why can’t the brightest minds find solutions to the smallest problems of the country? Is it because deep down we want them to remain where they are? Are we afraid that the tables will turn? Or is it that we just don’t care?
After listening to this lecture it was like being pulled out of the cryo sleep which I was in till now. It was like being freed from a cage. Like someone had forced open the cocoon of a butterfly long overdue to spread its wings and fly. He had surgically cut open the bubble that society had placed me in to blindfold the truth. He made me realize that now is the time to do something about it and that we are the ones who ought to do it. It was a wakeup call to all of us who just thought about white collar jobs and he made us realize that we, being the so called “ brightest minds of the country” need to step up and pay heed to the call of needy and poor and to address the real problems of the country. We need to remember that sleeping through the storm does not delay the inevitable; similarly turning a blind eye to the problems of the nation does not mean you won’t be caught in the web someday. It is up to us to strike the iron when it is hot. The relation between people of this country and the students is like that between parents and their children. The parents feed their children, ensure they get good quality education, live comfortably etc. till the child can support him/herself then it becomes the duty of the child to look after his/her parents.
He then stated that India is a paradox in the sense that it is both over and under developed .He then said “Okay let me ask the bright minds here to present a solution to the following simple problem. In a village with no electricity and heavy rains where clothes do not dry up if washed, come up with a device that can dry the clothes”. He said that this was the problems in one of the so called developed states of our nation. We were silent and he smiled. He then moved on to the topic that he was actually called to talk about social entrepreneurship he said that the best example was a street vendor. He asked if there was anyone present in the room who could write a business plan for a street vendor? None, he again asked if we had ever heard of a street vendor go out of business? Not once, the bandhs the rallies the calamities do not come into the profit equation of a street vendor. He explained that a street vendor has to take Rs 1000 from the money lender at 3 in the morning at 10% interest rate, she then has to decide in which community she will sell vegetables today, she has to buy vegetables according to what people in that community consume… this is called market segmentation. At 8 pm she has to then decide which rates to increase and which to decrease as she doesn’t have the facility to store the vegetables. She then has to return the money to the money lender at 10 pm and extra Rs50 for the “Thela” another Rs50 as “Hafta” to the police and after all that she has earned enough to feed her 3 children and send them to school. After listening to this we were dumbstruck. Never do we look at the street vendor and say look at that ingenious business plan, never do we respect them like we respect any other business entrepreneur in the news, where in fact the street vendor deserves more. The vendor had managed to earn amount x when she had nothing to begin her venture with. Meaning if we look at her gain percentage, it amounts to infinity. Some of the present day entrepreneurs already had an existing capital investment to back them in the expansion of their business when they began. They inherited an X00 crore company and managed to make it Y00 crores, by either starting new branches or new businesses. The gain percentage exists but is finite. An entrepreneur with a fortunate past is respected more by us than a street vendor with an unfortunate past and an uncertain future who risks everything he/she has, to gain a meager income every day, not knowing whether he/she will be able to pay back the money borrowed from the money lender. This shows how ignorant we are or rather we like to be about anything and everything around us, we fail to see that it is the people like the street vendors who hold the philosophers stone that alchemists have been long searching for.
He concluded by saying that “You can never design an efficient system based on Excel Sheet and Power Point!!! You must TRAVEL, TRAVEL and TRAVEL to learn and get a solution to a problem rather than fitting a problem to a solution!“

-By Akhil Shukla, UG Second Year