Dear Friends,
Every day one learns! Don’t we? I do. Writing these blogs has helped me quite a bit in terms of examining my past and building my confidence. Looking back always helps as it insures us against committing the same mistakes we made in the past. Life is a major challenge and we will have to deal with the unexpected and the unknown. Every day comes packed with unexpected challenges. In this particular blog I am going to stay away from the challenges of doing business in India and come back to you with some of my earlier type of writing.
I don’t know how many of you are aware that though I’ve been a diligent student who learned from the lessons of life, I’ve not gone beyond 11th grade in formal school education. I haven’t written about this explicitly so far. Probably I have touched on this in some earlier blog. However, I want you to know that I had the opportunity only to sit in a formal class room only up to the 11th grade. All that I have today, knowledge in particular, came to me through self education.
Today, I own and run a big school, ‘The Choice School’ at Cochin where the student strength is over 2300 and the teaching and non-teaching staff together, close to 300 in number. As I write this story sitting in Mumbai, I go back to my past and even wonder if I had envisioned starting a school when I was doing my studies.
I see the educated youth today and I also follow the current pattern of education, especially in the colleges because I too have college going children. From what I see among the current youth, they go to college mainly for finding friends and acquaintances and somehow while away the time they are required to be in college and manage to pass their tests and exams “some how”. I wonder what they are learning! The reading habit has disappeared. General knowledge is poor. Today’s dudes know nothing and they don’t care about it as well. What they are into is what I call, “pleasures of life” face book, twitter and texting. For all this, Blackberry helps. What do they achieve from all this? What do they learn? They may be building a huge database of acquaintances, but do these acquaintances help, especially when in need?
I was in Thailand yesterday with a close friend, Mohan Lal. He too writes blogs and he writes it on the 21st of every month. He asked me to read his latest blog and I think all of you should read it too. It simply conveys one message. “All your friends may not be there for you”.