Steve Wozniak in an interview once said the life of Indians revolve around studying, MBA, job and money. They lack creativity. while most of the Indians were deeply hurt by this statement but those words uttered by Steve was not false at all.
Steve was barely 25 when he with jobs started Apple. Elon musk, Bill Gates, Jeff bezos, Mark Zuckerberg are all along the same lines. If my opinion is taken, I think that what Steve said was partially true but overall, Indians do have a creativity, I believe.
Being intelligent and hardworking is one thing and being creative and imaginative the Other. United States possesses the latter. After all the brainstorming one must think that why most of the innovators and entrepreneurs are from United States? what is there that India lacks? and what will blow your mind is, the way American parenting is done, it is good enough to inculate all these self reliance trait in an individual.
There lies a difference between being practical or being emotional. While Indian parents are emotional living no room for self analysis and self Reliance, Americans are practical giving a much larger space to develop the needed creativity and out of the box thinking. sometimes pampering a kid of age 20 or more backfires and this is what Indian parents do.
What gives Cherry on the top is the Rotten education system. Indian education system gives more emphasis on the degrees rather than the calibre of a candidate. The United States is just opposite. If you are even homeschooled and possess a bright mind, you will be welcomed in Ivy League Institutions like Harvard, MIT or Stanford. What I have seen in most of the Indian household are that children don’t live by their choices.
The choice of profession in India is very limited. If you have to reach on your social circle, you are bound to choose between an engineer, a doctor or a Civil Servant. Indian Institutions churns a whooping 8,60,000 engineers per year and how many them are skilled and by their own choice consists of less than 1%. Doctors and civil servants on the other hand are out numbered, given the condition of Indian Healthcare and administrative potential.
In United States parents free their children to live on their own as soon as they turn 18. I have seen most of them working on McDonald’s in shifts and working hard to achieve their American dream for rest of the hours. you can’t really compare a kid who works on his own and then manages to study of his/her own choice to those of Indian counterparts who still at the age of 22 or more is still living on the parents’ money and looking for a handsome job.
I have seen most of the Indian lads speaking about Zuckerberg or Gates as a college dropout. But very few consider the fact that Bill managed to get an outstanding score of 1590 out of 1600 to enter into Harvard. The very fundamental difference that I have found among the Indian and American lads are that Indians (specially youth) lack the general tendency to think out of the box where as Americans curiosity lead them to a great way. “Necessity is the mother of invention” founds ground in this case.
Sometimes I feel that comfort makes us lazy. Unless and until the youth does not feel the sense of something missing, he/she is not gonna work for it. Indian entrepreneurs like Sachin and Binny Bansal who founded Flipkart just sensed the Indian market and acknowledged the lack of e-commerce in India and this very thought led them to the great success. The founders of swiggy and Zomato, a food delivery app have also sensed the missing aspect of door to door food delivery in India and thus made it.
India must learn from their American counterparts to give their child the freedom to choose, to encourage them, to inculate leadership qualities in them and most importantly to give them enough space to self explore and self evaluate. Parents should know their children in which field they are good at and to motivate them to join the same with much zeal and enthusiasm.
They should set their children free to choose the work of their interest. Everyone need not to be an engineer or a doctor or an IAS. The job crunch situation in India is one of the by-product of the constraint to choose. The Limited number of choice and the overwhelming number of aspirants always lead to a crunch. Leaders are not born, they are made and parents play a crucial role in shaping their world.
The 21st century is the era of technological Revolution and if India have to become a world leader, the younger generation must be made to pursue their goals. Failing is a part and parcel of life and the parents must be there during the darker days standing by their children’s side and then only India will develop into a giant world leader.
Parenting the American way and fulfilling the Indian dream.
The great Indian Politics 