La Mala Educacion

My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were “the best and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright. I learned to give that little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic “Oh,” when people told me they went to a less prestigious college. (If I’d gone to Harvard, I would have learned to say “in Boston” when I was asked where I went to school—the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.) I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to college at all.

This is an excerpt from a very nicely-written, not altogether original, article by an Ivy League alumnus. Strikes too close to heart.

Not entirely connected, but I was reading this mail from a friend, sent to me and another good friend, a few days back. I am taking it out of context, and anyway these are the days when people trying to adjust to a life of working after two years of bliss at Cal would crib and complain.

So he was talking about how he was sitting in his flat in Mumbai without electricity or water, thinking about similar conditions faced during under-grad in the hostel of an engineering college, and when we used to believe that life would be so much better when we work.

I might have said this earlier - we are funny people.