India has been a rapidly growing country over the past three decades, since it opened it’s markets to the world. India’s GDP grew 10 fold in the past 26 years, from around 266 Billion USD in 1991 to around 2.5 Trillion USD in 2017. This somewhat rapid growth has resulted in the westernisation of the Indian Millennials. I come from a small town in the bank of river Ganges and have seen drastic change in my way of living while growing up. It started with a single landline telephone in the house, then a colour television, followed by a mobile phone and subsequently a Personal Computer.
You might wonder by now, why is this guy blabbering about his schools years. But you see, to understand why we grew up being one of the most competitive races around the world , one has to understand what formed our mindset.
All this change in our lives resulted in one important character trait that you shall find in most of the millennials : The quest for money. Indian parents, understanding what open markets meant, wanted their kids to have the best of foreign items and their belief in Pandit Nehru’s philosophy, of teaching Indians the value of Engineering as a profession, strengthened. Every middle class parent in India, at least the ones living in cities and townships, wanted their kid to join the IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology) or the NITs (National Institute of Technology) and get themselves a high paying job in an international firm that they couldn’t have imagined growing up. And so it happened, we all became Engineers. If not from the IITs, but from the thousands of private Engineering institutes that opened up in the last two decades.
Now people started wondering, what next? And like the rest of the things we follow from the westerners, Indians started pouring into business schools (B-Schools). Although the lack of managers in the early 1960s had led to the formation of a few IIMs (Indian Institute of Management) in collaboration with the Harvard Business School and Sloan School of Management, part of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but those mainly served the purpose of providing managers for big Indian enterprises and conglomerates. The game changed in 1991 as the US companies started coming in India to do business and they wanted people with a proper understanding of the local markets. From investment banks to prestigious consulting firms, Indians were now going places.
No wonder each kid on the block wanted to have his or her share of the pie. The fear of missing out (FOMO) in the Indian engineers paved the path for numerous private B-Schools and hundreds of coaching institutes around the country. It led to ‘private coaching classes’ becoming a Billion dollar industry in India.
So you see an MBA wasn’t or isn’t just another option for us Indian Millennials, but rather a way of survival. A way in which we too can dream of a life like a kid in the US, a way to get that PlayStation that our parents couldn’t afford for us and a way for us to see the world without looking at our pockets.
I am a part of this RAT race called CAT (Common Admission Test) and I am chasing my MBA. Are you ?