Opinion Bankers and Indian teachers
A respected commentator with great business experience has been quoted as saying that we are slowly emerging from the crisis in the US and perhaps in the Eurozone.
-
Share -
-
-
A respected international commentator with great business experience has been quoted as saying that we are slowly emerging from the crisis in the US and perhaps in the Eurozone. The commentator ends by writing that the bankers who will lead and invent the products which with exuberance will cause the next crisis,are already being trained.
A few weeks earlier,Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz had in an interview in Delhi,said that the fellows who advise the world from the World Bank and the IMF were not very good,and the best students in his experience as a teacher did not go there. This wasnt particularly liked in a city where most advisers have that experience.
Salaries and jobs in banks went down in most placements in gold ribbon management institutes in the crisis years,and are only now picking up. There was an inverse relation with fortunes in Indias villages,however — for applications in the Institute of Rural Management went up by around 25 per cent in recent years,and placement interest was never better.
When we were just leaving University,homilies of the Stiglitz kind were a fact,and the best wouldnt dream of ending up in a financial institution. After I finished my work at the University of Pennsylvania,my teacher Irving Kravis asked me to stay on and teach full-time at Penn,where and at Swarthmore College,a small elite liberal college,I was doing so part-time to fund my study.
I said that having finished my degree,I was going back home,but he convinced me that a year of full-time teaching would look good in my bio. During that year,I was walking in my Department and Lawrence Klein asked me to go in a small seminar room and get interviewed. Apparently we had agreed for some interviews for an IFI and forgotten it. I went in and a gentleman called Mr Woods (who was later a VP in the World Bank),after a few casual remarks,offered me a job,since “your teachers think well of you”.
I said that I was thinking of going back home,and was told that I could do so and work there for them for some time and then come back,for they were setting up an international department. We parted saying we will get back if need be,and on that same day I got a letter from the Reserve Bank of India from the assistant to the Secretary of the Recruitment Board saying that I should read the Times of India for advertisements if I wanted a job.
More difficult than that was to get a job in a University at home. I remain an admirer of the late Prof D T Lakdawala – for,of the 11 universities to which I sent my folder for a job,he at least wrote back saying there were openings for which I could be considered,but warned me that housing was a problem in Bombay. And also Prof Amartya Sen,for he was Head at the Delhi School and gave me some hope.
I wouldnt be surprised if it is the same now – only without D T Lakdawala and Amartya Sen in Indian universities. You can of course,join an American university and come back home with the new higher education Act.
-
Share
-
-
-
Share
