A Winter in India

The morning of our day in Indore we had a very good meeting with Dr. S.P. Parashar, Director of the Indian Institute of Management, he is former USEFI Board Member. A very dynamic, articulate gentleman who is remarkably direct, which we found very refreshing in a land where we are daily trying to navigate our way through “ritual speech”, speech that to us seems designed to establish the speaker’s high rank or to weave a web of obligation. Dr. Parashar is trying to establish cooperative MBA programs in International Business, where a student would spend six months in India, six months in the US and six months in New Zealand, then do a thesis in the last six months. The existing curriculum at the Indian Institute of Management stresses such things as “verifiable outcomes”, the importance of deadlines, and an economy based on “value” not on obligation. Dr. Parashar is very positive about the direction that India is headed; he says that this huge democracy runs by consensus, so public debate takes a long time (decades) but that at least 60% of the people now believe that modernization and economic development through privatization and globalization are the keys to prosperity. He says that direction is now settled; opposition groups can affect how fast it happens, but they can’t (and for the most part don’t want to) derail it. In past decades people from low socioeconomic groups have thought that sowing chaos would help them get ahead and India has had decades of communal (i.e. religious) and caste-warfare. They have gradually changed to a point where few think that such chaos is productive. An example from this week’s news is that an area of Madhya Pradesh called Dhar has had religious riots with deaths and destruction every year on a particular day when Hindus and Moslems both want to worship at the same place. The state of Madhya Pradesh has been a hotbed of Hindu Nationalism, and in the past this unrest has been actively stirred up by some state government officials and the police have not stopped the riots. This year Madhya Pradesh has a new government and they said, riots will not happen. There were small skirmishes, but the police were sent in and kept the two groups apart, so there were no deaths and no damage, and Moslems were allowed in to worship during a specific time period. Similarly after last October’s bombings in Delhi, in the past there would have been backlash mob violence against Moslems, but there were none.

Dr. Parashar also talked about the value of student research. He was specifically taking about Ph.D. research, which is almost the only level at which anyone here gets to do any research, but I think that what he said also applies to the value of undergraduate research. He said it gives a person an orientation toward the future that they cannot get by just memorizing received knowledge created by someone else. He said it also teaches honesty because you learn to have evidence for every statement.