Privileged?

A few days ago I was invited to speak at the inaugural South Asian Diaspora Convention held at Singapore. I got to hear many distinguished academia and prominent business leaders.

Honored to be amongst such august company I observed at the start of my own talk; “I feel a bit like that pinch of salt in really great chocolate; I’m afraid no one will notice I was here!” Eventually though the domain of my subject connected with and interested most of the people in the audience and my session was well received with a lively debate in the question and answer session.

One of the rousing talks I heard during the conference was that of Mr. Pradeep Pant, President, Asia Pacific Kraft Foods, who was sharing about what he called “the DNA of successful leaders”. He stressed that one of the essential components in the makeup of today’s business leaders is a ‘solid primary education’.

Later, while talking about the topic given to me; ‘education through innovation’, I used my own story as an anecdote to show why achieving even this is becoming increasingly more challenging.

I got an Atari 2600, back in 1983, when I was 5 years old. This was a few years before even Coin-operated arcade machines made their way to my town. Its glowing 8 bit graphics and beeping music held me captivated for hours at an end and started a lifelong love for computer games that has never abated.

In 1985 I got my first computer (which was a 286). I got a computer before my school had a computer and by the time they were teaching us how to use Wordstar at school I was already writing simple GW Basic programs.

Both my parents were heavily into reading and we always had an enormous library at home with all kinds of books and many genres of movies and music. I spent many blissful hours, growing up, with my nose in a book listening to music from around the world.

All this early exposure helped shape much of my personality and eventually led me to make a career in technology and media.

Though I owe much of my entrepreneurial drive and creativity to the privileges I received in my parents’ house I believe these ‘privileges’ were also largely responsible for me not sailing smoothly through school.

I was never popular with most of my teachers in my ‘rote and discipline’ type school because I would often ask difficult questions in class and debate most topics till they were explained to my satisfaction. My penchant for reading ensured that I would look up references outside curricula and be generally disruptive in class with the ‘extra’ information I had. 

Like all youngsters I too found it challenging to connect socially and my angst was aggravated because few people shared, or even knew of, my interests. Aside from the few co-curricular activities I dabbled with I found school in general either very boring or very stressful.

Recently I was telling my elder daughter, who is 7 years old, about my privileged childhood. She completely stumped me before I even began:

Me: “I had a very privileged childhood”

My Daughter: “Oh! You had an IPad too!”

This innocent exclamation from her was heavily laden with insights and implications for me. It dawned on me that the privileges I enjoyed in my very special childhood are not only common place but completely trumped by the facilities available in every average household today.

On a quick count my own home has 14 internet capable devices, 18 game enabled systems and 21 different types of media players that are easily accessible by her. On top of this ubiquity of access to information & entertainment-on-demand we subscribe to some 24 television channels that she is allowed to watch.

Not only is she adept with using the tablets and mobiles for both games and surfing she often uses Google to find more information on things we talk about. Already, I can often find myself struggling to keep up with her questions, while her onscreen time is still so regulated, and wonder how I would cope as she gets older and has more access.

I wonder too how her school will cope with her growing appetite for information, entertainment and connectivity.

While I work for a company that is working on the very bleeding edge of education technologies and methodologies I will be the first to acknowledge that we don’t have all the answers yet.

All  I know for sure is that the traditional rote and chalk system of education will not work.