An NRI student, possibly a naturalized American came back to his parents' country to pursue a bachelors degree in instrumentation engineering.
His parents had studied and lived in India but moved to the US in search of greener pastures. After graduating from High school, he had to pursue his college education in India because of the best education their money could buy was from this certain south Indian institution that was among the best private engineering institutions in the state.
But they had no clue about the strict practices that these institutions followed to survive and help their students survive in a country that's built on competition - it being so densely populated and all.
Needless to say he wasn't used to this sort of competition before. He had come to learn that Indian students are brought up with this idea in mind and the competition was cut-throat - it was too little too late by the time he came to know of this though.
I witnessed what was happening first hand. This was something I couldn't title at that time. The quality of education that a person is entitled to in India is based solely on their survival skills alone. I wasn't the best student in Engineering Graphics, but pushed through. We'd have all of these extra classes in first year of college because the institution constantly wanted to keep us on our toes and hence maintain its public image.
Better the public image, better the rate of enrollment would be , better the perceived standard of it, and hence better its revenues. It was and still is a tight system.
It was during one of these long trips from extra classes back home, that I saw this kid on the college bus that catered to us select few. He had a thick American accent. Indians don't usually have accents, hence the average American accent would sound 'slow' to them. He was unintentionally giving off an image that wasn't much desired. I felt sorry for the guy.
NRI's had to pay a lot more than us local students. It was for that reason that they(the management) kept him in college for another semester though he had flunked all of his subjects in the first semester. After his whitewash(flunking of all subjects) in the second semester they had asked him to quit the institution.
So what went wrong here?.. Who's to blame?.. Me feeling sorry for him didn't help one bit.. Hopefully me writing about this will help someone else..
It's a dog eat dog world out there..