Can Entrepreneurs be Manufactured?

Late yesterday evening while strolling through MG Road, Trivandrum, window shopping; I happened to me meet one of my friends, who is an Engineer by training. The last time we met was during the wedding reception of a family friend in May 2014. Since both of us had some time to spare, it was not difficult to find a place to sit down and talk. 

Our conversation drifted over myriad topics as diverse as family health to the social and environmental state of past and present Trivandrum, the opportunity cost of Governance and public administration, etc. 

I shall find time to make anecdotes about various topics at a later date. For the present, I will dwell on the essence of our conversation on declining educational values.

Individual ambitions and inability to work as a team led to mushrooming of discipline specific Universities particularly in Kerala, India. Together we failed to count the number of Universities in in Kerala. This can partly be ascribed to lack of strong political leadership. While individuals driving these stands to gain, students, who literally are Guinea pigs lose. 

Another queer thing that came up was the current interest in “creating entrepreneurs”. Entrepreneurship is something that is innate.  Apple, Microsoft, Alibaba, etc. and major Indian business houses, was brought up by passionate entrepreneurs, who never received any formal training!  No wonder it is rightly said “I was born intelligent. Education ruined me”. The icing on this cake is also taken up by smart entrepreneurs. There are tuition houses for this!!!! 

The embedded message in promoting entrepreneurship almost always gets overlooked. Academic houses cannot guarantee what the student will do after graduating, the best they can do is push to see, if a student can create a job for himself .I could learn from my friend that there is a huge difference in approach of promoting entrepreneurship across the Atlantic.

Have we as a society ever though the returns on these efforts? How long do we feel can we close our eyes to reality? We are sitting on thin ice. As rightly said by Lester Brown; the world is just one poor harvest away from chaos. There are pressing issues and things that we can contribute to. If technology could help us print food grains, we would have enough time to experiment.

Knowledge era has reduced education to a commodity. However, with tomorrow will dawn wisdom.   

We soon realized that we had consumed three cups of coffee each and time was well past 8 PM. We decided to pick up the threads from where we left next time when we meet. 
It was a refreshing experience.