Great piece as usual. Wrote down a few random observations as and when they came to my mind:

1. When I visited India a few years ago, 8 years after my previous visit, one of my observations was the explosion of coaching centers for all sorts of government exams. They were suddenly everywhere. I don't remember it being the case in, say, 2015.

2. Rote memorization wasn't just a 1980s phenomenon. It's still the same today. I faced it when graduating in the late 2000s. It was true even in my undergrad in the 2010s. It's true now. More prevalent in the state board education than CBSE, but still true everywhere. Growing up, it was common to get a lot of ads in the TVs for memory pills.

3. The Musallahpur student hanging isn’t an isolated rural Indian government job thing (not that you are claiming it is). In my own college, a student died by hanging after graduating because he couldn't get a job. When I was in school, it was common to hear every single year, after the board exam results came out to hear in the news of at least a few students in the city committing suicide after getting low scores. Student suicide is common even in urban India.

3. I googled why Unacademy crashed, and I laughed when I read "key factors contributing to its restructuring include the end of the pandemic-driven demand for online classes, increased competition from offline centers, challenges in executing an offline strategy".

In the US, businesses contract because they face online competition, but in India, it's the opposite for this sector. This is because Indian parents don’t fully trust online-only education. A coaching center that costs ₹3L feels “safer” with a physical institute with a building, classrooms, and teachers who evaluate their children, rather than a cheaper online option.

4. The part about cheating is far more damaging than just limited to government exams, very much like you mentioned. It corrupts the entire culture. Or they cheat because the culture was already corrupted. Hard to say which came first. Cheating in Indian exams is so common that even international students do it. That international students cheat significantly more and in more serious ways than American students is widely discussed among faculty, but rarely said openly. It is the same for Chinese international students as well, who have a reputation for cheating. There have been many cases of Indian students in graduate mills in Canada who have even tried to bribe the TAs for a passing grade, even though they never attended a single class. They get to Canada on a student visa, skip all classes, and work in menial jobs.

The rural Punjab to Canada via the international student visa and immigration fraud cottage industry, which is similar to the much larger industry of government exam coaching, is also a result of Indian socialism.

One of the main reasons I've become opposed to downscale Indians immigrating out of India and bringing all their cultural baggage with them. A major reason behind the anti-Indian sentiment we've seen since 2024.

5. Whenever I read stuff like this: that Indian exams are written like old-fashioned Oxbridge entrance papers, and so on, I am reminded of the MR post Premature Imitation and India’s Flailing State by Alex Tabarrok (marginalrevolution.com/…).

In the post, he says, "We argue that one reason that India passes laws which are incongruous with its state of development is that Indian elites often take their cues about what is normal, good and desirable from Western elites."

Once you start noticing this, you will notice it everywhere in India. I interpret so many of my memories and look at them through that lens now. I’ve lived through at least a thousand absurdities in India.

One quintessential Indian, premature/irrational Western imitation absurdity that just came to my mind:

In my undergrad college, all students had to wear a lab coat in all my lab classes, even though I wasn’t a chemical engineering student. Lab coats are even in the computer science lab. This was in a nominally English as the medium of instruction college in one of the biggest metros in India (although no one actually taught us anything in English in the four years I was there). You weren't allowed to question this absurdity or any of the thousands of absurdities one faces living in India.

In fact, the very fact that I was among the very first ones to actually notice that this is absurd was a revealing moment for me. I realized that many of my peers hadn't even recognized the absurdity of it until I pointed it out. Like Samir, it was one of the moments that led me to leave India. In fact, when I questioned it, it was the first time the peon who works in the lab had heard any student questioning it. He still didn’t understand why I was questioning and was getting increasingly foul-mouthed, in a stereotypical way, even though I am the student and a customer who pays his bills. He kept repeating, “Lab coats are required for labs. This is a lab. Get back there!”

Also, I don't remember a single word or a concept from the 4 years of education I received there. All I did was pure rote memorization in the name of "engineering". My degree isn't worth the fancy paper it's printed on. I just googled it, and it’s ranked the 20th best university in India. What a joke.

6. That a stationmaster lived in a bungalow that seemed like a palace with servants is absurd. I thought only IAS officers like collectors lived like that, and even if they deserve it is an open question.

That there needs to be a job in 2025 for inspecting tickets and a human has to spend 8 hours going up and down a train is another absurdity.

Edit: But after thinking about it for a minute, I find it understandable that such a job needs to exist in India. It's impossible to build infrastructure in India is so many railway stations and stops where you can keep all the miscreants who won't buy a ticket out.

Imagine turnstile jumping in a NYC subway, but instead of the turnstile, you get hundreds jumping walls dangerously close to railway tracks to get on to the platform. That's what we'll get if we don't have a human ticket inspector in India.

Also, I still find it as absurd as I did when I first noticed this absurdity when I was 5 or so that this is what a ticket inspector in India dresses like: share.google/images/7ZO…. He needs to wear a suit and a tie in one of the hottest countries on the planet, on trains, packed with other Indias, even though only a minority of train cars have air conditioning.

Indian life is one absurdity after another.

7. Caste quotas are the primary reason why this system is unlikely to go away. Looking forward to the next in the series about The Reservation Wars, as you put it.

8. When I was around 12~15 or so, I visited my grandmother's house and noticed the new neighbors next door. There were 5-6 males in their early twenties sharing quite a small apartment unit. They were cramped and had to share a room to save on rent. The memory is a bit fuzzy, but my mother had to speak with them to ask for a favor. I think it was to help my grandparents with some homeowners’ association stuff or something like that.

But I remember this well: My mother asked a guy she spoke to if they were college students. They said no, and they had already graduated from college two years ago, and a few of them even quit their jobs to study for government exams full-time.

When my mother asked a guy if studying for these exams was worth quitting a job, they said yes, because they could recover the lost earnings in 2-3 years from bribes. He said this with glee and a laugh. He had no moral compunctions about admitting that. My mother was slightly taken aback by this, though she didn’t express it to their face.

He said government job salaries weren't as good as jobs in a software company (the only high-paying private sector at that time), but the government jobs meant "life is settled," as he memorably put it. What he meant was that public sector jobs are virtually lifetime employment, and it's impossible to get fired. They only have to worry about getting transferred to a new location, which is a pain.