Back on the net! Here come all the blogs, starting with a thought I’ve been having:

I’ve got a lot of safety nets, right? Safety net 1 is my savings: if something bad happens, I can throw money at it until it goes away. Safety net 2 is also monetary, I guess: my job. Or, if I’m unemployed, like now, it’s my ability to get a job. Tangled with that is safety net 3: people I know professionally who might know someone who knows someone who could help me get a job. I guess you could say my “network”. Failing all that, there’s safety net 4: my skills and resume. I could get a job writing software at any old place. And if all these fail, I have a lot of family and friends, who could probably help me out for a time if I really needed it.

So I was reading “Revolution 2020” by Chetan Bhagat. I guess he’s a popular paperback author. The writing wasn’t great, but as a window to parts of India, it was fascinating. He describes the life of Gopal, an average guy from Varanasi whose family has some problems. Gopal’s mother died years ago, his father inherited some land but his uncle tried to legally wrangle it away, and his father is even having health problems too. So Gopal’s father puts his hope in Gopal becoming an engineer.

There are two national exams for engineering schools: the AIEEE (to get into NIT, the National Institute of Technology), and IIT-JEE (to get into the world-famous India Institute of Technology). IIT is more prestigious, but even NIT is tough. After the one-shot exam, all >1 million aspiring engineering students are ranked, and if you get in the top 30k, you can get into NIT. So 3% “pass”.

Gopal’s rank is about 50k. So his father uses the last of his savings to send Gopal to a coaching school in Kota, where Gopal spends the next year studying, so he can take the one-shot exams again. This is like year-long full-time SAT classes, but more pressure. You have to get yourself into the top 3% of students; 97% of you are guaranteed to fail. Furthermore, there are varying levels of quality and prestige among the coaching schools, so the schools have entrance exams. There are even coaching classes for those.

Why go through all this? Because he has no safety nets. If he doesn’t pass these exams, which 97% of students must fail, he’s got no chance! At one point, he jokes about running through his options: exile to the mountains or a hard life of manual labor. (spoiler alert: he finds option 3, a life of shady business, and later has a moral crisis because of it. I said it’s not a great book.)

Now, the safety nets come with a slight cost, while traveling: to quote Pulp, when I’m “lying in bed at night, watching roaches climb the walls, I can call my daddy and he can stop it all”, and as a result, I can’t really relate to most people. I can’t understand why (for example) it’d be reasonable to keep trudging through a job you dislike, because I haven’t felt the icy stomach flops from falling through all the safety nets. But nor do I desire to; having the essentials taken care of allows you to focus on the “better things” in life, whatever your definition of “better things” is.

And so I guess there is the crux of it. If you were looking for a Thanksgiving post, here it is. (it’s not late, it’s just, time zones, y’know?) I’m thankful for my safety nets. And traveling through India, a land of few safety nets, has made me more so.