Vivek Kaul: Sharma ji ka beta and the economics of imitation

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. If I had the chance to relive my life, I'd love to study economics and history in college—or even better, delve into the economics of history and the history of economics—instead of the mathematics and information systems I ended up specializing in. However, there's a catch with this counterfactual.

Given how subjects are taught in Indian colleges, studying economics and history might have drained my interest in them, just as it happened with mathematics and information systems, steering me in yet another direction. So, as the saying goes, all’s well that ends well. In the early to mid-1990s, when I had to choose a subject to specialize in, for a stable career, pursuing an engineering degree was what was expected of me.

My maternal grandfather had his heart set upon me becoming an engineer. He is an engineer. So are his two sons-in-law and his two younger brothers.

I took the path of least resistance and decided to sit for engineering exams. Now, do remember that these were the pre information technology boom days, and engineering colleges were yet to sprout up left, right and centre, so, getting into a good engineering college was tough. It needed a lot of hard work and preparation.

But my heart was never in it: I was enjoying college life a little too much; watching movies first-day-first-show was more important for me than preparing for engineering exams. Not surprisingly, I didn’t clear any exam. Now, that was a time when if you did not make it on the first attempt, you dropped a year, prepared all over again, and wrote engineering exams a second time.