In a new book, an entrepreneur presents a blueprint for building sustainable, profitable start-ups

Leaving India for greener pastures abroad was considered the best outcome in the late ’90s for those of us who were not afforded great wealth but graduated from elite educational institutions in India. The low growth opportunities of the pre-liberalisation era were the impetus for our careers. The American dream provided the perfect getaway to our prosperity.

As an individual who excelled in exam-taking, learning was never the real objective in my earlier years. Through rote learning and exam-cracking regimes, many of us had perfected the art of repeatedly making it through progressive academic rungs. Learning by regurgitating past test papers, studying with a friend’s class notes on the day before the exam and prioritising exam-oriented problems were all part of the study system that many of us had mastered. No wonder Narayana Murthy of Infosys, in 2018, posited that “engineering colleges in India are churning out only 25% quality engineers and nearly 80–85% of youngsters are not suitably trained for any job.”

Deep learning and mastery require a disciplined, systematic approach, not shortcuts. During my graduate study in America, I observed that many of my international student peers had made a conscious choice to specialise in their chosen fields and understood what the...

Read more