The top five reasons why Indians take a personal loan are:

1. Medical emergency,
2. Travel,
3. Wedding,
4. Investment (esp. stock market and speculative property investments),
5. Helping a relatives and family.

And debt consolidation: Some people also use it to refinance their Credit Card dues or loans from informal sources. But in that case, one would realize sooner if not later that it was an expensive decision.

Most personal loans have 3 clauses -

1. A regular EMI for the entire duration of the loan 6-24 months
2. Processing fee from 2-4%
3. Restrictions on prepayment. I.e. one cannot prepay in the first 3-6 months and not more than 50% of the loan balance outstanding in one payment.

These Terms and conditions often don’t match with the optimal debt repayment schedule for the individual. Hence given a choice, I always discourage people from taking a personal loan.

Alternatives

1. Bank overdraft: This is the easiest and the cheapest option for short term credit. If you have a salaried account, then just ask your bank and they would be more than willing to give you a generous 1-2L line of credit which you can repay at ease. Charges like account opening charges, commitment fee (0.25-0.5% of the line of credit) may look like a lot, but due to flexibility in repayment, the overall interest expense is much lower.

2. Credit Card: If you search the archives of enagar, you will find reference to an older article which tells you how one can draw money equal to the credit limit (which is higher than the cash limit) for 50 days at a cost of 3% (paid upfront) and 1.8% for subsequent months.

Using this loophole, one can minimize the pre-payment penalty/charges by calling the bank one month to increase the EMI and revert it back to the old levels next month. Chances are that you would be able to stretch a little and continue paying that higher EMI for a few extra months. Hence reducing your interest expenses.

When it comes to debt, don’t ignore any processing charges, penalties or fines. It might put you in a debt trap.
For example
A 1M (10Lakh) INR loan for 15 years period at 8.75% has an EMI of 9,800/-

If you prepay 1EMI (9,800 on the first day), it will save you from paying about 3.5 EMIs 15 years later which is a net saving on 24,500/- in interest expense alone.
Please note that this calculation assumes that you would continue to pay the same EMI even though now your loan outstanding is (10Lakhs – 9,800/-)

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Also you might find this useful to add a small table with columns in your posts.

<table style=”font-size: 10pt; font-family: ‘Lucida Sans Unicode’; color: navy;” border=”1″ cellspacing=”0″ cellpadding=”1″ width=”700″>
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>no.</th>
<th>col1</th>
<th>col2</th>
<th>Remarks</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1.</td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

I agree when we sign up for a course at IIM, we practically write off all our vacations and free time. However keeping an exam on a Sunday morning is like being sadist. Who will teach our professors the meaning of “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”

After spending a couple of hours listening to his idea, this is what we came up with:
1. Don’t confuse investments with tax planning. First decide in which financial instrument you want to park your money. This is because whether you want insurance, property, FD/bonds or mutual funds, there is always some tax saving instrument to help you.

2. At any given point of time have liquid assets to cover for 6 months of expenses. This could be parked in savings bank, or FDs or other financial instruments that can be prematurely encashed instantly without attracting much penalty. This cash often comes handy when you are between jobs, during emergencies esp. medical and when family/friends need you. I strongly advise that an individual should not dip into it and also refrain from any long term investments until this reserve has been created.

3. Work towards reducing your loans. If you have a education loan which costs you more than the Bank Fixed deposit (even after accounting for the tax break it provides) then it is advisable to retire it before doing any financial planning.

4. I would recommend you to keep your personal finances separate from that of the parents. However, what good of is all the money if it is not there for those who need it, when they need it. If your parents/family needs money or has taken a high cost debt, work towards retiring that.

5. After taking care of all these, I would recommend you to read this amazing book “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”. This simple book gives a remarkably different insight about how one should classify various assets and investment options.

Now some serious stuff…….
6. FDs are a good place to park the money. You can be sure that your money is safe and will be there when you need it. However the returns this generates is hardly sufficient and inflation eats into it. Hence One should invest in the Stock Market linked instruments (Shares, Mutual Funds, ULIPs etc.) Early on when your savings are small and risk appetite sufficient, then one should park upto 50% of the money these instruments.
However it is also advisable to reduce it as you age. The best way I found is to put an artificial cap of 3 years of Salary on your Market portfolio. 3 years of salary is large enough that it will be a substantial part of your investment. Yet at 15% p.a. expected returns, it won’t be able to generate half of what you earn from 8-10 hours of labor. Hence the market performance will not be a major distraction from work.

7. Now comes property/home: Some people who want to take less risk want to buy a property immediately after graduating. However I would recommend you to push off this decision by a couple of years. The reason for this is that even if land prices don’t fall, it often involves taking a EMI on floating rate. With EMI payments exceeding 50% of the salary, the financial flexibility one has to cope up with unexpected events is severely limited. Once you have sufficient savings and/or a working spouse, then investing in property is advised.

8. Insurance: It is one of the most mis-sold financial instrument. An insurance is neither an investment avenue, nor a tax saving instrument. It is taken to enable a person to take care of the unexpected. The best times in life to buy a life insurance are:
a. When you take a long term loan (for property/education etc.)
b. Marriage (esp. to a non working home-maker)
c. Planning for Kids
Also whenever possible, please buy Term Insurance (huge insurance cover for a small premium) and medical insurance.

So to summarize we have covered liquid assets, market linked portfolio, property and insurance. Last is tax.

9. Most tax savings happen under 80c. If you buy an insurance, its contributes under this segment.
If you plan to go for bonds: then NSC, Infrastructure bonds, PPF are few of the avenues
If you want to invest in market then ELSS (Equity Linked Savings Scheme)
If you want to invest in property then Home Loans give you tax shields.
Hence you should first look into what lock in period you are looking for and what risk/return profile you fall into and then select the tax saving instrument accordingly.

I hope this really long and boring post helps. How different is your investment philosophy?

Dilbert Blog is one of the most if not the most interactive blogs on the net.

The song writing started out by Adams asking the blog readers to write catchy phrases which almost mean something.

Write a Song

A band weeded the response from the readers and based a song with them.

The Hit Song You Wrote

And now we have a video:-

She Amazed Me

GoI has been recently collecting educational cess on all the taxes and financial transactions. This was a welcome move, because in a country where half a billion souls have never attended schools/colleges now the Human Resources Ministry has almost infinite funds to educate the masses. Or this is what I had thought.

All the tolls collected via cess went directly to the center. While Primary education was funded by state government and panchayat/local administration (Madhya Pradesh) So in reality, although a huge war-chest was build, the spending on education hardly increased over the past 3 years.

Another problem faced by the HRD ministry was that budget was to be presented in a few months. Traditionally, any department that does not spend the funds it had been sanctioned in the previous budget is penalized in three ways:
1)It has to answer why it had not been able to plan and execute efficiently
2)The funds are taken away from it
3)In the next year, the department will get lesser funds.

I have a feeling that this scheme is nothing more than a plot to squander away our taxes.

If government wants to do something for an “All Inclusive Growth”, then open a thousand primary schools, open vocational and technical schools. The higher education is already very subsidized (a engineering graduate’s first year salary would be more than adequate to cover for his entire educational expenses).

Also if you look at the fine print, it covers only the undergraduate/post graduate study loan taken from Nationalized Banks. Now if Government wants to help the poor but deserving students, then isn’t providing a scholarship/full tuition waiver a better way to help them. After all its general knowledge that students work harder and perform better when they get study grants, for these students need to display good academic achievements for continuance of the grants.

In short there is nothing new or significant in the scheme.

When it comes to success in the technology arena, entrepreneurs’ choice of schools isn’t nearly as important as what they study, and for how long.

That’s the down-to-earth conclusion of a report released in June by the Kauffman Foundation. Founding a tech company doesn’t require an elite university degree, whether it’s in the U.S. or anywhere else.

The study bases its findings on interviews with 144 Indian, Chinese, and Taiwanese immigrant company founders culled from surveys of 1,572 companies in 11 tech centers across the country.

“It doesn’t matter which university you get your degree at,” said Vivek Wadhwa, the study’s lead author. “What matters is the level and the field of education.”

The survey found that more than half of foreign-born entrepreneurs came to the U.S. solely for an education. Close to 40% came for work. Fewer than 2% came with the express purpose of starting a company.

Immigrant founders of U.S. tech and engineering companies are highly educated in what educators call the STEM subjects — science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

That was expected, says Wadhwa, a former entrepreneur who is Executive in Residence at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering.

Almost all immigrant founders in the study — 96% — had bachelor’s degrees. Forty-seven percent had master’s degrees, and close to 27% had doctorates.

Of those degrees, 75% were in STEM areas. Engineering accounted for 44% of the degrees.

Over half of the immigrant founders — 53% — earned their highest degrees from U.S. universities. But no top-tier university in the U.S. or abroad got particular credit for producing tech entrepreneurs.

That was a surprise, Wadhwa says. It’s good news for less prestigious schools and the students who attend them.

“From the U.S. perspective, M.I.T and Stanford didn’t have any advantage in developing successful entrepreneurs over some small university in the Midwest,” said Wadhwa.

The situation is similar in India, where tech success is practically synonymous with the subcontinent’s seven famed India Institutes of Technology. But the research shows that the IITs graduated only 15% of the Indian tech company founders.

“IITs aren’t what we feared,” Wadhwa said.

Institutions ranked below the IITs are exulting at the news, which got wide coverage in the Indian press, he says. Researchers at Duke and the University of California, Berkeley, conducted the study.

It follows a January report showing over a quarter of U.S. tech and engineering companies started between 1995 and 2005 had at least one foreign-born founder.

That a top-tier university education isn’t necessary for success shouldn’t be surprising, says Arthur Schwartz, deputy executive director of the 50,000-member National Society of Professional Engineers.

“It is absolutely the kind of education that the individual receives rather than the institution that provides it,” he said.

Education in certain fields are often a tried-and-true path to success, Schwartz says.

“Historically science, technology, engineering and mathematics have been social levelers for getting ahead for all groups,” he said.

Those looking at the tech professions from the outside in also agree that a particular university pedigree isn’t everything.

“There are certain critical thinking and higher order skills that can’t be transmitted via education,” said Forrester Research (NASDAQ:FORR) analyst Sam Bright. “So where you go to school is not the be-all and end-all.”

Whether study findings will affect investors who fund entrepreneurs is the bigger question, he says.

“The real test of this report is how open-minded angels or venture capitalists will be to expanding their filter beyond the brand of a particular school,” Bright said.

It also addresses what’s sometimes forgotten in the immigration debate, says Raman Unnikrishnan, dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science at California State University, Fullerton.

“The discussion tends to focus on the negative aspects of immigration,” Unnikrishnan said. “Often immigrants are evaluated in terms of employment rather than entrepreneurship.”

But foreign-born entrepreneurs make a significant contribution to the U.S. economy, he points out.

“Immigrant-founded firms have created wealth and employment opportunities for all Americans,” Unnikrishnan said. “When political heat comes to bear, people forget that aspect of immigration.”

There are culture-specific reasons why foreign-born entrepreneurs are successful in the U.S., according to Unnikrishnan.

If the Indian tech and engineering graduates noted in the study had remained in India, they could not have taken the same entrepreneurial paths, he says.

“The U.S. allows failure,” Unnikrishnan said. “Older cultures like India do not.

“That is a profoundly important contribution that the U.S. education system and culture imparts to these bright foreign graduates who come here as immigrants.”

Since the situation has not improved since 2004-2005 and has only worsen since then…. Where did my money go?
Don’t tell me it went in creating new IITs, IIMs, or AIIMS with the sole purpose is to create an army of professionals who would pay taxes and help US Government reduce its Social Security deficit. Because… we have not created a new one either in the past couple of decades.

If you opt for the first, How can your kid know the:
1) What is right and what is wrong.. what is socially accepted moral behavior.
2) What are the medical consequences of error. (STD, AIDS)
3) How it can impact your future? (pregnancy, early marriage, being forced to undertake responsibilities you are not prepared for etc.)
4) What is safe what is not?
5) You need to reinforce in the kids that they have a right to say NO, and not succumb to peer-pressure.
6) What qualifies as sexual harassment by a pedophilic relative?

In the USA, obesity is a tell-tale sign of poverty, but in India its the large number of offsprings… often more than they can take care of. The parents are not able to invest in the child’s future and hence condemning them to perpetual poverty.
1/3 of the Indian population cannot even read and write…. How do you think you can increase awareness in their kids?
In a society where a female is often reduced to a Cooking Machine and a Sex Toy, How do you plan to tell her her rights?
How can you tell a couple that
1) “Agreed that a child is a God’s gift, but a dozen of them is a curse”
2) What are the benefits of a planned pregnancy?

Well Even College educated kids are no better:
I know a newly married couple (husband an engineer, wife a Post Graduate student) who conceived within 2 months of their arranged marriage. Now someone tell me how does she plan to attend school while she is carrying? Unfortunately I cannot blame the couple for not thinking through properly… “after all ignorance is a bliss.”

I have a confession to make: I do not know even even the names of the STD. So if I ever catch one, I am 100% sure it will be too late before it is diagnosed.

Many countries in Africa lost an entire generation due to AIDS… Is Indian Government also preparing a similar stage for population control?

I also admire the US educational system.
Anybody can open a university. There are cases when the universities were opened just as a memorial of their dear departed son. This mechanism ensures limitless supply of seats and colleges actively compete to enroll the best talent. The courses need to be modified each year (no this years question paper is not a rehash of the previous 5 years question paper) so that they attract prospective students.

The fees are high, but the univs offer generous scholarships, TA and RAs to ensure that deserving candidates are not able to afford it. Scholarship is not seen as a grant, but as an investment by the college. It is to attract the brightest minds that can potentially turn into brand ambassadors for the University and also enhance the learning and experience of the whole batch.

However Indians have come up with a unique higher education system:
A license raj crippled with the curse of Eklavya Syndrome.
more on education system on

We have returned to the same old Gurukul system where by limiting the access to education, the higher castes can maintain its stature. We have created a small rank of elite colleges who are respected by the society not because of the knowledge it imparts, but because of the rigorous selection process.

good education is not picking up the brightest handful of the students wasting their 4 years and then boasting about their success. Its should be like a book… anybody who has time to go through it is eligible.

I see education as an enabler who prepares the youth to take up challenges and drive the development of the nation. However we end up subsidizing the education of a bunch of pomp ass IIT/IIM graduates who have huge egos and the only mission in life is to migrate to USA never to come back.

When you talk about education, people talk about reservation. I say, open 50 more colleges so that nobody who aspires to be educated is denied of it. Nobody talks about reservation in govt run primary schools.. why? simply because there are more seats than the people aspiring to take them.
For the country’s GDP to grow at 10%, the supply of educated professional workforce should increase by at least 15%. If you say that there should be a World Class university in each district of this country: I would say…. For a population of a billion and the world’s largest source of youth this is too little.
However the reality is:
1) In last 40 years we created only one IIT (Guhathi). And at least in this decade there are no plans of having a new campus.
2) We create 20 new NIT by renaming existing RECs. A new IIT by renaming University of Roorkee. Somebody tell me how does this eyewash matter?

However I am also against government allocating a bulk of the money I pay through Educational cess to subsidize Colleges rather than educate the 30% illiterate citizens we have. Opening private operators in high school education, medical care has definitely increased the cost of these services.
But I am ok with it. After all my government has limited funds and these private players have ensured that there is quality in the system. Indian Higher education on the other hand is rotten because private players are so much restricted.

So the only solution we have is to open up Private Universities. Allow FDI in education. And I thank Arjun Singh for giving his approval.

But now i feel that it should be entirely scrapped and rebuilt. That is the only way we can modernize it and align it with the requirements of the present day India.
Firstly, policy makers are Babu’s who have never stepped outside their office. Hence they do not know what the world is. They just think of churning out more clones of themselves as the way to educate India. They always talk about opening a 100 more IIM, IIT etc. But is it what India needs?
1) IIT typically cost government 600 million each year to maintain and yet 90% of the students either move abroad or join IT industry (and hence unlearn what was taught to them)
2) A typical IIM graduate is like an IAS for the private sector. He thinks the world owes them a living. They will not work in traditional industries, sales or marketing jobs or production jobs which MBA is all about. Instead they will always long to migrate or look for a number crunching desk job at an I-bank on wall street. I can never understand in what world is tracking stock Indices requires an MBA skills.

Vocational studies. Unfortunately we are so much engrossed in churning out bots for Call centers and IT/ITES industry that we forget to have a cadre of skilled labor. In India getting a simple crane operator is almost an impossible job. You need to pay him 15k + overtime still you will be lucky to get an applicant.

The Policy Makers Babu do not see their kids attending so they never concentrate on them. Unless a company has its own training program, it is almost impossible to get a experienced factory worker. Probably that is the reason why manufacturing sector is lagging.

I was looking at an ITI syllabus.
All cast iron furnaces have been closed 30 years ago. yet a large part of the curriculum deals with it Why?
Composites/ plastics/ handling CNC and automatic machines is never even mentioned.

IT/Software will not fuel the growth for long. For a country to have a perpetual growth all areas need to be focussed.
Open up a 100 more schools to train factory workers and machine operators….. and not a call center operators.

However whenever I eat some really delicious food, it is very likely that a guy-chef or the male member of the household has prepared it. One of the best hospitality experiences are when I am served by males.

I am not a MCP who is trying to prove that males are superior in a female activity. What I am trying to say is… most guys cook/serve not out of compulsion but due to passion. While most females cook/serve because they have to.

The only difference between an Average performer and a Top performer is simply PASSION. To excel in life, one needs to pick up an activity which he/she loves, and pursue it with complete dedication.

Combing back to my rambling on education:
India has tens of thousands of graduate engineers. But even then most IT companies find them sub-standard. This is because most Indians pick engineering and software industry out of compulsion and not out of choice.

“You can take a horse to the water but you cannot make it drink”

1) If Government wants to promote Kananda, then it should open up more schools. Shutting down schools that are already running won’t promote Kanada in any form.
2) Since these schools were not getting any government grants (in fact they were paying huge sums for license etc.) State has no business in interfering with there proceedings (unless of course the education and facilities are sub-standard)
3) Majority of these schools lied in the suburban area, where people from lower middle class used to send their wards for quality education. So denying them English education might force the parents to shell out huge sums for the already few education.
4) There is a market for English medium schools so private schools cater to the niche. Closing these schools would only worsen the situation. Remember it will be the poor who will suffer, the rich will pay some donation and continue to send their kids to the choicest schools.
5) Do they want some kick-back to regularize these schools? More the controls, more inspector raj, more the corruption.

When will government realize that it has done a shoddy job in providing government sponsored primary schools to the masses? Subsidizing college education at the expense of primary education does not benefit the average Indian. Still 30-40% of the children have no access to schools.

Private schools are doing a great service by providing education without government having to spend a single penny (out of infamous educational cess). If you cannot assist them, then at least do not hamper their work.

2) School education: If you look at school with best board results, theie fees are always affordable. While the school which is the most expensive always has below average results ( and many of them do not even impart education beyond 5th class) These expensive private schools will take admission interviews of a 3year old and their parents. What is it for, what purpose does it serve? I have no idea. But I have never met a person who aced in the primary school as well as in life.(discounting people from places where there was no compitition)

3) College education. The most wonderful thing I discovered recently was that ISB school of business charges more tution fee per month than any of the ivory business school. Comparing 2.4lakh charged by IIM for a 2 year course with 17lakhs charged by ISB for a 1 year course make the whole structure ridiculous, but ISB charges more fees than Stanford, California, Berkley and MIT. Also the school is only 4-5 years old and is still establishing itself, I shouldnot comment on the quality. But probably who can pay so high fees, already have big offices and father’s businesses to run. So they already might be at the top positions.

Even in graduation, I found fees at IIT were 16thousand per semester, while most of the private engineering colleges were safely charging upto 80 thousand per semester (with much less faculty, and facilities). Then for those who could not afford even this 16thousand, there were more scholarships than applicants. So if you fell in the merit cum means criteria, you will get a full tution fee waiver and a monthly stipend. For the rest there were affordable student loans, which banks were more than happy to lend. So good schools and college always ensure that you do not pay through the nose for education, and no bright student is denied education because of economic reasons.

Inspired by this, I thought of checking US schools, before generalizing. The top 20 schools(engineering and comerce) always have many times more scholarships, research assistanceship, tution fee waivers then the rest of the schools. Also the highest fees is always getting charged by the mediocre colleges. Call it a price of mediocricity, but next time if someone cribs about the expensive education, you might be safe to assume that he is not very bright.

Well ever wondered why we always mention about the glorious past, well agreed that the Vedas and Upanishads were master pieces at their time, but those were written in the early age of Aryan culture what was there after that? Takshila and Nalanda lay as ruins soon.

Dark Age of Indian education!

Propagators of Gurukul system seem to be very sure that teachers selected were of high caliber in knowledge and character. Well the reality is that there was no central authority controlling the appointment of teachers. There was no fixed syllabus.

Each and every person by virtue of being born as a Brahmin had an inherent right to be a teacher. He could open an ashram and take pupils as and when he likes, and he could give certificate of completion of studies as and when he chooses. He was not bound by any law of land nor any convention of teachers’ body. There used to be guilds and bodies of merchants and craftsmen, but I am unaware if some institution was established to supervise the teaching and conduct of the teacher in such gurukuls. Most of the gurukuls were single teacher residential ones free from any royal or academic control. What was the guarantee of quality under these circumstances? It is a matter of egotism, vanity and conceit to think of quality in such teaching institutions. These gurukuls had no respect in foreign lands and never attracted any foreign students.

Course Content

There seems to be misconceived idea that a student coming out from such a school had all the requisite qualities of a good citizen. This is far from the truth. He used to have learned by heart the Brahmanic sastras, which hardly make him versatile. He could never think of outside matters. What is not in his books does not exist for him. Al Biruni, for example, mentioned that Indian scholars have no knowledge of civilization abroad, and they disbelieve if somebody tells them about it. Their thought process centered on the rituals, vratas and ceremonies.

The Brahmanic knowledge consisted of recital of Vedas, without understanding the meaning of what is being recited, and was miles away from the actual life of productive castes. As a matter of fact, it was enjoined that the recites must not try to understand the meaning of what he reads.

The education was more centered around training some parrots who could sing than create some educated civilized citizens. Writing new books or literary texts, doing scientific study was never encouraged. The medium of instruction was Sanskrit which is a dead language of any value for the community.

Infact, there was no medium for scientific study till the 18th century. The educated class predominately used Sanskrit and Farsi. ( Haath kangan ko aarsi kya, padhe likhe ko farsi kya… meaning like you are not expected to need a mirror for the ornaments in your forearm, you are expected to know farsi if you call yourself educated)

Sanskrit was constructed in the poetic lines (where the stanzas need to by rhyming) which makes it tough for any recording work. The Hindi which we very proudly say as ours was never a written language. It was first written in a paragraph form ( like it is today) by British scholars in the 18th century.

And we blame British to ruin our education system.

One cannot stick for a couple of centuries with the same book in hand and say it is the ultimate source of all knowledge and is written by god himself. Like civilization even books need to evolve. Saying that this scientific discovery was already mentioned in so and so stanza of this ancient book is ridiculous. If you already knew about it then I would say… shame on you Vedic scholars. You are sitting on a gold mine of knowledge and have gained nothing from it.

———————————————————————————–
Chanakya’s views (Now writing as DeadManWalking)

I have heard about the glory of the upinishads and vedas since I was born. Everything we have now is already in the vedas. Recently a girl told me that we have had no progress in the field of medicines new in medicine thats not in ayurveda or ancient Chinese medicine! were her exact words. I dont know much but i definitely don’t think this is correct. I don’t believe penicillin is mentioned in the vedas is it ? Coming to the vedas its all about interpretation isn’t it. A shlok praising the sun god calculates the value of pi to huge number of decimal places. I don’t know Sanskrit but i found that to be awesome (i am not being sarcastic here).

Between Chinese and Indian aurveda a huge amount of knowledge is covered. However one still has to remember that we still have no cures for a huge number of diseases and we seem to be very apt at finding new ones. diseases which were not even there in ancient times definitely have no cure today. Oh yhea and cancer and radiology and tumors. Let me see the ancient method for tumor in the brain was to remove a part of the skull so that the pressure on the brain decreases (practiced in very few places most places would just kill off the person calling him crazy) . Nowadays i can choose to have my brain fried in case of tumor.

But medicine has not improved much over the ages. However the others parts of the medical world has improved. Surgery for example. We are so intent on glorifying our past that we tend to forget the present. the past is always perfect isn’t it? We keep on hearing about the great things being found in the vedas. The design of an aircraft for example, however within a few months of the claim there was no longer any more information about it. If the vedas are such a huge storehouse of knowledge then why hasn’t it all been brought out?? just random parts from people who disappear over the horizon.

The vedas have information there is no doubt about it. but what i don’t know and as far as i see no1 else really does except that they know its there.

As far as the ancient education system goes which denied every person the right to study. The immorality of it all is still beheld as being a great system by a majority of the country. Considering that even today the caste system is so prevalent in India i find it absolutely ridiculous. Not that our present system is any better, if you can afford it u can get education. What was initially being denied by virtue of caste is now being denied by virtue of cash. and lets not talk about the government mid day meal programs and its education effort. when the process will be able to lift a person from the downtrodden to reach one of the premier institutes of the country without reservations then ill say it has succeeded.

while i cannot comment about the course content of the gurukul system especially since i wasn’t there nor have i really seen anything other than in the serials and movies. If the vedas were that good i believe then all those stuff must have been imparted into the disciples by the gurus. But somehow it doesn’t look like it happened did it? were the teachers so righteous that they forgot to impart knowledge written in books ? or did the books come to be written at a time when all knowledge had been forgotten. But one thing is guaranteed the aim of an education system such that the knowledge is limited to a particular caste is bound to fail in one way or the another. if education in those times was how and why we are better than the person whom we have conquered in the past then no thanks i say. i cannot believe that we can stil think about that as being a great system of education

Those who are fond of Gurukul education, know well its draw backs, but will not speak because of their vested interests. First thing gurukul was never open to the majority of masses. About 85 to 90 percent of population was outside the pale of Gurukuls. Only the 15 percent population was being catered by Gurukuls. That too, only the boys were admitted and not the girls, thus bringing the total possible population to be only about seven percent.

There were no criteria for admission apart from the caste and whims and fancies of the teacher. Examples of denial of admission to very meritorious candidates on the basis of caste are seen. Glaring example is of Eklavya. Not only the guru Dronacharya denied admission to Eklavya, but demanded Eklavya’s thumb as gurudakshina for education NOT imparted by him. Many people feel it is irony of fate and mockery of awards, that such a name is associated with highest sports awards in this country, without any protest from the sufferers of the system.

Second example is of Karna, who got admission to Parashurama’s class, which was exclusively reserved for the Brahmins, on false statement of caste. Benefit of his knowledge, labeled as unlawfully obtained, was withdrawal when his caste became known, which ultimately lead to his death.

Example of Satyakama Jabala is mentioned by many orthodox people to erroneously show that education in Upanishadic times was open to low caste people. This is a wrong inference drawn from his story. Satyakama was asked by his guru his caste. His mother sent a word to the guru that she did not know the exact father of the child as she had relations with many people. This frank statement, the guru declared, can only be a statement of a son of a Brahmin. So the admission to the gurukul was done on the basis of Brahmin caste. Not only that, the test applied by him, and his presumption of Brahmin caste, was derogatory to non-Brahmins, because it was his belief that only Brahmins could speak such a truth and non-Brahmins could not have uttered such truth. It may be noted that the declaration was made by the child’s mother, who had no right to education. How a bold statement by mother can decide the caste of putative father, is a mystery, nobody has ever talked about.