It’s an unexpected setting but yet, in a quaint Chennai paradox, there it is. Walking into the temporary premises of the Great Lakes School of Management, set in Shrinagar Colony in Saidapet is something of a shock. From outside, the building looks like a smallish business esablishment, no more.
Walk in past the security sign-in and there you are. Groups of students dressed in jeans and tees or crumpled salwars, mill around looking at ease in what appears to be a global environment. Perched at the reception desk quite casually, scribbling away at a slip of paper, quite oblivious to the people around, is Dr Bala V Balachandran, Kellog Distinguished Professor of Accounting, Information and Management; Director, Accounting Research Center; who is also Hon Dean at the Great Lakes Institute of Management(GLIM) that offers an intensive twelve-month post-grad programme in business management.
If Dr Bala’s various credentials impress, his beginnings offer glimpses of the man who took wing to the US of A, simply for the vast choices in academia that country offered. Born in a small village in the Chettinad region, Dr Bala was brought up at Pudukottai till he was eighteen years of age. He went on to take a Masters from the then fledgling Annamalai University, after which he took on the post of a lecturer. But academics beckoned and Dr Bala looked to greener pastures in this quest for knowledge – America became the given destination. An illustrious academic career followed… which included the No.1 rank and gold medal for his Phd from the Carnegie Mellon University – a feat that remains unsurpassed so far.
Now, 37 years later and a US citizen to book, Dr Bala is back to the city he loves best, a country he wants to give something back to. “I am an Indian,” says the academic whose many students today can be counted among the world’s achievers, “I am back in Chennai because in a sense this is a city where my roots are, my mother and a brother are here. I have lived here and want to return something to the community.”
This longing to `give back’ drives Dr Bala’s other passion – creating quality primary education and spearheading wealth generation in the country’s villages. A programme which has already been drafted on paper, he tells us, one that he has co-written with 77-year-old Kohli, Dept Chairman of TCS and the person he dubs as the `Father of IT’ in India. “Village schools don’t work when there’s just one teacher to oversee all subjects,” he says, “Very often the father makes the children help him in the fields – school then becomes the casualty.” Dr Bala goes on to describe how this vision melds popular media(vis: films and filmstars) to technology(the portable computer/television) to take education to where the child is. “For example,” says he, “Just imagine this laptop or TV fixed to the plough belting out various subjects; and say a popular filmstar like a Jyotika or an Ajit singing it to a tune set by Rahman. The repetitive nature of such a medium would ensure that the subject is memorised well.” This, says the academic, should trigger off an interest in the education process in the children, in turn, drawing them into the world of books and learning. He also describes how such education can be aided and monitored through centralised village systems.
If such a system seems far-fetched, Dr Bala is emphatic that it is workable. “Ensure that every major company adopts at least 2-3 villages,” says he, “Make the NRI put money and `brains’ into the community he came from. For instance, if every NRI puts in a 1,000 dollars and an initiative to help back into his native village – we can make this country prosperous. I am from a village myself and I know how I struggled…”
This coming together of the `American Greatness’ in academics and research with the Indian ethos and values - is at the core of Dr Bala’s vision for India - to bring to enlightenment, its vast knowledge potential. So it’s no surprise that this Padmashri, who has been among the prime movers in setting up B-schools in Gurgaon(Management Development Inst) and Hyderabad(Indian School of Business) bills his state-of-the-art up-and-coming GLIM campus on Old Mahabalipuram Road as a `gurukulam’!
No comments:
Post a Comment