From Ivory Towers to Realities

Published in Express Tribune on 29th June 2015

As MIT freshmen are wont to do, we were up way past midnight discussing big absorbing questions like the meaning of life. We realised that none of us had a clue and decided to ask our professors. A natural candidate was our history professor, who seemed approachable and had engaged us in interesting discussions in class. He gave us an answer which seemed satisfying at the time. He said that we had to learn the basics we were being taught, before we could tackle the big questions. It was many decades later when I realised that we had been swindled. In a classic bait-and-switch manoeuvre, we were tempted with the possibility of learning wisdom and sold an entirely different package.

[read more]