Friday, February 29, 2008

Leader's GPA !

Recently there was a lot of huzz buzzz related to the Lead India competition [http://lead.timesofindia.com/default.asp]. It was a search for the future leaders of India . What struck me was a thought of what should be a leader material and could there a be any single criteria that is must filtering criteria for a leader. Should future leaders have a minimum education criteria ??

Most obvious and generic answer to this question is YES ! . Most of the people I know believe that this should be definitely true for all leaders. They should at least have one area of specialization . How would a illiterate non-graduate person understand the complexities in this arena of globalization . Would his decision making be simply based on personal instincts and favoritism with a complete absence of any logistics behind it! .

While most of the people agree with the above views , I am still not 100% in favor of keeping a strict eligibility for a leader. When we say a graduate , there are so many graduates around us from various background who lack the basic knowledge of their own expertise. Automobile Engineers who are far worse than an automobile mechanic around , commerce graduates who cannot do any more calculations and analysis than a shopkeeper can do. Moreover most of their time is spent in attending some useless lectures and mugging up the most likely questions for their exams. Social life is limited to a hostel room , night parties and college gatherings . Do these people really represent the common man ? Do they have a slightest insights of the needs and difficulties of the poor ? . Have they seen any world outside their urban culture . Moreover how do these people earn public support and keep party members happy and loyal without slogging for the party . Do their earned certificates give them a right to rule the people since all they did was passed some graduate exam . Could anyone testify that they are always better than an illiterate leader who never got an opportunity to study and spent his life working for the people around and thereby increasing his good will and support.

To sum it up few things that are essential for a leader is decision making , domination at least in the party , guts to withstand and play political moves and ability to earn popular support even if by misguiding the common people ! . A future leader should definitely be able to not only understand the global opportunities and issues apart from local and national politics but also be able to put the implementation to the grass root . Should there be any rule demanding leaders to be academically proficient still remains a controversial issue for me !

6 comments:

Sam said...

well i agree with ur views about leader, but by what do u mean a common man??? Its defination is very important. beacuse every 'common man' has radically different needs.....

P1 said...

by this I mean our entire population , lower , upper and the middle class ..

Snigdha Shevade said...

hey update your blog dude.. no controversies off late?? :-O

take this comment as an encouragement rather than something irrelevant on your blog!! :-P

p.s: waiting for a controvertial debate!!!! :-D

P1 said...

yeah ...a bit busy wid work these days ...
ll do it soon ..
btw there hasnt been any debate as such yet ! .. i put something either ppl agree both sides or they don know !

P1 said...

and would you stop that "irrelevant on ur blog" thing :p

Snigdha Shevade said...

what?? i should be saying it damn it!!! :-P so when are you going to create a controvery?? ;-)