In his recent interview, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak mentioned that Indians measure success with academic excellence and a good job, but lack creativity.
In an interview with The Economic Times, he said:
The culture here is one of success based upon academic excellence, studying, learning, practising and having a good job and a great life. That’s a lot like Singapore study, study, work hard and you get an MBA, you will have a Mercedes but where is the creativity? The creativity gets left out when your behaviour is too predictable and structured, everyone is similar.
He added that he doesn’t see any big Indian tech company making a breakthrough internationally.
I am not an anthropologist and I don’t know the culture of India well enough. I don’t see those big advances in tech companies. What is the biggest tech company here, Infosys maybe? I just don’t see that sort of thing coming out of Infosys and I have done keynotes for them three times.
Now, we all know that somewhere what he said, is correct. Our education system does give more stress on scoring good than it does on being creative.
Most parents in India would want their child to take the typical engineering-MBA route, instead of going for something unconventional, so it’s not like they lack creativity but they do not get a chance to show it.
But coming from someone who’s not from India and doesn’t know about the struggles of living in this country, the comment did not go very well with Indians.
However, there are some people who agreed with him.
After reading Steve’s comment and the tweets of Indians in response, it does look like there are valid arguments made by both the sides.
We do need to introspect and attach more importance to creativity, but the problem is deep-rooted and requires collective awakening and effort to be solved.