Abhiram Chaudary stopped briefly outside the looming structure of the Indian Institute of Management (IIM). Every year he came here to hire for Teffer India, where he was vice-president (HR). Today, he looked at the great institution with deep reverence and a prayer that his son Rohan, too, would some day graduate from these portals. But the truth was that his son had a completely different vision.

Rohan did not think he needed a Masters in Business Administration (MBA); he did not think a life under a corporate collar was all there was to living. This belief came partly from his own displeasure at the tremendous pressure under which his father worked all these years. He argued that his dad, who was a terrific photographer, had wasted his life chasing a pointless dream. Rohan, therefore, would rather discover his dream first; the MBA, if at all, could wait.

Rohan was a natural, but he still did not have that raging fire to go grab the world - a trait that the HR man in Abhi would have otherwise frowned at. He knew that life would not wait for Rohan; after all, he was managing so many careers.

Abhi recalled what his professor of organisation theory had said 18 years ago. "Institutions want to widen your horizon, help you discover yourself. They use a broad range of subjects to allow you to soar for this discovery. But institutions also tend to draw you inward, towards its goals. This is because they are clearer about their objectives, whereas an individual is still discovering his goal. Organisations, with their resources, triumph over an individual, and the goals of an individual get subliminally subsumed by it. In the process, he may lose focus on his priorities. And he senses this dissonance once he matures as a person. Then there is a strife between his true calling and the environment in which he finds himself."

Abhi knew that this strife got protracted once you were deeply ensconced in a company; there were no alternatives to step out and chase old dreams. At the end of a 14-hour day, chasing targets, what choice do you have? Watching Zee, CNN? At Teffer, they talked about allowing individuals to discover who they are and the role they can make maximum contributions to. But that did not extend beyond a two-day workshop, which managers opted for as a quasi holiday! The moment these workshops were over, the bonding experiences, the liberating experiences, were also over. Soon one went back to the things one had left behind, the mundane things that give one a sense of continuity and well-being: the emails, the pressures, the targets. And one week later, nobody recalled that they had had a liberating experience!

How was it that generation after generation, this pattern was replicated? Where did the genesis lie? Then Abhi reasoned - you can't blame the organisations for this; they themselves are trying to discover their identity and true potential. They are asking, 'Are we in the right business? Should we be diversifying, upgrading and so on?'. Competition has taken over our lives, mused Abhi. But India had never been a competitive society; we had neither attacked nor plundered a country. Then what had led to this?

But his children's impressions of India were so different! His older daughter had recently written a 'middle' for a newspaper where she observed: "The industrial era spawned large institutions and we cling to them like fish and flora cling to the bottom of sunken ships. They find other uses for the metal and the wood; not to sail and move. Likewise, we are using the institutions that the British left behind very differently. The courts and police stations are used to funnel power. Newspapers and TV are in the business of selling media products, not informing. They are more concerned about not upsetting the people who pay or sponsor the space."

Competition was getting so ruthless - even the young saw it. This trend was taking people away from their natural priorities. Let alone his daughter's sense of alienation, he himself was startled by the recent BPO boom, where the best Indian minds were adding value to the US society! I can understand slogging 14 hours a day, he thought, but is it growth if all you can show for it is that you earned some money and lived off it, but the economic gains were reaped elsewhere? So the gap between what a company defined as matrix for efficiency and what is recognised as the traditional measure has increased. Who knows what the next round of boom will lead to!

ONE ripple was leading to another - just reaction-led ripples, but nothing that is structured towards capital growth, he felt. Last week, he had debated this with his colleagues. Many of them had children the age of Rohan and they were each faced with varying expressions of the future. But the common view was stated succinctly by Ritesh Chawla: "We need a different kind of thinking, but our institutes and organisations are replicating the same kind of skills, mindsets and moulds in which people are built. Our educational institutions work on the old Aristotelian principle that a society must identify its achievers, put them on a pedestal and reward them when they deliver; that some people have to lead the society and you lay down the criteria for how they are to be identified. Naturally, there will be a tendency to associate intelligence with leadership.

"So organisations want academic brilliance, so the IIMs and IITs want the same, so colleges demand 90% marks for entry and schools pummel kids to deliver 99%! It's one non-stop pressure belt! Bring that observation here.... It is not that the IITs or IIMs do something magical to people. They just do a great job of attracting the right minds and then put them on a structured path to glorious success!"

Vineet Sinha argued: "What about those who missed getting into these institutes by a percentage? Examine the grassroots level. What are our universities about? Teachers don't come; if they come, students don't go; if both come, teachers don't teach. By the time all falls into place, it's exam time. What is university life about? Ragging, elections, strikes, festivals, exams, then results. This has been the scene for 40 years. Everything else is incidental. People studying for botany, physics, maths - they all sit for the IIM entrance exam. Why? Don't we know what to do with those skills? It tells you that our universities are not encouraging students to pursue their dreams!"

Abhi felt anxious. Did that mean Teffer's future leaders did not necessarily lie among the institute-bred scholars? That many potential chairmen and directors were lost in the debris of institute rejects? Chawla said that this whole process of squeezing at school level to get the desired output at institutes was a process that organisations like Teffer encouraged. "Worse," he now said, "we have created a template and they are producing leaders in accordance. But they are not producing the leaders we need! They are supplying us with the kind of people we want! The reason is that we do not stop to define our needs precisely. Every year is a knee-jerk reaction of the one before because year after year, Teffer makes the same kind of products through the same kind of managers we hire, who think of the same kind of strategy!"

"It's not a simplistic demand-supply thing," said Abhi. "Today organisations have become all pervading entities, touching all parts of your life - even your social and family lives more than they used to!"

Ritesh didn't agree: "So organisations have also produced dull humans! That's because, at a time when they should have let the employee be a complete person, they demanded that he be just an organisation person. After 20-30 years of replicating this behaviour, they found that such a person was incapable of contributing to a larger framework called society. So they had to put him back on the drawing board and examine his psyche as an individual, as a family man, and as a man with needs and aspirations. So, today, organisations have family workshops to show this hasty concern for helping him sort out his domestic problems."

Abhi continued to counter: "But organisations are looking for ways to get more out of their employees because that is what will drive success. The main realisation is that if people are your key assets, then get the best out of them."

Marketing man Noshir Dhondy also known as Endy, who had been silently chewing gum, said: "So we have come full circle. We now allow the individual to choose his development. It's happening in other areas too. For instance, buying fruits and vegetables in a mandi. Shopping like that is very fulfilling because you have the satisfaction of buying what you want. After years of cloning, packaging, freezing, using cold chains and shrink wrapping, today Wal-Mart puts its vegetables and fruits in a heap from which the consumer chooses. They have realised it's time to let the consumer choose. Indian institutions - from academic to retail - have never evolved out of people's aspirations, but by copying templates. That is exactly what we did: we handled our people like cattle and forced a yoke around their necks. And when we realised that they have become dull, we looked towards the West and replicated what they did. Instead, all we needed to do was stay individual-centric, but we didn't. So the disconnect.