Indian Ed-Tech Start-Ups/Ed-Tech Unicorns
Escaping the Ed-tech start-ups
A personal account of escaping a gruelling Indian ed-tech start-up to prioritise mental and physical health.
What happens when your ability to say ‘no’ is taken away; when you are gaslit into believing that your ‘no’ hurts thousands of lives; when you are lauded for saying ‘yes’ even while you are drowning — instead being offered a hand of assurance?
Do not confuse this with my partially self-inflicted personalised trauma (that is a conversation for another day), this is a chronicle of my experience with an Indian Ed-tech Unicorn that fashions itself to be the beacon of light that our education system had been waiting for all this while.
So, where did this story begin? A renowned NGO decided that it could make a difference in the lives of millions of children by challenging people to enter the system as teachers for two years. Motivated youngsters and adults alike joined this mission, each carrying within themselves the mantra that ‘not all superheroes wear capes, some just wear cotton kurtas and enter classrooms’.
At the back of your mind, a voiceover resembling Shah Rukh Khan’s ‘Sattar-minute speech’ from Chak De India played as you sat down to plan the lessons for the week. As the voice, which was a mix of the CEO and your manager, echoed ‘two years … that’s all you have to change the world’, you started wondering how teaching nouns would make a difference in the life of that student who had to work in a shoe shop so that there was cash at home to feed a family of seven people.
Yet, you lived the life of ‘urban penury’ and the parents of your students indulged your messiah complex with inappropriate gratitude. By the time you reached the placements at the end of two years, the voice in your head had metamorphosed into that of your parents, chiding, ‘begin charity from home and please earn enough to at least pay your own bills, if not to support our household …’.
Anyhow, I digress. As you continued with the hangover of impact, your desire for social change not yet satiated, you grabbed a well-paying ed-tech job with both hands. Clearly, the horror of not being able to change anything with your ‘brilliantly planned’ lesson plans had not set in completely. And thus you spiralled into a perpetual journey of guilt where nothing is ever enough. You basked under the glory of values like empathy and growth mindset, you looked down on those with ‘empty opinions’ on the education system (clearly, you know so much more in just three years), and you accepted every deadline because ‘excellent education’.
As you eased into your new normal, the masks started coming off. It started with that one deadline which asked you to stretch overnight. Considering deadlines holy, you decided to burn a candle or two for once. However, you didn’t realise the monster that you had unleashed on yourself. The eyes were ready to prey on your mediocre expertise and nerve-wracking fear of being unemployed. Suddenly, you found yourself in the line of fire — battling the missiles of books, plans, and frameworks — ready to build a life-changing curriculum overnight.
You kept consoling yourself with rose-tinted dreams of turning lives magically with your concept times and graphic organisers. The sly monster offered you awards for your dumb faith and hard work month after month, and like a child, you lapped it up. And then, project after project, a new voice emerged, ‘I don’t get paid enough for this…’. But you were already deep into the vortex by then and all escape routes had been shut. And while you chose to suffer in silence like a martyr, goblins and elves reaped rewards for their sweet tongues.
Then, as ‘the vision’ turned from one sentence to three paragraphs, you started wondering how had velocity come into the picture when you pursued the pole star of excellence. And when you were thrown around the assembly-line production like a desi version of Chaplin from Modern Times, you began questioning whether that book which was drenched in your blood was created for the student or the salesperson.
The business of guilt slowly consumed the parent, the principal, the teacher, and you. Each of you was ready to sacrifice your sanity at the altar of the gigantic unicorn. Yet, you remained silent because ‘we don’t believe in blaming, we believe in taking responsibility…’. Of course, until it’s the appraisal time and you get penalised for every error that occurred when you created products out of your arse while it was still on fire. You realised that students may or may not get propelled, but the diabolic unicorn would have certainly propelled you towards a straitjacketed future.
This brings us to the questions with which we began — how do you survive in an environment where people marinate in their mediocrity while believing themselves to be a god’s gift to humanity? Well, the answer in my case was run Lola run.
Finally comes the awakening, and fortunately for you, this time it is not Sophie’s choice. You know it is either survival or an eternal acceptance of the cult run by not-so-closeted sanghis. Of course, this comes with its fair share of manipulation such as ‘you are our star performer’, roughly translated as ‘where would we find another reliable beast of burden like you’. It also comes with lollipops of more money and power, but they forget that by this time you have regained enough sense to know that the real rewards are reserved exclusively for friends and sycophants. This is when you decide to invest your money in therapy rather than draining your blood for people who can preach ten values, yet function with none.
As I hang my boots and bid goodbye to this sector, one realisation dominates my mind more than anything else: a sector that had emerged on our collective guilt of privilege, in reality, only values those who boast of the same privilege. So, a degree from a foreign university or IITs and IIMs would always be valued more than hardcore fieldwork because ‘not from a good school’. Glory will come to those who would shine as success stories on the mantle rather than the ones who held the courage to question the system.
Some may say it is a case of sour grapes, loss of passion, or mismatched intent and values, to them I would say:
In my life
Why do I smile
At people who I’d much rather kick in the eye?
In my life
Oh, why do I give valuable time
To people who don’t care if I live or die?
(“Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” by The Smiths)
