Kids, everyday is precious

This week, one of my colleagues is going to sabbatical. We took him to a restaurant of his choice for a sabbatical send away lunch. He chooses a restaurant called “Thailand Restaurant” in Beaverton, a small town near Portland, Oregon. Sabbatical is an 8 weeks paid vacation after seven years of service. The root of the word sabbatical came from Arabic number seven (Sabba); hence sabbatical.

Our team carpools and meets at the restaurant. We are a small team responsible for designing couple of Units of today’s humongous microprocessor “Core”. We ordered our food and chit chatting between Olympic, current events and work. Our small team composed of two Russians, three Indian (One from Bengal, One from Bombay and the other one from North), One Brazilian, One from Taiwan, One from Laos, One from Bangladesh, One from Chicago area and the last one from Utah. Surprisingly, none of the team members are from Portland or even from the state of Oregon.

We are a team of eleven came from seven different country, where only two are from USA, working in a USA company, which has more than 80% market share of the global microprocessor market. How amazing is that? How innovation, competition and globalization shaped the form of a small component design team in a suburb of silicon forest, where none of them came from that state.

Let me back up little bit to set the ground of today’s writing. Last month, July 2008, I was in Dhaka to see family members. During that trip I had an opportunity to hang out with couple of bright musicians at their Gulshan residence cum studio. Although the composure is single; however he brings up an important point regarding raising kid for future. “Shaping the future of our kids in the direction of science and technology”, this is what I would like to bring your attention.

With all due respect to them, I will not reveal the musicians’ identity. My kids along with four other nephews and nice, rampaging the studio. They are strumming their guitars and “DoTara”, not to mention the piano concert of my kids with the mouth piece in their hands. Anyway, we were talking about music. I am out of touch of music for a while, trying to catch up the recent trends. I remember during my University days at Purdue in Indiana. I, with my friends from the Purdue, went to Lollapalooza feasible, where “Sound Garden”, “Metalica” smashing the stage in a hot summer day in Midwest. Sudden rain soaked everybody and justifies one more excuse to have less attire. I not only attended this type of crazy concerts; but also some decent one by Sir Elton John, Paul Simon, and Bob Dylan etc.

In the middle of the discussion in their apartment, another prominent musician walked in. This third one has Master’s degree from a prestigious University in Massachusetts. We are in the middle of very talented people who happen to be musicians’. Going back to the “raising kids” discussion. One of them was talking about one of their friend in the west. Her friends are so concern about the kids future education, how to improve their intelligence and so forth. She also indicated that her friends bought all the gadgets’ by “Baby Einstein”, Leapfrog etc to tickle the tender little mind.
I can relate to their thinking. My friends here in USA, I mean, Diasporas’ are also concern about the future of their 3-6 year old kids.
At this point of the discussion, the top music composure made a comment. He said, “look at Sohel Bhai, did he ever play with Baby Einstein; but he is designing the most complicated microprocessor design of the world today.” How cool is that? This is a huge complement. The moment I started writing about it, to me, it sounds like I am bragging; however he has a point and a very good one. You don’t know what future holds; however you aim high enough to get best out of you. This does not mean that you get panic and give up everything. What it means is that you understand what you want, understand the challenges, plan a path to reach their and then start working on it. Be diligent, discipline and committed to the plan of action.

We see kids are deprived of being kids now a day. I must acknowledge that today’s kids are not the same as kids of the 80s. The expectation and demand profiles are not same as before and it should not be in a changing world. Look at Olympics at Beijing, there were accusation of extreme training from very early age. Even in the USA parents are pushing their kids to a limit to excel in Golf (to be Tiger Wood), to excel in Piano lessons (to be Mozart of tomorrow). These are reported in the major TV broadcasting. In Bangladesh, affluent children are being transported from one couching center to another.

The nightmare of parents during the admission season, irrespective of kindergarten, primary school or middle school pass down to the tender kids. Hence these kids are deprived of being a kid. I am not suggesting that you do not push your kid to excel; however you as parents need to get involve and plan ahead. Please take it easy and as smooth as you could be. There should be a balance and kids should be comfortable enough to communicate. They should participate spontaneously and trained to negotiate freely.

I have a wonderful childhood. Although, I went to a good primary school, which was by accident an English medium. However, we did not have tons of homework; most of the tasks were done at school. I had all evening to play and to be kid. I experienced a vacuum during the transition from primary school to middle school. My middle school was an average Bangla medium and enforcement of discipline was poor. Not much education was done in class and children are encouraged to attend the couching class. I did end up attending couching class in my 9th and 10th grade.

After my high school education, I went to Dhaka College for my HSC. Like almost all the students I was receiving stipend for my SSC. During my two years in Dhaka College I paid almost nothing; however I was paying a good amount for my dining hall (no subsidy there). I take no pride; on the contrary, it gives me shame that during those couple of years, like most of the students I did not attend the regular classes, there was no first year exam or second year exam. Attending class was not a cool thing those days.

There were attempts to schedule, conduct exam; but the macho students made every attempts to nullify those. And they were successful. The trend was to go to the batches at the professors’ residence to attend couching class. Students of well-to-do families had no trouble with that culture; however there are few students who had hard time to adopt that culture. They are tutoring high school students on Math and science. The remuneration that they received was directly changing hands form them to the professors.

I entered BUET after Dhaka College, thanks to my friends of Dhaka College and couching centers. I have no clue on how did I made that. I believe most of the credit goes to my friends. Hanging out with them and following the trend put me on the “BUET stream” and I sailed pretty good with the western wind of couching centers. BUET test exam is one of the horrifying life changing experiences for most of the students. For me it was like “whatever”. Because I was fool and did not really realize the true consequence of failing at that stage of life. May be that helped me to go through the process seamlessly without any tension at all. I recall couple of incidents on the day of the admission test. I was excited seeing lots of my friends going to the big exam room which was the second floor of the BUET library. I patted my friend; let’s call him T2, on his shoulder. Out of my surprise he did not return the same enthusiasm in response of my pat on his back. May be a little perturbation could disrupt his concentration of all the trick questions solutions that he piled in his mind. I should mention here that T2 did excellent in the exam and he secured his discipline of studies. Later in his life, he became a successful professor.
The second incident surprised the exam supervisor on my care free stupidity. She showed an outmost expression of irritation when I asked her if I could go to the restroom. Because nobody was wasting a single second in that time packed testing. These two incidents give some sense of seriousness of the test exam and my ignorance of the event.

Anyway, I end up with BUET. I will write about BUET some other time. Stress free environment and good association of friendship was key to my success during those days.
I had the opportunity to kid around as well as stress free guidance.

For the kids growing up today, my suggestion to them is to do what you do best and excel. Today’s children, who are aiming at science and technology, please use internet to dig what interest you. Read more and be discipline about it. More you know more you get interested. And the only way of knowing more is reading. Do not believe in “special talent or gifted child” or “sharp brain”; because they don’t exist. They are Myth. Spending time in a guided, well planned path and dedication to achieve that plan is the ticket to success. Finally the biggest advice that I can give to you is: “make your idle time into productive time”. I know my nice spent all night to study and she is not doing well enough in the study; But if you ask her how many hours she studies during her HSC days, the answer is two or at best three hours. Because her night starts at 1:00 AM and ends at 3:00 AM or may be stretched up to 4:00 AM. She wakes up at noon. You can not achieve a decent education if you don’t utilize your time in a discipline manner. Same goes with your passion or hobby, your sports or music.

So kids, have your parents in your team, get them involve with your web browsing and quest for knowledge. Respect your elder sibling and learn from their success or failure. Utilize every moment for meaningful activity that enrich your life experience. Let’s assume you have 70 years to survive then you only have ~25,000 days. Everyday is precious; do you want to waste a day doing nothing?