01.11.2026

S: They charge you tens of thousands for one year’s learning in a degree. And yet the degree itself is absolutely valueless except for a handful of chosen people.

A: In what sense?

S: Most people can’t get any work in their field after they have graduated. I certainly didn’t. And I have five degrees with top class results.

A: So degrees are valueless.

S: Precisely. Employers don’t value degrees and top results. Academics doesn’t value degrees and top results. Teachers, art galleries, museums, these don’t value degrees and top results. Friends and family don’t value degrees and top results. Who does value this? No one.

A: It is a sad and unintelligent world.

S: Precisely. And, if we are talking about academic achievement, we have to point out that academic achievements also impress no one. You publish a book. The world says, ‘so what?’ You consistently keep on publishing everywhere. The world says, ‘so what?’ It never ever counts. It never translates into opportunities.

A: Why?

S: Because it is not your brain or your talent in the humanities that counts. Instead, what matters is your ethnicity and your cultural background. What matters is if you can go with the agenda that has been set in this society. If you back yourself and your own community, then you will have nothing to hold in your hand.

A: If all of this is true, why do you keep on accruing degree after degree with top results?

S: So I can say that I hold all of this and still they denied me my rightful place in thought. I can prove their unfairness. Because I have the hunger for education that they withheld from my people, the Dalits, The Oppressed. The low castes. Because genius demands work and I am a genius.

A: You work and work and work. And then, at the end of a long day, on your days off, early in the morning, you study. And it gets you nothing and nowhere.

S: My grandad said one thing that stuck with me when I was a boy. He told me that our people, The Untouchables, we had to study standing up when everyone was sitting down in a class. Adversity was our lot because we were not one of the powerful. And yet, education was what our people needed. It was my duty to get education for our community. They can starve us and starve us and starve us. Still, we will have our voice. We will have our education. This privilege that I have been given, that I have this mind and that I have the resources to study, to have a voice, I cannot squander that privilege. There is still one man in this world that believes in education. Not like the universities, or the museums, or the art galleries, or the schools and colleges, which just see education as money and a cash transaction. As purely a business and nothing else. As purely the ideology of the dominant and nothing else. Someone that believes in education for itself as transformative power to better society and the self. Someone that is pure. Someone that sees the real value in education, not the actual value that this society has bestowed upon it.