Bringing Up Innovators, Inventors, and Scientists

If you have spent your life building a great professional career, gathering a corpus, the worst way to help humanity would be to spend it on charity.

- Abhishek Asthana

Don't get me wrong; helping the underprivileged is great. But you need to build privilege for your offspring first. Let me explain.

The best way to contribute to humankind would be to provide a financial cushion for your kids, so that they can study without worrying about getting a stable monthly salary to pay off their education loan. Many great scientists from the 19th century came from privileged backgrounds, be it J. Robert Oppenheimer or Niels Bohr. You need to build enough corpus so that your child can spend more years in college and happily "opt-out" of final placements; a privilege many people of my generation couldn't enjoy. As a school-going kid, I loved physics, especially rotational mechanics, so much so that I would doodle free-body diagrams on the back of notebooks. Draw force vectors and conjure tougher questions. Imagine myself to be one of the three cast members of Big Bang Theory. But I also knew, for a lower middle-class kid like me, education was a means to eventually earn money and pay back to my investors—my parents—who had taken money out of their Provident Fund account to pay the first-year fees. Naturally, my education loan EMIs strangulated my love for physics. And I shifted to a shared PG in BTM Layout, Bengaluru, hissing obscenities at the traffic while chasing the next pay slip.