Some Views on What Regional B Schools in India Should Be Doing

At the very outset, I would like to issue a disclaimer that this article is based on my own observations and my own opinions only!


Now that enough has been said and done over the economic meltdown and the subsequent recovery, nations, international bodies, think tanks and institutions are looking at setting an agenda for the future. Though at a relatively small scale, I am a part of a project group that is supposed to explore selected fields of socio-economic activity to identify and recommend road maps in those fields that can take India to a double digit growth.
As always, I cannot help but wonder what could be the role of management education in the regional and small business schools in helping achieve a double digit growth rate. My choice of the specific field of “management education” is a subset of the grander question of the role of education in a nation achieving sustainable inclusive growth. But addressing the issue of “education” and that too in India would need us to examine an extensive array of variables. Such a piece of work would be an interesting doctoral dissertation but for the sake of brevity (and my own limitations!), I chose to stick to commenting on issues in management education. Even in the case of management education, issues worthy of consideration are far too many for a casual article to address. I have decided to stick to the regional and small business schools as it is them that form a major part of the 1700 odd business schools in India and produce the bulk of the management manpower of the country. Moreover the established national players have the luxury of captive markets and great human resources.
In this article, I shall try to espouse my opinions about the following:

• The role of regulatory bodies.
• What do we need to teach?
• How should students be rated?
• What should be the role of the placement cell?


Seek Approval & Accreditation
On Jan 26, 2010, Times of India ran a story that ISB is among the to rated business schools of the world right up there with some of the best ever. Then on April 29, 2010, the same newspaper carries another story that the Hon’ble HRD Minister tells the press that ISB is one of the 201 institutions that are running without “government” (read AICTE) approval! I know this cannot be a good argument in favour of seeking approval and I do not intend it be. On the other hand I have been a witness to AICTE inspections at four different AICTE approved colleges and have seen how the system works! Any further explanation of this point would bring me into “how the system works” will bring this article into very dangerous and potentially libelous territory!
The target segment of ISB and the the excellent positioning of ISB that ISB aspirants do not really bother about approval but in case of “me too” business schools serving the aspirations of the burgeoning middle class at regional levels need that certification for acceptability among students and parents. Such colleges usually serve the segment of the population that still looks for the security of “government approved” label on anything they invest their money time and trust in. My logic is simple; as an educational institution, you will seek to attract as many students as you can so that you can influence and enable as many of them as you can. And for this, approval from relevant authorities seems to help a lot. And by what I have seen, getting AICTE approval is not a hard nut to crack! Once the approval monkey is off your back, you can focus on establishing and executing systems that staying within the permissible constraints can maximise the value delivered to the student, her family and the society at large.


What Do We Need to Teach?
I frankly have failed to see any point in faculty rephrasing what is already there in the standard texts and then expecting students to regurgitate that in examinations. The teaching-learning system at most business schools I have had any association with have been employing either the same “spoon feeding” system a student is exposed to in India from childhood or a variation of that. I had many friends and juniors who went to the IIMs and the IITs and I used to keep “interrogating” them to try and see how they do it these places. To my surprise, it was no very different from some of the progressive but relatively lesser known business schools I have worked with. The main difference came out to be the “teachers” and the “students” but the “methodologies” being followed were not very different from what we are doing where I work now!
The difference in faculty was that most of the faculty over there either had a lifetime’s worth of experience in the industry and thus knew what they were talking about or were constantly interfacing with the industry for training, research and consultancy work. This association with the industry not only helped them stay in touch with the practicalities and the realities but also helped them better understand at what kind of human resource the industry needed. This knowledge enabled them to deliver sessions that maximised the chances of a student becoming such a human resource.
The students were also different from the ones we see in the regional and me to business schools. Many of the students I met at IIMs and IITs had valuable industry experience that gave them an edge as they already had a clear idea of why they were there and what they needed to do. Then there were the freshers who lacked the industry experience but were a fired up lot. Considering what a student has to face to be at such a place, one can assume that you must be a fairly intelligent and highly motivated individual. At such places one can argue that an MBA should mean dispensing knowledge in the subjects opted for by the students and that one need not (and may not have a mandate for) tinkering with their personalities and mindsets!
But the regional and “me too” business schools may not be able to attract such accomplished faculty and such students. In such a case, it becomes imperative for the policy makers of such institutions to get together and develop a clear action plan based on the kind of students a college gets. As an example I would like to present the case of a college I have associated with in the past. Since the college was one among the multitude of undifferentiated educational institutions spawned by Punjab Technical University, we did not have the luxury of being able to attract very good students. In fact they were students our academic system had labeled as “average” to “well below average”. Rarely would we come across a student who had more than 60% marks in 10+2 or had a passable command over English or any idea why they wanted to do an MBA! Luckily for this college, some freak accident of nature saw some very capable and accomplished academicians and professionals converge there as faculty! The faculty body got together and after a protracted series of discussions and debates decided that focusing on “motivation”, “soft skills” and “awareness”. We also decided to not treat the students as “weak” students and exposed them to a very demanding curriculum. I am vey happy to announce that most of our students in that college who had been written off by the system not only survived but prospered. When I use the word “prospered”, I actually mean it. I know many of them and most of them who chose to build a career are already at middle management levels and many have started their own entrepreneurial ventures.
We just need to open minds and then sit back see them bloom! Of course we do need to dispense the mandatory functional knowledge but that is not the end. In fact I consider that the insignificant part at the regional business schools. Here the focus should be on training and mentoring to carve out an emotionally balanced, moderate, progressive, innovative and happy individual!


How Should the Students Be Rated?
A recent encounter with my super boss saw us at the receiving end of the following question, “What do the students want from the teacher?” Cautious answers ranged from “answers” to “knowledge” to “guidance” to “mentoring”. But we all knew when such a question is asked the answer is never this complicated! He patiently heard us all out and in the end, his answer was “Marks”!! That’s it!! Again I marveled at the simplicity! Come to think of it, what did we ever need from teachers? In most cases, it was marks! Even in cases of teachers like Dr. M. A. Zahir at Punjab Agricultural University whom we used to hold in extremely high regard and we would blanch if some one suggested that we went to him only for marks. Even in his case, marks were a measure of how well we “measured up” in his view!
What students believe is worthwhile to do or not to do is indicated to them by the kind of evaluation system an educational institution has. Take the case of another experiment in my current workplace. I saw that despite repeated requests to stay “aware” not many were investing the quantum of effort in that direction which I could deem significant. My current workplace offers great freedom in evaluation systems and I made it a point to make general awareness an integral component of all my class evaluations. The result was that even for the final university examination, when the knew that general awareness would not feature in the examination, they prepared for it and an year later a very large percentage of students were hooked on to “knowing” stuff!!
Otherwise too, I have seen that student performance in a business school does not necessarily translate into professional success. Ideally the regional and small business schools should identify the regular recruiters from the college and the recruiters they wish would recruit from their college, get them together and ask them to partner the institution for development of the evaluation systems. This will help increase the validity and reliability of the scales used to measure student performance at business schools. One of the main problems in my opinion is that the student rating and ranking is primarily based on “academic performance” and the tools used primarily measure ability to cram up and reproduce. The term “student performance” should be a multi dimensional construct that is able to evaluate the individual on various parameters that are critical for the success of managers and entrepreneurs.


What Should Be the Role of the Placement Cell?
The prevalent paradigm defines the role of the placement cell as a group of individuals tasked to invite companies for campus placement. This definition essentially degrades the role of the cell into a hard core sales function which should consider “Sell whatever the product is like” as its guiding mission!
I believe that if you should have a placement cell use it to interface between the faculty and students with the industry. The cell should partner in the development of a students right from the beginning rather than getting involved in the end or at the time of summer internship. The cell should act as the polishing agent that will design sessions and modules of its own for the students. These session should focus on career planning, interview skills, awareness etc. The placement cell and the faculty should meet regularly to evaluate the student development, propose changes, and appraise each other of needs and changes.
If the cell does it’s job well, honestly, the college will not need a placement cell! My limited experience as the placement coordinator for a couple of batches of MBA at a local college taught me that the role of the cell needs to be very proactive and consistent. It is not possible for a placement cell to swing recruitments in the favour of their institutions by making just a few calls and presentations as hiring at most national and multinational organizations are policy matters decided at the headquarter level where the placement coordinator of regional colleges may never even reach!
On the other hand, if the placement cell of a college can somehow enhance the long term employability and value of a student, the industry will start flocking in eventually!


How is All This Related to Growth?
Not only growth, sustainable, inclusive growth! The quality of business education in a country is a barometer of it’s development and when we talk of quality of management education, we should look not only at the IIMs and IITs but towards the small entrepreneur run business school with 60 seats affiliated to a state university. It is many such universities that churn out the next generation of MBAs in India. Most such MBAs are still afflicted with the “need a job” and “afraid to loose a job” mentality. If we keep on producing job seekers who are too scared of looking one, the chances that we will be able to achieve our goals seems remote.
We need to set minds free. Asking mundane questions and making students solve “ready to serve” cases will not help. Give them raw cases, let them “decide” something at every step for decision making is going to be critical. Make them do stuff!! “Decisive Action” as a colleague of mine says is the most valuable ingredient of success.

The emerging business reality is fast and furious! Competition is intense, life cycles have shrunk but opportunities are there for those companies and individuals who are able to break the pattern and innovate! And innovation comes from free, happy, confident individuals. And that is whom we need to create!

Of Graveyards and Life

A quiet place nestled in the shadow of the Punjab Cricket Association stadium, Phase 9, Mohali is an unremarkable neighborhood. A cluster of houses, hospital and a couple of religious abodes packed together in a cubical monotony so typical of middle class neighborhoods all across India. On April 11, the monotonous predictability and order of this neighborhood gave way to intense social tension.
Phase 9, Mohali along with its homes, hospitals, temples and Gurudwaras is address for a piece of land which is legally owned by the Waqf Board and is demarcated as a burial ground. In a country that is home to the second largest Muslim population in the world after Indonesia, this is too is an unremarkable piece of information. Waqf Board like other community bodies owns properties all over the country and burial grounds too are not an unheard of concept.
Yet on April 11, when the Muslim community of the area assembled to bury one of theirs on a piece of land that had been allotted to them for that, they were prevented from doing so. The otherwise conservative middle class homes where “Do not meddle in others’ issues” would be a common preach got together and objected to the burial.
What was to be a solemn and maybe a somber event that has been performed for ages transformed into a distasteful stand off between two social groups. I call it a stand off between two social groups deliberately. It would have been a far easier event to analyse had it been the more common and expected run of the mill showdown between two religious groups. In this case this was a standoff between two groups, but the differences between them were far deeper than merely religious.
The residents of Phase 9 who had objected to the Muslim burial were a hurriedly patched up coalition of predominantly Hindu and Sikh families. The presence of a mosque in Phase 9 means that there were Muslim families in the area too and maybe a couple of Christian families thrown in for good measure. On the other side you had a group of Muslims who were being vigorously supported by Hindus and Sikhs from their village. As both groups had all the religious groups in their ranks the only difference seems to be that one party to the dispute was Rural in nature and the other was Urban! One could also fairly assume that the “Urbans” were more “well to do” and educated than the “Rurals”.
Yet for some reason the more educated and the more “well to do’ took an uncharacteristically radical stand to deny what was a constitutional and human right of a community. Their objection to the burial was that as the plot of land was smack in the middle of a residential neighborhood, they could no allow what was an equivalent to a cremation to be performed in their midst. Right from seemingly rational arguments about the need for burial grounds to be situated away from residential areas to ridiculous ones like fear of their innocent children being attacked by ghosts were presented by the Urbans. The Rurals on the other hand had a very simple submission. They needed to bury their dead and no one could stop them from doing so on a piece of land that had been allotted to them for that very purpose constitutionally. Both parties began calling for reinforcements and in no time the event had escalated to a flashpoint.
One political party did get involved and as expected did all they could to raise the tensions and there was a legal shark representing the Rurals who too did all he could to convert the issue into one of “communal” injustice instead of a disagreement and misunderstanding. The administration for a change did well, the SDM, the DC and the managed to keep the tempers down and the ranting radicals at bay.
The day finally ended with an amicable agreement being arrived at that this one burial would be allowed to proceed as the last one at that location and the Muslim community would be allotted a suitable piece of land at an alternate location.
I feel what happened on April 11 in Phase 9 Mohali was a consequence of cultural insensitivity and age old dogmas. I am sure that the residents of Phase 9 are not the typical religious hardliners and did what they did in response to deep seated fears and anxiety they have of death and finality. Our perceptions of graveyards are moderated by second rate horror flicks that present them in a rather morbid light. In a country where the educated elite still subscribe to medieval beliefs in occult and mysticism graveyards are seen as a place of evil. This is in stark contrast to the image of graveyards being solemn resting places for the departed more common in the west and even the Christian and Muslim dominated regions all over the world. I am sure that the same community which objected to the burial would have been taken aback when a British court disallowed cremation in the open on grounds of it being morbid and polluting. Was this too disconnected from French establishments disallowing turbans or the Swiss government disallowing minarets on mosques?
I am sure the very community that objected to a burial will appreciate that cremation is as morbid to other communities as it is nothing more than a desecration of the departed to cook them on an open pyre. I am sure that the pious woman who was seen coaxing the men folk of Phase 9 to arms against the other community does not consider any other form of disposing off the dead than is prescribed in her religion to be appropriate. I am also sure that she does not even have an idea of what could have happened had the men folk be stupid enough to do what she was asking them to.
For me this event underlined the deep divisions and intolerance integral t our society. What happened in Gujarat was the extreme form of this very intolerance. This event also highlights the woeful inadequacy of our education system to address religious intolerance which in my humble opinion is the most clear and present danger to India.
I have decided that as soon as my son attains an age where he begins to understand such things, I will take him on a visit to a grave yard and will tell him that this where we rest till eternity. I will tell him that there are no ghosts in graveyards and the only ones he will ever meet are the ones in is own mind. I will tell him that his Mom whom he loves so much and his Dad, his grandparents and he too will one day need to sleep…….I will tell him that all these people who sleep here want him to remain safe and happy just like his own parents want him to. I will tell him that when people go to sleep they are put to rest differently in different religions. Some bury their departed and some assign them to flames. I will tell him that even if both seem different, it is basically the same. After all fire and earth are the basic elements.
I want my son to grow without fear of graveyards……. and death. I want my son to focus on what he does best, love life and live it to its fullest!

Of Garlands and Democracy!!

Another garland of currencies for the leader! I wonder why we the citizens of this country are creating such a hue and cry over these visuals of one of our esteemed leaders being garlanded for more money than what could have fed at least hundreds of households for years?
The fact that politics is a heady mix of power, religion and a lot on money has been known to us and yet the civil society actually considers the unholy trinity a necessary evil. Somewhere, it seems, we as a collective society has learned to feign shock only at instances of overt display of that trinity. Even Lincoln would rethink his subscription to the concept of democracy if he were to see the implementation of the system. We make decisions on who to vote for on the basis of extremely skewed preferences for questionable characteristics and that weakness has been exploited by few into establishing a political system where the public which it is supposed to serve ends up bearing the cost of lugging an unproductive and often callous office bearers.
The garlands were not a symbol of corruption, they were a symbol of a failed system where few decide for many and many who were supposed to choose the few are left wondering what happened!

Finally TERI.... Wow!!

Upinder Dhingra got selected to The Energy and Resources Institute and that is one of the best news I have had in a while. Apart from a student succeeding in getting a job in a company what pleased me more was that I too had dreamt of working with TERI after my MBA. My attempts at associating with them were however fruitless. So a student getting in is almost like an extension of me getting in! I know, Upinder may not look upon himself as an “extension” of me but I guess these are some of the few luxuries teaching offers!
That brings me to another point. I do not see many MBAs look for jobs in the not for profit sector. Is it probably because they consider working for such institutions as working for less remuneration? If that is so, they are mistaken! NGOs and organizations like WWF, Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Teri….. offer more than decent packages compared to many conventionally attractive sectors.
More than that working in such organizations offers young managers a chance to work at policy level issues and areas of significant socio economic importance.
I guess coming semester onwards we should try to highlight such companies in the classes too!

How We Create Negative Citizens

This is the story of one of the best students I have had over the past many years. This story, I believe may provide some answers to any of us who wonder why the future citizens of this country harbour such intense scepticism and negativity towards life in India.

This is the story of my namesake, Ashish. His story is perhaps a good snapshot of all that has gone wrong in our country. Ashish was a perceptive, intelligent and motivated student. He belonged to a middle class family from a small town in a state know more for its backwardness, corruption and crime than anything else. Ashish had seen all that. He had seen his honest father being hounded by the powerful. He had seen large swathes of rural India suffer while ministers were being garlanded with currency notes that could have fed villages for an year. He had seen all that and still he had the courage to believe in the concept of India as a nation whose time was yet to come. Ashish believed that like his father, he could use education to help others. Even though he was doing his MBA, he always wanted to use his business education for social good. His pet project was to somehow translate his father's gift of being able to concoct cheap, natural remedies for many illnesses into a business model where he could make his father's skill reach the poor at incredibly cheap prices. He probably was aiming for another Aravind Eye Clinic model!

To say that he was disenchanted with the entire MBA experience would not be too far off the mark but even that did not break his spirit. In his final semester, a series of incidents managed to not only break his spirit but also shake his belief in the very value of education.

One day, Ashish met with an accident. Even that accident is a testimony to the depths we have fallen to as a society. Ashish and his friend were riding a motorcycle, and were rammed into by a car coming from the opposite side. Ashish broke his knee cap and passed out while his friend was lucky enough to escape with bruises and gashes. The car driver did not bother and sped off. Even this much would be enough to disenchant anyone. I am sure that whoever was driving that car was an educated civilian who knew that driving on the wrong side of the road is not only illegal but dangerous for others. I am sure that whoever it was knew that it is basic decency to help any accident victim and more so if it was our fault. I am sure whoever was driving the car that day would not want anyone else do the same to his loved one. But even then this educated Indian went down the wrong side, knocked a bike down and sped off. Then came the police. Ideally they should have taken the boys to a hospital and should have registered an FIR. But they just bundled them onto a rickshaw and left them to fend for themselves. I am sure they were too busy pampering political brats to care for two nobodies.

Ashish was hospitalised in what is considered as the benchmark in quality health care by a government institution in Chandigarh. The accident had left his bone shattered and a surgery would be needed to implant splints. Ashish and his family asked the concerned doctors if the needed splint was available and were assured that it was. they wanted to avoid unnecessary delays as Ashish was very keen to get back to his classes. Then after his doctors had actually cut him open, they found out that that the splint in question was actually not there in any hospital stocks! Imagine the plight of the patient lying with an open knee and his family running around the city for well over a couple of hours looking for the right splint! So much so for our health care and Hippocratic oath!

Ashish remained on bed for months after that. He kept feeling guilty of missing his classes despite knowing that attendance is never enforced at his college. He just wanted to learn. He just wanted to pursue his dream. No one from the college apart from a couple of his friends ever visited him. No call, no "get we soon" card, no visit by his beloved faculty, no one. But he knew that they could not come as they probably did not even know. He understood that they were his teachers not his mentors or "gurus" who would be concerned about their students life. "How could they?", wondered Ashish. With such rampant commercialisation of education, the number of students a college takes a hefty fee from to deliver pseudo education is so huge that it becomes impossible for them to care for individual students. Ashish understood that it was not their fault.

But what did his institution do when he returned to the college after when he could? They informed him through a cold notice on a notice board that he had been unceremoniously ejected from the placement process at the college. When he approached the placement coordinator to seek answers, Ashish was insulted and ridiculed. he was told that he was barred from the placement process due to low attendance. His plea that despite being on bed rest for months, he still had three times the attendance than many who were being peddled to companies in the name of placements. he pleaded that he had the necessary medical certificates and evidence to prove that he was actually bed ridden for the whole time he had remained absent from his classes. But the placement coordinator did not budge. Ashish was not the only such case. And there were cases who were not only considered for placement but were actually placed despite them being barred from the placement process too! Ashish tried to approach few teachers who he thought would help him. No one did. No one could. When few did raise the point with the high and the mighty, the college showed its magnanimity by allowing all those who were barred to be considered for placements. That however is a different story that that there are no placement opportunities anymore. It is a different story that this criminal insensitivity of the institution had cost Ashish and many others like him the last few chances they had. Now the institution too does not have time to do anything. i know it is impractical for an educational institution to look for jobs for all the students. Now when they are busy celebrating a better than expected numbers for the new batch, life has moved on for them.

Today Ashish faces a looming educational loan repayment and a protracted period of joblessness. he roams the streets of Delhi with his resume in his hand. I am sure people would be wondering why such a young man has such a helpless look o his face. Educated elite would in conferences and seminars deliberate upon the ever increasing negativity among students. We would spend hours mourning the lack of interest and rigour among students. We academicians would all that but not even once would it cross our mind that it is probably us who is the nucleus of this social downfall. i know it is wrong to judge others but as I am a human being I cannot resist. I find thatin today's "earn as much as you can" world, it is the leftovers of the society that chooses to become teachers. Either people who could not adjust to demanding careers or business, maybe a few who chose it thoughtfully as a career and those who have retired but need more for whatever reasons they may have. I know that everyone need not subscribe to my idealistic views on the education system. I know that not all need to share my reasons to become a teacher, but I do believe that as a teacher, we need to introspect on what we are doing and what impact we have on lives. After all we are what we do.

I know that these are deep seated systemic faults that will take long to repair. I also know that if one wishes to change the system, one does not have the luxury to take a micro view on every wrong. In the larger game, Ashish is just a statistic and not worth getting worked up about. Strategy I guess demands detachment.

I am sorry I have failed to help the hundreds of Ashish I come across every year irrespective of the name of my employer. I had a great career in glamorous line of work with all the money and perks I could have wished for. I gave all that up to become a teacher.

I am beginning to regret that.

The Gullible common Man!

Of late I have begun appreciating what my 9^th standard history teacher once said in class; “Democracy was our only choice. We chose democracy because it was the least flawed system….” I did not understand and I did not ask for clarification. However, for some reason, such a mundane issue like the choice of the political system at independence lingered on in my mind. I could not understand how democracy was flawed. So what was that “…..of the people, by the people, for the people…..” all about? What more than the common man controlling the destiny of the nation could be better? I was sure there was something amiss.

Over the past couple of decades, I started seeing (but not realizing) events and incidents that underline how flawed a system democracy is. It almost sounds like some crazy conspiracy theorist spewing anti establishment rant when I cite the helplessness of the common man in democracy and how that helplessness is engineered by the establishment.

What control does the average Indian citizen have? As control is a function of information, what information does an average Indian have? How many of us know how much about the most burning issues facing our nation today? Let us do a quick audit…..

·         What is the Maoist problem? Who are these people? What do they want? Why are they feeling alienated?

·         What is all this hullaballoo over some Liberhan Commission report? What happened in Ayodhya? Who did it?

·         What happened in New Delhi, then Punjab, Godhra, then Gujarat, Kandhamal, Mumbai, Coimbatore?

·         What is the Telengana?

·         What is the 123 agreement and what is our stand on it? Did you see what happened in Parliament?

·         What is our policy on Iran, Palestine, China, Pakistan…..?

 

The list can go on…… We are guided by history that has been decided by people. What we believe is history is nothing more than the most accepted version of the actual events. In many cases, accepted history has nothing in common with what happened. The establishment creates history, then uses media to whip up a frenzy when it seems appropriate. And it is funny to see even the supposedly educated people fall victims to such campaigns.

Consider the three links:

 A Discussion on Chinese Incursions on a travel forum

An Article Rgarding the 71 War

An Article regarding the Ayodhya Issue

The first is a well meaning discussion on a travel forum and the other two are articles on the website of The Dawn. Look at how people are reacting to “news” of Chinese incursions. Read the articles and ask yourself if you knew that about the 1971 war or what the article about Ayodhya talks of?

Then is it surprising that few are able to take an entire nation to ride and that too with such ease and so often?

Now look at the following recent events:

1.       We voted against Iran on the nuclear issue.

2.       We gave a “figure” for emission cuts.

3.       We made the right noises about Pakistan post 26/11.

4.       We made the right noises on China, Palestine and Israel.

5.       Canada jumped on to the great Indian nuclear bandwagon, France already has and Russia is about to.

6.       ULFA leadership suddenly drops in our lap.

7.       Suddenly FBI is closer to solving the 26/11 riddle than we ever were.

8.       Pakistan charges seven on the eve of 26/11 anniversary. All of a sudden!

9.       India asks for greater role in Afghanistan and USA grants it!

10.   Why not consider, USA signing the 123 agreement with a nation which has not signed the CTBT or even the NPT?

 

Again the list can go on…….. I know I may be seeing ghosts here but if you connect the dots, you see India making gradual changes in state policy and get "rewarded" in the process. I know, I know..... I know it sounds too much but consider it!

So much is happening without us ever coming to know or we ever bothering to know. All this lack of information coupled with sponsored dis-information and mis-information makes the common man the most useless variable in the equation of governance.

Lens for EOS 500D

Based on an extensive and protracted research, I purchased Canon EOS 500D a couple of months ago. Now the quest has shifted to which lens solution will best suit my needs.

There are hundreds of web pages dedicated to the subject and some are incredibly detailed explanations and in some cases opinions and judgment of very experienced pros!

I found the following sites useful:

http://www.bobatkins.com/photography/

http://www.canonlensreview.com/

http://www.the-digital-picture.com/

http://www.photozone.de/Reviews/overview

http://www.dpreview.com/

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/lenses/canon_lenses.shtml

http://www.cameralabs.com

After all my research laced with my subjective judgment, I have decided that:

1.      Lens will be considered important investments and compromise lens will not be purchased.

2.      Will analyse my photography to identify the lens solution that best suits my style.

Considering lens as investment is important as DSLR Lens are not exactly cheap products and more than that I learnt that more than the camera, it is the lens that determines the quality of an image. Of course the creativity and the “eye” of the photographer is always a determining factor but as far as equipment is concerned, the lens will make or break quality.

An analysis of hundreds of pics clicked over the past decade with point and shoot cameras revealed that, I like taking the following kinds of pictures:

1.      Landscapes. 90% of all photos clicked by me have been and probably will remain landscapes.

2.      Portraits. I am expecting my portrait work to increase as after buying the 500D, portrait work has been on the increase. It may also be because after buying the 500D, I have not been able to afford a trip anywhere!!

3.      Some Macro. I guess the moment one lays hands on a DSLR, you suddenly feel the irresistible urge to close in on flowers and insects!!

 

So based on the above analysis, I decided I would need the following:

1.      A good general purpose walk around lens that would remain on the 500D till a specialized need arises.

2.      A good prime for Portraits.

3.      A wide angle

4.      A telephoto

5.      A macro

 

Now this solution did not factor in the budget. So for people like me who are perpetually cash starved the following two and three lens solutions can work too.

1.      AN ECONOMY CLASS TWO LENS SOLUTION: A general walk around with some wide angle and mow end telephoto capabilities, like the  Canon EF-S 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS or EF-S 18-200 f/3.5-5.6 IS and a probably the most value for money lens on the market the Canon EF 50 mm f/1.8 II.

2.      AN ECONOMY CLASS THREE LENS SOLUTION: A good walk around like the EF-S 17-85 f/4-5.6 USM IS with a EF 50mm f/1.8 for macro work and the EF 70-300 f/4-5.6 IS USM for the telephoto work.

 

If you do not want to mess around with lens changes and would prefer a single lens solution, my recommendations would be:

1.      Economy Class Single Lens Solution: Go for the EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM. Avoid the temptation of going in for longer zoom ranges like the 18-200. My research indicates that longer zoom ranges coupled with economy produces rather unacceptable aberrations and issues. Moreover, the non L class build with such long ranges will start giving problems after some wear and tear takes place. Moreover the 17-85 is optically superior to the 18-200.

2.      Best Single Lens Solution: For Canon, unquestionably the EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM. The lens is considered to be the most widely used always stay on lens by professionals.

 

MY DREAM LENS SOLUTION

As mentioned earlier, I had decided that all things considered, I will need a five lens solution and the following are my choices.

1.   EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM

This would be the all purpose, stay on lens that would remain on my camera.

2.   Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS USM

 

For all telephoto and maybe some portrait work.

3.   Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 L IS USM Macro Lens

 

For all the insects, flowers and any other macro work, I may fancy!

4.   Canon EF 85mm f/1.2 L II USM

This lens has been called by many as the best lens for portrait work by Canon!

5.   Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM

 

Even though not an L category lens, it is still supposed to be great for landscapes. I am assuming that most of landscape needs will be taken care of by the 24-70 but just in case I need a really wide perspective, this will come in handy.