One thing that really caught my attention in this year’s annual meeting between Tertiary Education Commission’s (TEC) top management and TEC funded MPhil-PhD students/Postdocs, was the speech from Hon. Bhushan Domah, chairperson of the TEC Board.

The well respected figure of the judiciary made a plea for more professionalism within all spheres of the Mauritian Society and especially Researchers. According to him our greatest limitation in today’s world is the fact that we have succeeded as a nation by being amateurs. We are comforted by this fact and continue to evolve as such. This situation could backslash and hit us hard in the face.

I could not agree more, today’s competitive world leaves no room for amateurs. Emerging giants already are racing forward and in no time could snatch away whatever we have and take for granted.

I must admit that that Hon Domah is right, amateurism is widespread in the country. During my spell in software development for example, there were several instances where I asked myself questions about the level of professionalism of the Mauritian engineers; commented code were being commited, bad indentation, huge functions, no reuse, blatant copy pasting. The attitude seems to be about making things work and not about making things right.

I am humbled when I gather how our forefathers toiled to earn a living.  I must admit that I myself am culprit of amateurism in some instances, I rarely exert myself and maybe it is time to change things. But those are all good intentions, I wonder how much time its going to take me to forget about all this. :S