We don't need no "EDUCATION"

You only need to score marks they said, being first is everything in life they said. The sad state of Indian education has been pointed out in many movies and articles. It basically concentrates on the psyche of Indian parents to decide their child’s future and the future is limited to either being an engineer or a doctor. The problem though according to me lies much deeper than that, putting aside the sad state of the education system in our country; I feel the main problem lies in the fact that we have completely misunderstood what “Education” is.

A girl studying in sixth class has been topping her class since she has learnt to spell the word school. She never steps outside her house to interact with kids of her age nor does she indulge in any type of frivolous activity as she has been told all these things are just “time waste” by the elders. Firstly she wants to be a doctor, you may point out that she is after all only in sixth class, what does she know about being passionate about doing something? Is it then ok for her parents to scare the little girl to the point that she regrets thinking she ever wanted to be a doctor? Isn’t life all about doing what you wanted to? Is life only about choosing the guaranteed way to success which comes quickly and lets you get settled early in life? Secondly, the girl is now being made to learn subjects a grade higher than hers so that she can just give her exams and skip a grade and start off with the next grade immediately. The sad thing over here is the people making the decision for her are educationists and are actually proud of the decision they are making to kill the soul of a lovely innocent girl fast tracking her development in the process making her skip the joy of attending school and enjoying the learning moments which lasts forever.

Here is where education especially that in school plays a huge role. Education must be about shaping of a human personality, building character, teaching how to make decisions and make you strong enough to know how to take risks and face failures, but it has all ended up being a tool to just score high , really high in so called tests and exams and Olympiads and what not. Yes by the end of the tenth grade, this flower will bloom and all it will have to show is a few beautiful pictures of it appearing in the newspaper (read : 10th class state first, 12th class gold medalist) and accolades of how perfectly her future is shaping up but will this flower learn to face the wind , enjoy the turbulences , feel a bee sting on its petals. Will she ever learn the fact that her parents are there to help and guide her and not to decide for her? Can anything replace the beautiful bond of trust a child shares with parents by letting them decide everything. Do you want to use this and end up making the kids a zombie.

A heinous crime is being committed where the essence of education is being questioned. People are completely misunderstanding what “Getting Educated” stands for, all that is going on right now is education is given a label of just scoring ridiculously high marks and not learning and applying what you learn. Scoring high is not a crime, in fact this article is not a question against people demanding only high scores from their kids but what I want to say here is, Is scoring high and topping everything called education? You may be brilliant at what you write on paper but can you call yourself “EDUCATED”. I have often heard people tell, “Here education is just a rat-race”. No it is not unless you make it to be. Once you enjoy what you learn it is never a rat-race. You people are making it a rat-race and then complaining about it.

The same people once told me if you don’t score after a few years you will see people much less deserving than you being your boss, at that moment you will realized how wasted your life is, you will feel like a failure. I have started working now in a pretty good place doing what I was passionate about all my life. I stand out in what I do. I just concentrated on learning what I liked and doing what was required. I learnt to be really good in what I liked to do and yes I see people who are in the same field, in fact forced to be in the same field who don’t want to be there bossing over me but I never felt that pang of jealousy or sadness, when I see them I get this famous lines from scent of a woman in my mind

"There is nothing like the sight of an amputated spirit. There is... no prosthetic for that. You are executing his soul"

Even though they have the position, the respect, the money, a car, a house they don’t have that happiness. I am already more happy than them. That for me is what life is all about, happiness, hunger to do something and treating work like play. Their souls have been executed and they will never find a prosthetic to replace that.

I took the advice given to me as a guideline but in the process of learning discovered it was wrong, that is what education all about. It is not about doing subjects a grade higher by putting immense pressure on you, it is not about having to score by rote learning and then vomiting on paper; it is not about doing things that turn life into a rat race, it is not just about learning the things that will help shape your career. It is also about learning more about what you love, it is also about learning to build character, integrity, facing the crossroads of life, questioning and discovering what life is.

This is an appeal not to misconstrue what education is, don’t let those kids amputate their spirit. Don’t throw them into a vicious cycle of over-performance at the cost of actual learning, let them enjoy what they discover, give them time. Life is not a rat race unless you make it so for them. Let them enjoy their childhood because they will never get it back. At the end of the day remember a naturally ripened mango is always tastier to those artificially ripened in a short period of time.

Scam, scam everywhere: the line is blurring

“Terrorism” defined the year 2008,”Recession” defined the year 2009. I guess 2010 will have “SCAM” as the word which defines it. Scam(noun):swindle, defraud as the oxford dictionary puts it is something that has dominated our national affairs this year… it has been happening everywhere all around you, every gully, every corner is the home to some scam or another…

A great man probably in power and scamming around once said “Power is corrupting”, then came the grandpa of Spiderman with the line “with great power comes great responsibility”… but he was too late by then or most probably too feeble to make his voice heard as power got into the heads of the powerful and started doing the “thandav” dance…

I don’t know if it is the Indian media turning vigilante in the last few years or is it just the coincidence but scams are dominating everything nowadays…

Politics, a field which turns Arnab Goswami and Rajdeep Sardesai horny has thrown up a hell lot of scams, the ADARSH gate scam being the latest...first it was the former Maharashtra cm Ashok Chavan who was in the line of fire… next came up the head of opposition GADKARI with a proxy AJAY SANCHETI, looking at this man’s personality, one would expect a food scam but in turn that was done by SHARAD PAWAR… who will ever forget the A.RAJA 2G scam I guess he is one person who can jolly well utter filmy dialogues like ”koi mera baal baaka nahi kar saktha”, “catch me if u can Hanratty”... and still go unaccounted for…

The outcome of such scams are more scamacious (I came up with this word) decisions and bull shit commissions…seriously speaking these commissions live longer than Albus Dumbledore and still end up not saving Harry...the ruling party wants to take a moral high ground and blame the opposition and the opposition too wants to do the same… the great words of Ted Kennedy “what can u do for your country” has been lost in this maze of scam..

Entertainment has been scamming our senses from the time when queen Ekta decided to take up television and Simon Cowell inspired INDIAN reality

Rakhi Sawant delivering justice—Made in china fake piece doing it is so frigging TRP attractive eh? Jeejus save me !!

A leading music channel, calling itself “THE MUSIC CHANNEL OF INDIA” showing 12 hours of reality shows ,11 hours and 23 minutes of ads and 37 minutes of music is itself a scam…

Kbc showing life stories of contestants with such sentimental music that even Homer Simpsons life would look sad and unworthy…How the hell does everyone in this cosmos have such a sentimental story associated with them??

Some shows need not even be described just the name would be sufficient, BIG BOSS 4(isn’t Salman’s voice reason enough), These stand-up comedy shows having judges laughing their ass off for redundant Rajnikanth jokes( I don’t understand why that woman is trying to emulate NAVJOT SINGH SIDHU, her laugh has already broken a few glasses in my house) and yes Akshay Kumar’s laugh has made every dish on master chef bitter for me…

Coming to the field of Sports , as you see this field I wonder how many people might have already thought of Suresh “sir u made lakhs” Kalmadi… Tissues worth tens of thousands … Treadmills worth lakhs of rupees… He has surely given me the confidence that we are not a developing country struggling to feed the deserving…. we are frigging overdeveloped and rich….

Some may argue this scam should come under politics and not sports… don’t you see it, sports is politics in our country… I am at least happy that our sportsmen continue to inspire us by doing nothing wrong…

The Great IPL tamasha turned fugly with Lalit ”even god maybe wrong but I am not” Modi scamming and conning big time and with him ready to flee the country to some other land, this case may die a natural death as there are too many buried skeletons which could be unearthed…

I hope I am wrong, maybe this whole blog post is a scam against scam, but as we people laze around ignoring these scams like spams , Arnab keeps masturbating looking at the fax papers of scams and Rajdeep keeps assaulting our senses …. These scams have slowly turned into the acceptable reality of life…

Beauty pageants : an insult to womanhood?

Long legs, beautiful curves, flawless skin- and what springs to our mind immediately: supermodels and beauty pageants. What people fail to identify over here is the long hours of hard work, strict regimen the girls undergo to achieve that picture perfect figure. Nowadays, when junk food is taking over an average young man’s life the sacrifice these girls make by resisting it almost on a daily basis surely deserves appreciation. Modeling and beauty pageants act as an avenue for their sacrifices to be recognized, but what do people generally do? They sneer at them and pass lewd comments and the elders just complain about the degeneration of moral fabric of yesteryears.

When a quiz contest comes on television, why only a quiz contest even those melodramatic soaps which vilify women the whole family sits together to watch it happily, but when it comes to the beauty pageants all that comes to everyone’s mind is indecent exposure of flesh , what I want to ask is that if they have it what’s wrong in flaunting it ,never mind the gender… what people are not able to understand is that all those beauty pageants participants have undergone tremendously stressful regimens and have been able to achieve that trim figure with a lot of discipline…. According to me these people are as good as or even better than those people who participate in quizzes or the overly made up heroines and villains of the soap eras being telecasted on television...

In fact beauty pageants should be treated as a celebration of womanhood (I specify woman because they are the ones targeted in general, in fact they are the only ones targeted). The rewards for work done day in and day out to achieve something that most of them can only dream of is very valid and doesn’t deserve a moral speech on it and should not be treated as an insult.

The beauty pageants are just like any other competition where the judges decide on who is the best among the good people in the field….and the winner must be appreciated not sneered at for drifting away from the so called moral principles of our culture….

Any sane woman would not participate in a beauty pageant if they feel they are an insult to their gender... participation is a matter of choice and no one must be forced into it or out of it for no reason but what has become commonplace nowadays is the people and society sneering at them…. I do agree these participants are subjected to some lewd comments and sometimes as much as societal boycott but that doesn’t mean that the women choosing this path are doing anything wrong, it simply implies that the person who does these things are corrupt by the mind and it is that person who is an insult to the society not these girls…

Beauty pageants are as fiercely fought as any other competition in the word let it be mental or physical... in fact these pageants test both the mental capability and physical aspect so in a country like ours where academics and anything related to academics is worshipped there needs to be a complete change of mindset towards these participants and shows...

So in the end I would like to say please put aside any narrow mindedness and appreciate the participants and the models and the amount of hard work they do and encourage anyone who wants to take this path there is nothing wrong in it if they are guided properly…. We must concede these people do their bit even if it is for a short period of time towards spreading any message or working towards any charity….so let’s treat them as a symbol of empowerment and let them do their work properly

P.S. the anger was due to one girl in my neighborhood being treated badly due to her affiliation towards the beauty industry...

Indian Farmville : State of Indian farming sector

When Farmville started becoming a craze on facebook there was a huge outcry with a huge number of number of netizens from india petitioning zynga to include INDIA as a country in the game….they succeeded and I am happy for them but what about these thousands of netizens thinking about the actual state of farming in INDIA… I was thinking about it and came across some astounding facts which really shocked me very badly

From 2002 to 2006 there have been 17500 farmer suicides and from 2006 to 2010 there have been 20000 farmer suicides and more than a quarter of it has been concentrated on the vidharbha area in Maharashtra. The government on being pressurized promised a package of Rs.110 billion (about $2.4 billion) specially for vidharbha .The families of farmers who had committed suicide were also offered an ex-gratia grant to the tune of Rs.100,000 by the government. This figure kept on varying, depending on how much criticism the government was facing from the media and the opposition parties for being uncaring towards the farmers' plight.

The surprising thing over here INDIA ranks second in the world when it comes to agricultural output and farming contributes to 16.6% of gdp ….. and agriculture still remains to be the most neglected sector during 4 years of the rule and just before the elections .. every politician just before the election remembers the plight of the farmers and sops are announced….

With huge amount of wheat rotting outside the godown...the farmers living a beggars life ...the moneylenders turning into evil villians so torturous that even bollywood villians are felt to be sweeter and more accomodating .. it doesn't help if a poltician goes and lives in their house for a day(yes rahul gandhi and a few jdu ministers have lived in a farmer's house for a day , not only dalits..)...we need quick and permanent measures to improve the present situation

Nowadays the so called cool sectors in INDIA like software and fashion are being given more importance when the basic backbone of the country’s self reliance has been grossly neglected…its time for us at least give a thought to it… It will at least turn out to be more satisfying than petitioning for a game where a person can farm in the comfort of his air conditioned bedroom. Farmville is not a prestige issue as people deem it to be but the Indian agricultural sector is something that has to be saved