Education is not literacy.
Education is not ruthless competition.
Education is not mindless chase of high percentages.
Education is certainly not a certificate for employability.
Education is opening a window in a dark wall.
Education is opening doors in a closed room.
Education is allowing free winds to swish through our minds.
Education is blossoming of the mind.
Education is awakening of the spirit.
Education is discovering who you are.
Education is discovering the world around you.
Education is stepping out of yourself.
Education is developing understanding with compassion.
Education is showing emotion to those we do not know.
Education is wiping the tears of those we do not know.
Education is really a way of communicating with self, man, family, society and God.
Education is not what you get in school, college or university but in the lab of life.
Education is an unending experiment.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Well, let us not tear each other apart
I thought we no longer lived in the jungle, we do
I thought we were no longer animals, we are
I thought we only tore apart arguments, I was wrong
I thought we only tore apart dead conventions, I was wrong
We love to tear each other apart, I must say
We love to paw our way into each other's flesh, I must say
We love to claw our way into each other's heart, I must say
Only if we knew that pawing and clawing is not exactly love
Onlly if we knew that love is not a piece of mutton or carrion flesh
Only if we knew that love is our only chance of becoming human
Only if we knew that love is our only way of transcending beastliness
Only if we knew that love is our only option of being close to God.
I thought we were no longer animals, we are
I thought we only tore apart arguments, I was wrong
I thought we only tore apart dead conventions, I was wrong
We love to tear each other apart, I must say
We love to paw our way into each other's flesh, I must say
We love to claw our way into each other's heart, I must say
Only if we knew that pawing and clawing is not exactly love
Onlly if we knew that love is not a piece of mutton or carrion flesh
Only if we knew that love is our only chance of becoming human
Only if we knew that love is our only way of transcending beastliness
Only if we knew that love is our only option of being close to God.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Wishing all my readers a very happy Diwali
A festival of lights
Is an opportunity
To light the dark corners of our hearts
To light the dark lives of others
To spread good cheer among the joyless hearts
To infuse strength among the weak and oppressed
To share what we have with those who are not as blessed
To snuff out the burning desire inside us to harm others
To burn the monsters of envy, greed and anger
To attain peace, contentment and eternal light
To renew our pact with knowledge and wisdom
To make life little more bearable for the ones we care
To serve Him by serving those who are left unncared
To renew our promise to our Creator
To keep His eternal flame alive in our hearts and minds
To make sure that no heart bleeds in neglect
To make sure that no mind slips into darkness
To live life just the way He wants us to live
To continue to light one torch with another
And spread so much of light through the year
That 'Amavas' is shamed into hiding and quietly disappears.
By Rana Nayar
Is an opportunity
To light the dark corners of our hearts
To light the dark lives of others
To spread good cheer among the joyless hearts
To infuse strength among the weak and oppressed
To share what we have with those who are not as blessed
To snuff out the burning desire inside us to harm others
To burn the monsters of envy, greed and anger
To attain peace, contentment and eternal light
To renew our pact with knowledge and wisdom
To make life little more bearable for the ones we care
To serve Him by serving those who are left unncared
To renew our promise to our Creator
To keep His eternal flame alive in our hearts and minds
To make sure that no heart bleeds in neglect
To make sure that no mind slips into darkness
To live life just the way He wants us to live
To continue to light one torch with another
And spread so much of light through the year
That 'Amavas' is shamed into hiding and quietly disappears.
By Rana Nayar
Monday, October 5, 2009
A Song, Unsung
Not very long ago, we had moved into the first floor of this new house. One day as I stood, looking out of the window, a large beri loomed into sight. It stood in one corner of the park facing the house, silently, unobtrusively. Its thick, leafy canopy sprawling over its twisted, angular branches almost had a human presence. I don’t know why, on seeing it, I had been reminded of my overprotective mother who always insists on fussing over me even now when I’m on the wrong side of forty. Perhaps, in this season of autumn, I was thinking ahead of the gruelling summer, when scorched by the heat, the birds shall return to its protective arms. Looking at its strong, brawny roots, a sense of calm reassurance had surged through my being.
A few days later, when I got up one morning, I was somewhat surprised to see a litter of polythene bags around its roots. Rather than become a cradle of the singing birds, the tree had fallen prey to the decaying menace of garbage. Initially for a few days, these questions did come back to haunt me: who is defiling this tree? Why is it being used as a dumping ground? With the stink constantly on the rise, will the birds ever be able to return to its yellowing branches? Disturbed by these simple, rather naive questions, I did make an abortive bid to track down the culprit(s). But was it easy? With each passing day, the bags continued to multiply in number. So much so that now the stink had almost ceased to offend our nostrils. It was as though the entire neighbourhood was participating in a silent ritual of decay.
In winters, when the beri had already shed some of its leaves leaving the branches almost bare, a family moved into a house adjacent to ours. Right from day one, for some inexplicable reason, our new neighbour appeared to loathe this tree. His antipathy was obvious from the way in which he often looked at it. It was as though the presence of beri in direct line of his house, was a thorn in his eye. The day his telephone was to be installed, he was standing and watching outside. Though the telephone wires were in no way disrupted by the spread of its leafy crown, he ordered, rather imperiously, that a few of its branches be maimed to prevent the wires from getting entangled. Being a lawyer and a man of straight vision, he perhaps fears all kinds of angularities and puts them out of sight wherever he sees them. The thought of summer or that of the impending return of the birds couldn’t have possibly crossed his practical mind. After having presided over the chopping of the branches like some dark, sinister priest, he ordered them to be lugged into the middle of the park for everyone to view.
And the branches had lain there for several days, rotting away like the garbage around its roots. Not a single voice tore into protest. Everyone appeared to have accepted his authority rather demurely. Perhaps, this is what had emboldened him even further. One evening, he stepped out of the house along with his brother and son. With murder in their eyes, three of them marched towards the tree. While he stood watching with his son, his brother started hacking at the convoluted roots with a pickaxe, rather mercilessly. Despite repeated assaults, the tree refused to fall, holding on to its right to defend its dignity. After his brother had cut a deep, fatal wound into the main stem, he stepped over it, pushing it down, jumping over the half-cut branch. And when the main branch finally severed itself from the root, an umbilical cord snapped, sending a silent scream up the sky. Standing upon the severed branch, he had flashed a sudden smile of satisfaction, something you often see on the face of a mid-wife after a successful delivery.
Now waiting for the season to turn, each time, I look out of the window; a lifeless lump is what stares back at me. Who knows how many summer-songs lie stifled inside its dried-up sap?
A few days later, when I got up one morning, I was somewhat surprised to see a litter of polythene bags around its roots. Rather than become a cradle of the singing birds, the tree had fallen prey to the decaying menace of garbage. Initially for a few days, these questions did come back to haunt me: who is defiling this tree? Why is it being used as a dumping ground? With the stink constantly on the rise, will the birds ever be able to return to its yellowing branches? Disturbed by these simple, rather naive questions, I did make an abortive bid to track down the culprit(s). But was it easy? With each passing day, the bags continued to multiply in number. So much so that now the stink had almost ceased to offend our nostrils. It was as though the entire neighbourhood was participating in a silent ritual of decay.
In winters, when the beri had already shed some of its leaves leaving the branches almost bare, a family moved into a house adjacent to ours. Right from day one, for some inexplicable reason, our new neighbour appeared to loathe this tree. His antipathy was obvious from the way in which he often looked at it. It was as though the presence of beri in direct line of his house, was a thorn in his eye. The day his telephone was to be installed, he was standing and watching outside. Though the telephone wires were in no way disrupted by the spread of its leafy crown, he ordered, rather imperiously, that a few of its branches be maimed to prevent the wires from getting entangled. Being a lawyer and a man of straight vision, he perhaps fears all kinds of angularities and puts them out of sight wherever he sees them. The thought of summer or that of the impending return of the birds couldn’t have possibly crossed his practical mind. After having presided over the chopping of the branches like some dark, sinister priest, he ordered them to be lugged into the middle of the park for everyone to view.
And the branches had lain there for several days, rotting away like the garbage around its roots. Not a single voice tore into protest. Everyone appeared to have accepted his authority rather demurely. Perhaps, this is what had emboldened him even further. One evening, he stepped out of the house along with his brother and son. With murder in their eyes, three of them marched towards the tree. While he stood watching with his son, his brother started hacking at the convoluted roots with a pickaxe, rather mercilessly. Despite repeated assaults, the tree refused to fall, holding on to its right to defend its dignity. After his brother had cut a deep, fatal wound into the main stem, he stepped over it, pushing it down, jumping over the half-cut branch. And when the main branch finally severed itself from the root, an umbilical cord snapped, sending a silent scream up the sky. Standing upon the severed branch, he had flashed a sudden smile of satisfaction, something you often see on the face of a mid-wife after a successful delivery.
Now waiting for the season to turn, each time, I look out of the window; a lifeless lump is what stares back at me. Who knows how many summer-songs lie stifled inside its dried-up sap?
Thursday, September 10, 2009
A Review of BEING INDIAN -- a book by Pavan K. Verma
What does it mean to be an Indian? This question is bound to haunt and intrigue all thinking Indians at one point or the other. More so now when Indianness is no longer a matter of consensus and has become truly problematic. Crisis of the nation-state, endemic institutional collapse, growing corruption of money and power, economic and political dominance of the Hindu majority, fast changing caste and class equations, and the rise of coalition politics both at the Centre and the State have put a big question mark over the stable notion of Indian identity. It’s up against this background that Pavan K. Verma’s latest book Being Indian must be seen and read.
By engaging with this eternal question, Pavan Verma has stepped into the rare hall of fame presided over by such luminaries as Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Tilak, Gandhi and Nehru. While his predecessors sought answers within the philosophical, civilizational frame, Verma’s effort is guided by more contemporary trends in social sciences. Following the methodology of ‘thick description’ recommended by Clifford Geetz, a well-known anthropologist, Verma brings together a wealth of information through a strange amalgam of “inference with anecdote” and “deduction with personal experience”(p. 16).
Conscious of both history and his own position in contemporary history, he negotiates his way out, displaying tact and restraint of a typical career diplomat. Poring over the vast intellectual resources available to him, he often comes up with statements one can neither totally afford to agree, nor disagree with. For instance, the self-contradictory nature of the Indian reality or identity has never been in serious doubt. Historicizing this notion, Verma sees nothing contemporaneous in this ‘culture of ambivalence,’ for he traces it all to sources as diverse as Arthshastra, Mahabharata, Upanishads, and folk tales, et al. By the same logic, one wouldn’t really like to question his understanding of classic Indian obsession with class, hierarchy, trappings of power and wealth. It doesn’t take a specialist to proclaim that such an obsession is a spin-off of our caste system, a legacy of our feudal past that has pulverized our present as well.
Verma’s real contribution is that he has been able to find a new context, not new meanings, for some of the ideas we’ve almost grown up with. That we Indians are a power-worshipping nation of self-demeaning sycophants is borne out by our daily, work-a-day experiences. That we have always had an obsession with icons of power and wealth (technology being the latest fad) is also not drastically radical. But it does take Pavan Verma to ground all these ideas into social/political/cultural practices of our ‘functioning democracy,’ in our search for a new economic order and technological transformation.
The overall impression this book creates is that the more India changes, the more it is appears to be the same. Questioning the popular, rather mythical self-image of Indians as idealists, dharma-driven, non-violent, otherworldly people, he does manage to put in place a more realistic and less flattering image of Indians as pragmatic, corrupt, amoral and violent people, grounded in empirical facts. But the flatness of his conclusions rattles and jars as much as do the stereotypes he’s trying to escape.
Writing with a sense of inwardness, even passionate involvement, Pavan Verma often manages to sweep the reader off his feet by his awesome reading. It’s another matter that high seriousness of his self-posturing does unsettle the reader occasionally, especially when he assumes the tone of a professional sociologist, which he isn’t. On such occasions the book does begin to resemble a well-dressed, well-groomed gentleman who has nowhere to go. Otherwise, it makes for a demanding, even a compelling read.
By engaging with this eternal question, Pavan Verma has stepped into the rare hall of fame presided over by such luminaries as Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Tilak, Gandhi and Nehru. While his predecessors sought answers within the philosophical, civilizational frame, Verma’s effort is guided by more contemporary trends in social sciences. Following the methodology of ‘thick description’ recommended by Clifford Geetz, a well-known anthropologist, Verma brings together a wealth of information through a strange amalgam of “inference with anecdote” and “deduction with personal experience”(p. 16).
Conscious of both history and his own position in contemporary history, he negotiates his way out, displaying tact and restraint of a typical career diplomat. Poring over the vast intellectual resources available to him, he often comes up with statements one can neither totally afford to agree, nor disagree with. For instance, the self-contradictory nature of the Indian reality or identity has never been in serious doubt. Historicizing this notion, Verma sees nothing contemporaneous in this ‘culture of ambivalence,’ for he traces it all to sources as diverse as Arthshastra, Mahabharata, Upanishads, and folk tales, et al. By the same logic, one wouldn’t really like to question his understanding of classic Indian obsession with class, hierarchy, trappings of power and wealth. It doesn’t take a specialist to proclaim that such an obsession is a spin-off of our caste system, a legacy of our feudal past that has pulverized our present as well.
Verma’s real contribution is that he has been able to find a new context, not new meanings, for some of the ideas we’ve almost grown up with. That we Indians are a power-worshipping nation of self-demeaning sycophants is borne out by our daily, work-a-day experiences. That we have always had an obsession with icons of power and wealth (technology being the latest fad) is also not drastically radical. But it does take Pavan Verma to ground all these ideas into social/political/cultural practices of our ‘functioning democracy,’ in our search for a new economic order and technological transformation.
The overall impression this book creates is that the more India changes, the more it is appears to be the same. Questioning the popular, rather mythical self-image of Indians as idealists, dharma-driven, non-violent, otherworldly people, he does manage to put in place a more realistic and less flattering image of Indians as pragmatic, corrupt, amoral and violent people, grounded in empirical facts. But the flatness of his conclusions rattles and jars as much as do the stereotypes he’s trying to escape.
Writing with a sense of inwardness, even passionate involvement, Pavan Verma often manages to sweep the reader off his feet by his awesome reading. It’s another matter that high seriousness of his self-posturing does unsettle the reader occasionally, especially when he assumes the tone of a professional sociologist, which he isn’t. On such occasions the book does begin to resemble a well-dressed, well-groomed gentleman who has nowhere to go. Otherwise, it makes for a demanding, even a compelling read.
Friday, August 14, 2009
The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh: A Few Impressions
THE HUNGRY TIDE by Amitav Ghosh is a novel to remember. All along, while reading it, I had this strange feeling that Ghosh was pushing a story little too far, and that too, unnecessarily. Rather, he was trying to stretch a 'story' into the frame of a novel. But once I had finished reading it, my view changed radically. It is, undoubtedly, one of the greatest novels I remember having read. And now I'm sure, it's going to stay with me much longer than most novels do with us, often. In a way, this novel belongs to the ultra-Bengali tradition of a river novel, and in a way. it is our answer to Melville's MOBY DICK, Mark Twain's THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLE BERRY FINN or Hemingway's OLD MAN AND THE SEA. It certainly ranks with some of the best sea-narratives that have ever been created in the world. A reductive reading might tell us that it is a novel about the dolphins, the Sunderbans, ecology et al. It's all this and yet much more than all this. It's one of the most sombre, if not poignant, tributes, ever paid, through a narrative, to the resilient spirit and triumphal march of the 'dispossessed of the earth.' It is the story of the 'dispossessed,' their endless struggle against the hostile forces of nature, and an unjust, manipulative human and social order. It is an anthropological exploration into the myths, legends, customs, life-style and struggles of the anonymous, unsung inhabitants of the Sunderbans. It is a complex narrative that weaves personal memoirs with several strands of local histories, juxtaposes past and present to create a mosaic of human lives which are remarkably memorable and unheroically heroic. Piya and Kanai, Nirmal and Nilima are only fishing nets that help Ghosh trawl vast, sea-like surge of humanity. The real hero of this narrative is the most unheroic figure of them all, the least articulate and the most stoically silent of them all -- who else but -- the inimitable FOKIR.
This novel is strongly recommended to Aravind Adiga and the likes of him, so that they could learn a lesson or two, if not more, into how one could create a sensitve, engaging, compassionate and heart-wrenching narrative about the dispossessed, too. In such matters, one doesn't always have to be gimmicky the way Adiga was in his first novel THE WHITE TIGER.
This novel is strongly recommended to Aravind Adiga and the likes of him, so that they could learn a lesson or two, if not more, into how one could create a sensitve, engaging, compassionate and heart-wrenching narrative about the dispossessed, too. In such matters, one doesn't always have to be gimmicky the way Adiga was in his first novel THE WHITE TIGER.
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