Madness unchained and rampaging

A couple in West Bengal has been nabbed recently for having sold off their baby in order to buy an expensive mobile phone and go travelling to tourist hotspots.

What am I supposed to think?

Some people will say, These folks are insane... or too lower class to know anything about decent feelings... these are isolated acts of horror committed by very unusual people, so nothing much to bother about: we are different, and far more civilized, and know better.

I am not sure. Maybe I have seen and thought too much. I can't see very much difference between these people and the millions of 'educated' and 'sane' parents all around me who have driven it deep into the minds of their teenage children that they are only born to make money, and should never think of doing anything that diverts them ever so little from that solitary aim, or people who have never learnt to judge others by any index other than how much money they make (not necessarily earn) and how much of luxury goods they consume.

Civilized people were always rare: I have never had any illusions about that. Today, however, I think that even the meaning of the word has been forgotten, leave alone the need for it. Look at the language politicians and advertisers use. Most people around me no longer understand why it should hurt so much... 

On a not too different note, I was briefly much enthused by a book of fictionalized history in Bengali given to me by Pupu, one about Maharana Kumbha of Mewar. But then I found that the author has made Kumbha the husband of Mirabai, and I could not read any more. Maybe even among so-called educated people, ignorance, combined with a total indifference to facts, has gone so deep that authors do not need to know even basic things about reality any more. And to think that such things can happen in the era of Google, Wikipedia and ChatGPT, when all kinds of knowledge is supposedly just a few clicks away!

P.S.: Pupu has visited and gone off to Delhi again for a bit, and I think I have become a good enough guardian for Bheblu.  

This blog for students

One of the many ways in which I have been disappointed with this blogging experience is that I thought it would become an extension of my classroom, so that many current pupils as well as ex students, and perhaps some who have not studied with me, would have resources available to them beyond what I can do in my classroom. Unfortunately, most youngsters who pass through my classes 'find no time' or too little interest to become serious readers.

I keep telling all my wards that writing an essay is the hardest thing they have to learn in school (because you can depend not at all on memorization, which is otherwise about the only skill they learn in all other classes), and right from childhood they have been taught literally nothing about this art, so they remain woefully deficient, and will go on being so all their lives, unable to express their ideas and opinions coherently, articulately and persuasively, in their personal as well as social and working lives, and that will be a major handicap which they will rue for years to come. I read out good essays to them, ask them to edit bad ones, dictate model essays, and urge them non-stop to keep writing their own, which, under meticulous guidance, is the only way they will ever learn. Most avoid it; the few who try do it half-heartedly, only once in a while, seem to learn very little from mistakes strenuously and repeatedly pointed out (look up three earlier posts, titled Writing an essay), and that is good enough to get absurdly high marks in their board examinations, which is all they and their parents (well, at least 95% of them anyway) care about. Thus they grow up into degree-holding yet linguistically challenged adults, who can only stay quiet or scream abuse  in the name of debate: witness everything from what goes on in Parliament these days, to the kind of 'arguments' that take place on twitter. I never could make my wards either well-informed or well able to express themselves.

Yet at least the ICSE school examination board seems to be doggedly (and forlornly-) determined to go on testing this skill, setting topics that need, besides a decent grasp of language, considerable general knowledge and the capacity to think deeply and organize those thoughts systematically. Animals should not be used in drug development research, Democracy is the best form of government, Private tuition is a necessary evil, Moral Science is the most important subject taught in school, Describe your first parachute jump, Narrate what happened after your aircraft developed engine trouble in flight, Mobile phones deaden social life... any adult will admit that unless one has had long training, one cannot write sensible essays on such subjects even if you have a college degree. And exactly like basic math, this is a skill which, if well cultivated, will benefit you lifelong.

So here's urging my old boys and girls, as well as those who are currently paying me for tuition, to make better, more frequent use of this blog: if nothing else, it will help you to think and write (or speak) better on myriad subjects. And who knows, given that there are so many different kinds of posts, including those tagged under travel and humour and stories, it might entertain you too. Why stay glued to just YouTube and Instagram?