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.
2 comments:
Dear Suvroda
I do not have much optimism to add here. I am living the phenomenon everyday where kids are somehow pushed away from books. Look at this news if you have not (hopefully the link works) :
https://www.reuters.com/legal/new-york-lawyers-sanctioned-using-fake-chatgpt-cases-legal-brief-2023-06-22/#:~:text=New%20York%20lawyers%20sanctioned%20for%20using%20fake%20ChatGPT%20cases%20in%20legal%20brief,-By%20Sara%20Merken&text=NEW%20YORK%2C%20June%2022%20(Reuters,an%20artificial%20intelligence%20chatbot%2C%20ChatGPT.
Basically, some lawyers (highly paid) used ChatGPT to prepare legal submissions. ChatGPT obviously used fake cases but more dangerous is that nobody bothered to check.
I hope the doctors treating us and the engineers’ building bridges are not acting like these lawyers. I am not 100% sure any more.
Regards
Tanmoy
More than a decade ago an old boy warned me to be careful about which mutual fund managers I was relying on. 'Suvroda, many of these hot-shot CEOs are in their thirties', he said, 'and many of them are not even capable of managing their own household finances!' I said then, sadly, that maybe a day was coming when the only way to be sure about saving would be to bury our nest eggs in the form of gold coins, as our ancestors used to do...'. For the time being, I have been relying on a close friend, and trusting mainly in fate. Such is the state of the world that despite having saved assiduously for 35+ years, I am still not sure whether my lifetime savings will assure me a comfortable retirement if I live long.
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