Gross Happiness...

I seem to find fault in all the work i do.

I see the articles i wrote about my issues with alternate education in Shibumi, with the biases of Sociology, with the selfish motives of Market Research and now i will write about the frustrations of cosmetic social change in the Social sector.

Of course i knew what i was getting int this time. I know it from my family. But then you really wonder, where can one go where there is both SOME money and good, real work?

Seems that is too much to ask for...

Moreover, i find that i get things much faster than others do and they waste so much time making sense of things that are staring them in their face.

Why is that so? And what is the answer? Do i compromise and go to a space where there is money, clear work and excellence but little meaning. or bunk all that and search for elusive meaning? Will it all culminate in setting up yet another NGO?!

Or do i get into teaching - at least a job whose quality i think (who knows) i will have control over?

Because i don't want to leave it all and go live in a village, where just maybe you can make real change. I can. But what about savouring the things of life? They can (albeit differently) be savoured in a village too, but oh not yet!

Meanwhile, lets see, the high life temps but its like fools gold. Especially when your search of another kind. Or is the demand for something more meaningful just a lot of vanity and a lot more of naivety?

-- Although i think I'm missing the point, the world is what it is. the question remains, what moves you? But then again after having seen so much of the present and real character of the world - its economy and society, can you really go back to - simply what moves YOU?

It's about can you deal with hypocrisy within yourself or can you deal with less of the good things in life. Strangely even radicalism has gone elite in some ways- books, ideas, methods... are found in social circles and you find yourself drawn back into all this. To move away from that too would be truly radical - and then the final question that confronts you is that are you just being socially radical or do you want to be personally, spiritually radical as well. And you can't fake that to yourself, unless of course you want to grow into a bitter old woman!

-- Then again, do i make it a big deal, says the ever shifting perspective in my brain? Just go out and enjoy life. Period. hmm. Well. .. so here ends a round of mental masturbation!

Searching...

all this insight

knowledge immense

pride remains

also repentance

sin is not felt

when i forget myself

why must i remember

regret, desire

faith and suspicion

on such quicksilver

rocks the ill shaped boat

defined by the trend

lost to myself

hopeful of a love

I refuse to grasp

whose words do i write

do i have any at all

climbing a hill

just to escape the ground

on the summit the view

is what i left behind

the blue summit appears

only to be clouded again

the jigsaw completes

and jumbles again

Benaras...

What can I say about Benaras. Having been to Rishikesh, Dharamshala and Pushkar and of course to Chandni Chowk there was much in Benaras that was a reflection of these places. And yet there is a character to Benaras that speaks to you in its own particular tongue.

The Benarasi is just different. I’m sure the lure of the city life has made inroads into the narrow by-lanes of Benaras too and why not, but there is sense of happy calm in the way of the people that you sense immediately. They blend seamlessly with their city and do not seem too anxious to get out of it, the way people in other small towns in today's India do. May be it is the promise of salvation that pervades its consciousness. What is it that has prevented shopkeepers from upgrading their shops? They may sell you lassi in mineral water (for the umpteen tummies from abroad that comes hunting for culture) but the shop will still be the old, well kept hole in the wall.

The local man still approaches his art and knowledge like a connoisseur and is ever ready to tell you reams of significance and meanings about every aspect of his life.

Perhaps it is the less ruptured inclusion of the Muslim who also lends this character to the city – and many still carry the old world traditions and rootedness in community living. 

Maybe it is just narrow lanes that prevent a certain invasion by expansive modernity… for architecture is also a site of praxis for social change. In these lanes curd is still jamaod (setting curd in Hinglish) in open paraants and served fresh as a snack, even as a cow ambles by. Breakfast can be a 7 rupees meal of kachoris, pulses and mint chutney.

This city has never had to go anywhere. Everything has come to it…

Rajahs from distant lands have built forts here, restored a temple destroyed by a Mughal king, donated gold and financed ashrams and boatmen. Politicians have financed the building of crematoriums and philosophers have passed by, learnt, delivered sermons and even settled here. It of course symbolizes the end of the body’s journey for the Hindu.

History is in the making here… every boatman, co-passenger, shopkeeper and trinket seller is ready to tell you a story about what beget what and why the present is the way it is. With so many gods rubbing shoulders, tradition must be re-emphasized and boundaries of identity have to be re-marked. A Hindu shopkeeper emphasizes to us the greater powers of the idol of Ganesha over that of the Buddha and nomenclatures add to the multitude of this religion with no borders.

Benaras has so many faces for me – Korean, Japanese, Thai and Sri Lankan Buddhist temples, Nepali Hindu temples, Hash smoking tourists, photographers or culture developers, old retired couples rolling by on a boat, claiming their late-found freedom from worldly roles and that little talked about Rajghat  Krishnamurti school where a sensitive education that goes beyond identity is attempted. As a continuous stream of bodies burn along the Manikarnika Ghat, there is both an acceptance and revulsion towards the starkness of death. The Ghat is the holiest of them all but the dome community who cremate the dead are traditionally considered low-status.

Meanwhile the locals seems to understand your need to explore this city… as you walk down the streets; there is no fear of getting lost, for everyone is eager to show you the way. And also to tell you , sometimes unsolicited, what to believe and where not to go.

Also refer to Shivangi's blog-piece on this same trip for a wholly different, more personal and visceral feel. This trip was a joint experience of Shivangi and I:  (http://shivangi-thestudentoflife.blogspot.com/2010/11/rangrasia-benaras.html)

Educating teachers...?

As long as teachers themselves carry a paternalistic attitude into their classrooms there is little room for real change. And this attitude still hugely exists through the entire system. Unless we recognize that education is something apart from imparting certain knowledge that has the haloed character of necessity, there is little chance our being open minded enough to allow for progress in education.

For education can only happen when we enter with the adventure of – ‘the discovery of the unknown’. No what we learn but learning the ability to learn is the key. And within this there are endless possibilities of what is learnt and taught.

Education is about making the child believe he is good, worthy and capable and making him see that everyone else is the same too. For this whether he is taught through mathematics, craft or play it matters little. But whatever happens, needs to be in the right spirit.

This is the training the teacher needs, not the content. The content reveals itself as you teach and it is in the collective discovery of knowledge that real learning happens.

The 'teacher' does not exist. It is only an illusion we develop in self-pomp. There are only learners. Learning this is probably the key to overthrowing deep-seated authority in our own minds.

Reality Check

Over this year I have had the opportunity to be exposed to the possibility of a wholly different way of growing up.
When we grow up seeing every child around us going to school, then college and then hunting for a job, we come to believe that it is the way of the world. In just the same way as we begin to automatically believe in death, in God, in the need to have wealth or social standing or so on. Simply because we have not been exposed to another paradigm at all.

It has been observed that prior to the Renaissance, artists were less concerned with the illusion of reality and more concerned with the content and symbolism of their work. The size of each element in the image related much more to its importance, rather than it's placement in a space. So clear three dimensions drawings where all objects or persons are in relative size to each other, began to be drawn only when the modern, western world began.

The sense of perspective that automatically comes into play when we draw or sketch anything is thus not inherent in the human mind. It is only one way of looking at the world.

Expand the implications of this and we realize that the world we know, as WE know it, maybe hides so many other dimensions, simply because our minds do not look at life that way.

You are the world, suddenly, has much greater meaning than before.

Such a realization posits that there is no absolute right we can hope to arrive at. Only multiple universes that we glide in and out of. The universe that feels more like home to our nature, is where we decide to set up home.

--

Meanwhile, going back to where I started, it was both scary, sad and liberating to know that there are several parents in the country who have been and increasingly are home schooling their children. Scary because radical change always challenges oneself to question deep assumptions and fears. Liberating because it shows us the fact that the dominant system is not entirely inescapable.

Several resource materials are now available for dedicated parents to teach their children at home. With much time on their hands, these children are able to travel much more, spend time learning in depth the things they like to do or are good at. They can learn a subject for the sheer joy of it and not with the pressure of exams on their minds.

Now the fact is that by the time they are 18, these children have quite possibly learnt lesser than their school going counterparts. (at least lesser than mainstream school, if not alternate schools)

But obviously, how much of what we learn at school is ever used. In fact increasingly, we are studying for the degree, and eventually we have to unlearn much of the patterns and ethics (if any) that school life has given us, when we step into working life.

However, the shift here is much more that just one of less or more learning. It is about growing up for the sake of living life itself, enjoying it, exploring it, being exposed to its multitude of forms - for the sake of those things themselves and not because they’ll get us somewhere.

A slow, unhurried education, allows for the flowering of a happy, secure person, who is not always worried about who is going to outsmart him.

Why should climbing a mountain only be about a school trip, about taking a break from what is the normal life. The mountain, its streams, its trees and plants are education – biology, geography.

Otherwise we just visit the mountain in summers, litter the slopes, talk loudly and completely fail to come in touch with the life that vibrates in it. Not that talking loudly doesn’t have its own charms J

To grow up with lesser fear and competition and to be able to be exposed to subjects as an interactive whole and not dissected areas of expertise…

To know that we are of value irrespective of the value we derive from doing socially rewarded actions – giving exams, getting prestigious jobs, marrying well… even while these things can be done

--

In our minds a ‘different’ education was the luxury of only the extremely rich or a compulsion of the poor.

The rich were anyway outside of the normative space. Meanwhile, thanks to well meaning governments and reformers, several of the poor have been convinced of the benefit of public schooling.

But the fact is that mainstream education furthers mainstream norms. Today education gets you a job. As demand increases higher and costlier qualification is required to apply for the same posts.

The poor have also entered this race mainly because education is seen as the ticket to upward mobility. But they are getting caught in a strange quandary. Their children, if by hook or crook manage to fund education till college find that they often join the ranks of the unemployed or at best underemployed educated. Because someone else did a post-graduation and won the race.

Where did the wonder of science, hindi, maths or history go in this whole process? Where did an energy which is not driven from insecure competition, and which is inherent in every child go? What is the point if half the lot feels they won while the other half live with the feeling that they were shortchanged by a system that claimed to be doing them good?
--

However, one must mind that it is dangerous to be caught in the romance of something better. It is the nature of the human mind to envy a life it could not lead.

Home schooling need not be the answer. But the realization that ours is not the only way to live and grow up, or the way we can bring up our children is real. Because it tells us something that we keep forgetting at we begin to robotically follow a pre-patterned life -that we are the boss and not the system that we ourselves have created around us.