I spend my day reading and
thinking about the meaning of education, about how best are people
taught and liberated, can anyone ever teach anyone, is education
liberating at all or is it a mere socialisation.
I read theorists who argue
that teachers, academics and philosophers present knowledge as
obscure and unreachable perpetuating the divide between the knower
and the ignorant. I read other thinkers who want to free man, free
him from the disciplinary practices that define truths for them and
want man to finds other ways out of the truths that enframe him.
This restless energy sends
us forth on journeys of emancipation. They are especially restless
because now we are told that there is not truth to be found anyway. F
celebrates the modern present in which man can invent himself again
and again. With Man and not God as the center of this modern time,
there are not moral bases to live life. Perhaps there never were. We
then must strive to be free, but to what end!
A recent incident threw a
very different light on this. In the death of a distant relative, one
saw a related kind of pain and journey. At the death of a 92 year
old man, his wife, who has been married to him since perhaps her teen
years, is completely lost. They were both teachers in the village
school, respected, disciplined and decently settled couple who lived
all their life in their ancestral village home in Haryana. Their
children are elsewhere and visit at intervals. The couple were
traditional but close and very much in love and affectionate.
They were a couple typicial
to the self-made, disciplined variety of those early 1900s in India.
Their children are not like them - they are dissipated, taken to a
more consumerist lifestyle. The village around them has changed over
the years, overrun by nearby Delhi culture. The two teachers taught
all their life. Our lady, was given to lay philosophising and also
gave spontaneous talks on the Gita to women of the community. She
always spoke a lot and was quite 'forward' for her times. Believing
that children should do, marry as they please and study well and
develop good minds and thoughts. She still thinks that way. Compelled
to speak, perhaps more so now, to fill her immense pain and silence,
she talks on. But now the positive and strong words, are mixed with
slippages into helpless meaninglessness. The house that was kept in
complete order earlier by her husband, as she sat with a recently
semi-paralysed body, is now taken over by her children and
grandchildren. 'Sacred' places that were not mishandled by others are
now helter skelter. She faces a life that is lonlier and will most
probably not be on her terms. As the village moves along, although
remembering the well-regarded couple, their teachings may have borne
little fruit. Perhaps some seeds lie somewhere, slowly waiting their
time. But for her, for now, the teaching is turned back on herself.
"I used to give so many
discourses and talks. Look now, i must give these teachings to myself
now"! she exclaims. The soul in torture speaks of its own pain
and its path in such clarity. But the pain remains yet.