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.

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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

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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?
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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.

i have it 'fingered' out...?

Ive seen something new about me...

I seem to know what i want much better now than ever before...

I know when i'm in a get together which i need not have come to, i know what extra entertainment or chill out i can give myself even in the middle of work and not feel guilty about it

And - and this is what triggered this bog - i seem to know what exact food i want at a certain time

I get a sudden clearly defined taste in my mouth. Halwa happened somedays back....
right now, just now, midlle of work, came an omlette... fresh, hot, spicy, i could smell it and taste it.
This never used to happen before

is is good that i know what i want...? i hope i dont get to be like this all the time, or life would be such a bore...!!

the food part i dont mind except that it comes at the oddest of moments.. perhaps has to do with the fact that having dispensible income has made me inclined to immediate gratification of desire... hmm... if that's so, my impending unemployment will take some getting used to....

Sniffofit

Smells are not simply about thing A and its smell B. Smells are a process, inextricably linked with both their subject and their object, so to speak. Only when red chilly finds its way to that pool of smoldering oil does its truely give out its fragrance. Not untill it can make the eyes water a little and and lead to a few sneezes is the experience complete.

Smelly gunny bags in which our daily vegetables present themselves are mouldy proof of the freshness of the merchandise. Can the bhaji sold in plastic trays at modern vegetable malls ever give that feel?Perhaps our urbanised senses have got used to another sort of freshness - big shining, clean vegetables, sanitised cold cuts.

However observation in weekly markets in small towns throws another picture. A litle mud on the vegetable just makes it closer to the land. Poultry must be executed in front of me.

Meanwhile, to return to the point I began with, smells are a coming together of many a thing. What is the item stored in? How is it presented? What are my notions of freshness, natural, reliable? what is it mixed with?

Tea powder is as if waiting to be added to hot water, mud when sprinked with water acquired a whole new dimension. mogra, jasmine, rose and marigold are intimately linked with memories of weddings, adorning hair with flowers while going to school. Rich thick and heady smells are part of rural and small town India.

And yet again that space from which all appears to be distant and alien. Is it a game of the mind to protect itself or a retreat of the soul form where it can be the observer par excellence. The hilltop where everything else is smaller, the corner seat in the restaurant from where you can absorb the place while the shadows veil your countenance, the flitting vision from the rickshaw from which the city jelously gives away a few relalities

Life in conversation....

- "had Bkfst"? (coz if not S and me will have maggi)
- do you want the all out liquid?
- hee hee ya..so cool...it was super mild! (when a micro mini earthquake spiced up a
listless day in hostel life)
- don't know about gerda lerner (who wrote on the creation of patriarchy)...darn should have attended classes..! (R in one of the several messages we exchanged about wot readings to do and which to leave out)
- my rack will be up for sale soon..lemme know if anyone keen..
- dude that was sinfully brilliant... i'm not an authority on such matters but i'm convinced that chaocolate is better than sex. (SP when i gave her a lindtt)
- he's left already should be in london by now.. (school frnds are all over the place now..hmm)
- ha ha :-D okat then some other time..just retrospecting..don't bring out the tissues yet.. (P on amby gangs and 'us four' nostalgia)
- cant believe but getting little senti about the 4 of us. could'nt have been a better bunch. (same as above)
- thought it had to do with 'boundary' (S on the forever elusive south-west asia readings)
- surveillance! :-) (P when i wasa trying to find out where she went of in the morning..)
- Neha are you planning to discard your readings and notes of second year? do u know of anybody who is ready to give? i'm in dire need (A: already worrying for next yr, while giving exams for 1st year..! )
- Bored as hell ( P - when it was reaching the limit)
- Elite class in satellite country. literally 'interpretor". (R my mobile dictionary, telling me what comprador means)
- arun agarwal rdng onlne undr title enchantment and disenchantment w concept of cmnty or smthg like that. do a google serach it one a site called science direct. (another one of those)
- oh shit! i can empathies are with you...i got one done last yr. clearly ur eating too much chocolate n growing old fast :-) remeber to get a porcelein n not metal cap fr d tooth. and show the Drji ur a duddette. (A on when i had to get a root canal)
- Can i please shoot tila!! (priceless)


Before i end up deleting these messgs... decided to archive them... D school and hostel in the last few months...