1.
One of the most enduring dialogues of Hindi cinema is: Jo dar gaya woh mar gaya! Meaning – One who gives in to fear is dead! It was mouthed by a jungle baddie, wild-eyed heartless bandit, Gabbar Singh. Gabbar, as a word always reminded me of another Hindi word: gubbara, meaning – balloon! How many balloons of ruthless toxins would have made one Gabbar – is anybody’s guess. Gabbar was in direct conflict with an upper-class landlord also perceived by his villagers as their sole protector against the merciless ploys of Gabbar taxing them perpetually on their farm yields (thus confronting the landlord economically because the ownership of the farmlands must be with the Thakur – the landlord). Ironically, this landlord is also a senior policeman of an emerging Republic constitutionally mandated to do away with the zamindari system and more significantly this Thakur having lost both his hands to Gabbar’s gut-wrenching violence employs two urban, fearless, extremely good-looking, sexy criminals in his personal war against Gabbar Singh. Well, we all know the story for we have seen the film many, many times over. What I like to ponder is Gabbar’s unique identification of fear as a thin dividing line between what we experience as life (as in existing) and our mental speculation of what death is or can be (which among the ravines where Gabbar lived with his gang facing the ravages of nature first-hand can be almost equivalent to actual dying).
2.
Modern urban education is increasingly driven by moronic aspirations of the school and college owners, book publishers, teachers, accessory manufacturers, training centers and an unimaginative bureaucracy and groups of educationists drawing up syllabus and curriculum on various Boards all designed to kill contemplation and thinking capabilities of students and learners at an early age. The problem is: How to produce non-thinkers out of guys who get helluva of marks (let’s say something like 98.3%)? Education has gradually converted itself to a viable industry by replicating the texture and cascading sequence of manufacturing units as we find elsewhere that is of a fully-integrated main plant surrounded by ancillaries both online as well as offline. A post-modern nation-state to thrive requires a bunch of people who know a lot and can store monumental quantum of data and thus is so blocked with loads of information and computational skills that thoughts are mortified to enter such constricted minds. Thoughts – that can move and break planets – require leisure, enjoyment, happiness and harmony as an ambience to the process and pursuits of learning. Loading a child with a mammoth syllabus annihilates the process of learning but is extremely good for business for as learning becomes more and more and more difficult you will pay more and more and more to get it (remember diamonds). More importantly the goal of education in a post-modern nation-state is much more than inculcation of learning (what you read and write) but to instill a value (as in frenzied hammering of an iron-nail to a soft piece of timber) among its recipients that competition under the most difficult of circumstances is almost akin to essential survival. Since in the process one makes competition all-pervasive (one is always and constantly fighting against the other and also at one level against oneself) one implicitly starts believing in the omnipotence and utilitarian values of war and even concludes: there can be no life without war. Collaboration soon becomes a bad idea. A post-modern nation-state wants this and the masters of the Corporations who run the show in absentia just love to see their foot-soldiers being manufactured in laboratories who embrace Shakespeare, Trigonometry, Laws of Motion, Periodic Table, Genetics, Rabindranath, mysteries of the Mughal Empire, Charter of the United Nations and Topo-sheets (readers may like to refer to the ICSE Syllabus for Class X which is nothing short of being offensive and rude to the idea of being humane) with the same comfort as dirty clothes take to the jostling ugly vortices of moving water inside the cavity of a washing machine.
One of the most enduring dialogues of Hindi cinema is: Jo dar gaya woh mar gaya! Meaning – One who gives in to fear is dead! It was mouthed by a jungle baddie, wild-eyed heartless bandit, Gabbar Singh. Gabbar, as a word always reminded me of another Hindi word: gubbara, meaning – balloon! How many balloons of ruthless toxins would have made one Gabbar – is anybody’s guess. Gabbar was in direct conflict with an upper-class landlord also perceived by his villagers as their sole protector against the merciless ploys of Gabbar taxing them perpetually on their farm yields (thus confronting the landlord economically because the ownership of the farmlands must be with the Thakur – the landlord). Ironically, this landlord is also a senior policeman of an emerging Republic constitutionally mandated to do away with the zamindari system and more significantly this Thakur having lost both his hands to Gabbar’s gut-wrenching violence employs two urban, fearless, extremely good-looking, sexy criminals in his personal war against Gabbar Singh. Well, we all know the story for we have seen the film many, many times over. What I like to ponder is Gabbar’s unique identification of fear as a thin dividing line between what we experience as life (as in existing) and our mental speculation of what death is or can be (which among the ravines where Gabbar lived with his gang facing the ravages of nature first-hand can be almost equivalent to actual dying).
2.
Modern urban education is increasingly driven by moronic aspirations of the school and college owners, book publishers, teachers, accessory manufacturers, training centers and an unimaginative bureaucracy and groups of educationists drawing up syllabus and curriculum on various Boards all designed to kill contemplation and thinking capabilities of students and learners at an early age. The problem is: How to produce non-thinkers out of guys who get helluva of marks (let’s say something like 98.3%)? Education has gradually converted itself to a viable industry by replicating the texture and cascading sequence of manufacturing units as we find elsewhere that is of a fully-integrated main plant surrounded by ancillaries both online as well as offline. A post-modern nation-state to thrive requires a bunch of people who know a lot and can store monumental quantum of data and thus is so blocked with loads of information and computational skills that thoughts are mortified to enter such constricted minds. Thoughts – that can move and break planets – require leisure, enjoyment, happiness and harmony as an ambience to the process and pursuits of learning. Loading a child with a mammoth syllabus annihilates the process of learning but is extremely good for business for as learning becomes more and more and more difficult you will pay more and more and more to get it (remember diamonds). More importantly the goal of education in a post-modern nation-state is much more than inculcation of learning (what you read and write) but to instill a value (as in frenzied hammering of an iron-nail to a soft piece of timber) among its recipients that competition under the most difficult of circumstances is almost akin to essential survival. Since in the process one makes competition all-pervasive (one is always and constantly fighting against the other and also at one level against oneself) one implicitly starts believing in the omnipotence and utilitarian values of war and even concludes: there can be no life without war. Collaboration soon becomes a bad idea. A post-modern nation-state wants this and the masters of the Corporations who run the show in absentia just love to see their foot-soldiers being manufactured in laboratories who embrace Shakespeare, Trigonometry, Laws of Motion, Periodic Table, Genetics, Rabindranath, mysteries of the Mughal Empire, Charter of the United Nations and Topo-sheets (readers may like to refer to the ICSE Syllabus for Class X which is nothing short of being offensive and rude to the idea of being humane) with the same comfort as dirty clothes take to the jostling ugly vortices of moving water inside the cavity of a washing machine.
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