Sangam: A Symbol of Unity

We are surrounded by bureaucrats, quick to their feet with a diplomatic answer, meticulously stitched glitter of words, to dazzle and mislead the inquirer, who is convinced thus by the high sounding phraseology offered with an air of profound wisdom and prophetic assurance.  It is indeed difficult to distinguish between empty appearances or brutal manners and the inner nature of people who outwardly appear thus or maybe the other way round, a person with reserved manners and a pleasant smile who are pros in the art of twisting facts and presenting them in a deceptive form. Cunning men they may be, but Fall they will by the very bullet which they themselves helped to cast.

Someone hit the switch in the narrow hallway near the jury room, and the lights went off. The auditorium became dark. I closed my eyes and sunk into the seat between both the conveners, Swapnil and Milo, while Kallol was busy pacing up and down unaffected by the darkness, probably already calculating upon the next GRAND event the Students’ council will organize. A silence hung in the air. Was it because I and Varsha were no longer at the podium welcoming the dignitaries or was it because Sourav and Shalini were no longer presenting the slides of various clubs? Or was it the empty stage that stood witness of many cultural performances for both the days? A silence we would have wished for during the incessant discussions during the past two weeks, where every spoken word would result in a new work that needs to be done. After all it had to be GRAND!!

In students lay the essential ground work of creative thought, which blossoms out in ideas and actions with an endless fertility and enthusiasm and hence furnish the building materials and also the designs for the future of the institute and country. And everyone knows it, the dignitaries who spoke, the others who did not speak, you, me, and even the low intellects outside sitting through silly diktats who for their own fight for existence have long ago killed their sensitivity towards the others.  

I might have been just an anchor on that day, decent clothes, careful of my speech and reserved in manner and nodding politely to compliments of “nice job”, “well spoken”, and “looking good” by the dignitaries and others. But I have been so occupied thinking about my present lot and future that the immediate surroundings seemed to be of little significance. Someone said “problems exist in our life not to boggled but to be surmounted” and I had responded with a Chinese proverb “If your problem has a solution, why worry? If your problem does not have a solution, then why worry?”  But then what if you don’t know if your problem had a solution or not and what if the solution you had, required you to act, and what if your action is to be in the interest of a larger group, like, your scholarship? Your degree?  Mess subsidy? And the likes.  Would you act? Would you fight for your fellow men and women? You can only fight for something you love, for you to love you must respect, and in order to respect you must have some knowledge. And hence the objective was clear and for that I worked for. Now you know, yourself and your fellow students, and you know when a rallying cry is made on whom shall you place your trust on. Because, you KNOW.

Entrance Exams & Coaching Centers: A Retrospect

Mother Nature herself in such matters has been prejudiced; as she concentrates her greatest devotion not to the maintenance of what already exists but on the selective breeding of offspring in order to carry on the species, a silent ploy by nature to topple the balance in the hands of the goddess of eternal justice with complete awareness of the fact that she is blindfolded, so how is it wrong if humans, a product of Mother Nature herself, have inherited this trait.

I considered myself lucky when destiny placed me among the top 1 percent of the students in such an exam, but this gives me neither reason nor a passion to speak highly of this process or enough experience to question the existence as such. When entrance exams was taken as an example to explain the survival of the fittest after successfully clearing them, the underlying irony never had a chance to be glimpsed upon as any attempts were drowned with proud smiles and nods and satisfied faces as they knew very well, they were all safely set apart by ditch called entrance exams that ran very wide and by fortune they were on the safer side of that ditch.

In all the hatred, fear and anxiousness surrounding the entrance exams, therein lay a spring that never dried up, and that spring in other words are the over ambitious coaching centers. Remember, coaching centers are here not because you need them, but YOU need them just because they are here.

These were the ones who understood the juvenile spirit of parentage and how they respond to a rallying cry of their child’s future, thus to the parent is the rallying cry first addressed. And hence, the child is made to enter into this vicious game. He arrives with little broken pieces of a dream, slowly, they clean up, dry him out, put him back together, piece by piece. They clear his heads, teach him confidence and discipline, and prepare him. They probably do a good job of this, but then there is the threat, fragile as he still is, and somewhere in between under pressure from school and parents has a break down, what he has worked so hard to produce is now past.

He now loiters about and passes senseless comments. He comes first to take position in the last bench and has a restless time waiting for the short ten minute break between the classes and then after the break prays for the teacher to be late. He begins to start drifting to the lower social level and mixes up with a class human beings through whom his mind is now poisoned, in addition to his mental misery he now lunges into a road to physical misery as well. Of course, the people who regularly ensure his fee is up to date know all this as well, and they still turn a blind eye, for the child comes at a cost, a stiff one indeed. Hence, they do their best, and strike the parents blind and make them stand near a corpse that bleeds with every sign of decomposition with a blank promise that these were indeed signs of renewed vitality of their dreams. Hence, the parents are made to spend extra resources on more materials, test series and counseling sessions, which the child takes on maybe not to his natural liking yet he joins in it out of sheer indifference.  Hope, he feels a hypocrite for even thinking the word.

I saw this happen maybe for a hundred times right before my eyes and the longer I observed greater was my dislike for such coaching centers which greedily attracts students under its tutelage just to break them mercilessly in the end.

This probably was one of the many reasons I dropped out of coaching classes in spite of threats, protests and laments from my parents. Guess I was after all right in what I did.

Note:- I have nothing against coaching centers as such. Some of them and maybe certain branches of the famous ones are really good. My advice here is not to encourage anyone to stop attending coaching classes but to tell them make sure you attend one when you have a clear idea about how to take an advantage of the guidance provided and the system.

Secondly, generalizing the student as a “he” may make you feel like I am gender biased or maybe that girls are spared of a similar fate, but both the beliefs should be dismissed because my experiences had been with a majority of male friends in this regard that’s why I used a “he”. 

Tick-Tock and yet another day goes by

“What do you know about Time?”

“Nothing” after a pause “Nothing at all” said the dark black statue, even though nobody spoke to him.

A handiwork of Gilbert Bayes in an attempt to immortalize a great man with an even greater vision, who till date clutches the IISc main building close to his chest of fear that even the tiniest of negligence on his part be responsible for Swami Vivekananda turning restlessly in his grave. Of all the ones in the campus, I pity him the most, for he stays there during sun and rain under heat and cold, of all these agonies the worst being the one pervaded by the crows, pigeons and any other kind of bird that have more right than us to call IISc a home.

As someone who stood there counting probably over every single second of his century long existence, yet no one could have a sound sleep after prefixing upon him a blame for knowing “nothing at all” of Time. Time, which according to Albert Einstein subjected its flow whether you lay your hand on a hot frying pan or on a hot woman, had by far shown no mercy at all as it ticks away busily exposing the limit of our very mere existence.  

The complex equations on pen and paper, for elucidating the anonymity of time does no justice in explaining to me how quickly time has gone by. It seems just like yesterday I had my first class and was easily cruising through Newton’s reckonings and here I am today struggling to understand the abstruse mathematics behind a counter-intuitive world of Quantum physics and still wondering where the past two years have vanished, and by now I also have the misfortune of being in possession of average grades of my four semesters which will hold little value in Ivy league if not for a research paper soon to come. And according to some, my continuous dedication to my blog may as well get me admission in Ivy League but for some degree in English!! After all that Physics!!

The serenity of the campus has probably veiled the restless timepiece that seems to govern everyone, an inevitable passage of a precious quantity never reclaimable, as our mind and body races between assignments, classes, lectures, research or maybe a talk by some Nobel Laureate who happens to join us from time to time.

The worst part of the day happens to be the time between bed and sleep, when the past comes back with a vengeance- the mistakes, the misery, the could-haves and should-haves. Try as you might, you simply cannot close your eyes and go to sleep.  That’s when I ask myself, how was all of my time spent today, was it the lectures? Or was it the endless assignments? Or was it the leisurely walk I went on holding some girl’s hand? Or was it the demands of a healthy investment in a long distance relationship?

And at that time you simply wished you could stop the clock for some time and take it all in and then probably resume it, for yet day another had gone by.

 
Photo credits: Abhinav Maurya
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Me, Science ‘n Father

“Checkmate!” my friend across me exclaimed. We were sitting in the veranda of the main building referred to as the faculty hall of the Indian Institute of Science with a chessboard between us. The Bangalore evening was as always pleasant, and held a silent promise to eavesdrop on any retention I wished to have from my past.

“Checkmate”, a term to indicate the climax of a battle suddenly seemed to bring a recollection of many other such skirmishes in my life, won with or without strategies and maybe sometimes by sheer determination and stubbornness and disobedience.

I remember, whenever the topics of my career cropped up, me and my father exhausted all our pieces and moves, and the struggle would become a stalemate. The loss at the battle with rooks, horses and bishops might be accepted in good faith but I had now another battle to fight, a serious one. A battle with egos of a man, who still has a strong memory of the hard road which he himself traveled, had contributed significantly to make him look upon a career in science as a waste of time and talent, and hence accordingly he set little value on them. The battle of “NO” and “NONETHELESS” originated since the first time he asked what I really wanted myself to pursue, the resolution that had already infested my mind expressed itself without any hesitation. He was suddenly speechless, maybe he was wondering that he might not have gotten my words correctly or maybe he thought he must have misunderstood by what my idea meant.  When I repeated myself, and explained the plans I had in mind and the moment he realized how serious I was, he exclaimed, “Physics! Pure sciences?!” and he opposed them with blind determination as was characteristic of the majority of the Indian parents. For, they would have already decided upon a career for their child. Their own hard struggle in making their own career has led many to overestimate what they have achieved and as a reason has led to stubbornness in this regard and also a strengthening of their belief that their experiences have placed them in a position to facilitate their child’s advancement in a similar career.

Maybe he wondered whether I was in a sound state of mind to think this way, for he felt, his decisions seemed simple, logical, definite, clear and in his vision, his plans for me was something that was supposed be taken for granted. A gentleman of such a nature, who has risen in life by means of his own hard work and determination and the struggle for existence, the idea of an inexperienced young man allowed making his own decision regarding career, where my future lay concerned seemed to breach his characteristic sense of duty as a parent. And the idea of standing silent and watching as I made plans would have been grave and reprehensible weakness in the exercise of parental authority and responsibility. His concern and longing had been genuine; he wanted me to advance in a career and save myself the tough ordeal he himself had to go through but as the rough corners of youthful crudeness began to wear off, he must have known that his longing has been in vain, for the future had to be otherwise. The seeds of future had been sown long ago and it was a premonition that he could never have foreseen at that time. For the future had to be otherwise.

“Checkmate” my friend repeated again.

“No, Not yet”

For the future had to be otherwise.