IF this week’s column is all over the place, blame the unbearable heat that has cooked my brain. If the Met Department is to be believed, then there’s no respite in sight either. However, even as I moan and groan along with so many others, we must also be aware that the low pressure that builds up after such an intense spell of heat is also what creates the right conditions for the monsoon. Let us hope that Trump or El Nino don’t nix that as well.
It is believed in rural Rajasthan that the nine days before the monsoon arrives (nautapa) must have the highest temperatures to destroy the eggs of locusts and other pests, prevent rats from breeding along with snakes and scorpions and also bring typhoid and such diseases later. I must say there is some wisdom in this belief and perhaps this is why, even as we curse the heat, we bear it. Water and power outages become easier to deal with if you bear this in mind.
Now a brief detour into the tsunami results from Bengal. I wonder how so many journalists who had spent hours poring over facts and figures in their offices here or even those who were criss-crossing the state, microphones in hand, were still predicting a close finish. Close? It was a wipeout but many still believe that the results were not fair. Why is it that they did not see or believe what was widely known? The extortion rackets run by the tola-baaz gangs, the I-Pac brats taking over running the government by proxy and the huge level of corruption and a systemic breakdown of governance? I am not even going to mention the sexual exploitation of hapless girls and women because a certain section of the media was determined to ensure victory, however slim, for the TMC. The sad fact is that even Mamata Banerjee, the doughtiest fighter in the Opposition and its most tireless worker, had lost control over her party and government. Sadly, she now looks a shrunken version of her roaring self and will have a tough time building up the party once again.
This may be a difficult truth to accept but no matter how deeply we may admire Banerjee’s courage, it was time she hung up her chappals. Free to speak without fear of reprisals, the common people of Bengal now tell us exactly what they suffered. So while those liberals who are cosily ensconced in foreign universities were talking of the civilisational uniqueness of their motherland, the common Bengali decided that they could no longer rot in poverty and fear. Those non-resident Bengalis who spoke of a different Bengal could come back and create once again. If Shantiniketan is now just the name of the sheesh mahal of the man who grabbed public land to build his fortress, Tagore’s famed ashram (the original Santiniketan) is all but gone. Jadavpur University along with so many other famous educational institutions are now remembered only for what they once were.
This brings me to my current concern: the state of education in the country. Forget Bengal, even the most rapidly developing states have lost their way in their hurry to build roads, highways and tourist routes. Unlike Kerala and some southern states, the great Indo-Gangetic plain is now largely bereft of a network of government primary schools. I have often written about the sorry state of even our higher education but there is one more point I wish to add here. Our university education — especially in our posh private ones — is now tilting dangerously towards indoctrination rather than education. The bright young faculty being wooed and hired have courses designed to awaken social concerns but more often than not, these are provided with solutions and directions that are strongly tilted towards one ideology or another. I will not be alive to see what this will mean for the young minds lapping this up, but there is a world outside gender, fascism, caste and creed.
In the schools that we attended as children, moral science and civics were compulsory subjects. The first gave us our ethical moorings and the second instilled in us our responsibilities as citizens. Today, citizen rights are more popular (as they must be) but the responsibilities that go alongside are not sufficiently emphasised. Including children from under-privileged sections is a wonderful initiative. However, in practice, such children are ghettoised in many cases. The class snobbery that privileged children see around them at home makes them insensitive to those who do not ‘belong’. So while we pay lip service to social inclusion and egalitarianism, the truth is often the very opposite of what was intended.
The reduction of education to gathering information rather than knowledge and good values, the inordinate importance of exams and results (remember the recent hoo-ha after the paper leak of NEET?) and the attention paid to singing Vande Mataram — all these are facile and predictable ways of creating a generation that only values money and success. The entitlement of the elite class who speak English more fluently than their own mother tongues, their indifference to the state of public transport, to garbage and plastic waste, as well as those who look the other way when faced with uncomfortable truths are all a part of education that we have forgotten to emphasise sufficiently.
This cannot be the way forward.

— The writer is a social commentator