On Strict Educational Institutions

Last week, one of my roomies was hospitalized. Nothing serious, just a bout of diarrhea from which he has since recovered. Anyway, A friend and myself had gone over to the hospital to visit him.
On entering the foyer of the hospital, we notice a lot of visibly tensed people. A whole cacophony of languages is to be heard, with Malayalam and Kannada overpowering the others. My friend guesses that they must be students staying in some hostel. I agree, as I can find no other explanation for why such a large, pajama-wearing crowd should be assembled outside a hospital. Since we do not have time to inquire about the situation, we let it go and move directly to my roomies hospital room. A hale and hearty patient greets us, informing us that the doctors have given him a clean chit. Since we were not familiar with the formalities involved in getting a patient discharged, I go to the foyer to find someone who was aware of it. Which is when I overhear one of the students discussing that they are in need of AB+ blood. I butt into their conversation to inform them that my blood group is AB+ and that I was willing to donate it. They take me to the blood donation center and ask me to wait. Seeing that it would take a long time before my turn came up, I strike a conversation with another student who was also waiting to donate blood. He tells me what happened.
To cut a long story short, it seems that they were students at a reputed private college in Mysore, with a very famous figurehead. As is the case with a large number of reputed private colleges, this one was infamously strict. He told me that allegedly(this is how TOI put it) a member of their college administrative board went through the contents of a personal diary kept by a student. Allegedly, he also threatened her that the contents of the diary will be published on the college notice board. This prompted the student to take an extreme step: suicide. Fortunately, the attempt failed. However, she was in a coma and an urgent surgery was necessary to improve her chances. The surgery required eight bottles of blood and fate had willed that I should be there, at the hospital, to give my share.
I am sharing this incident because it would have faded into obscurity with a small note in the TOI being the only evidence that it occurred. The college will be back to normal, the member of the administrative board will continue his rein of terror on the students.
I have never understood the fascination for extreme discipline in private colleges. They believe that suffocating their students and stifling their voice will make them world movers. History tells us that this is rarely the case. Doing so might make them capable drones, but it would never produce original thinkers. I personally know of cases wherein once students escape from the strict confines of their academic institutions, they abuse their new found freedom. Teenage days and college days are very impressionable periods, and an important lesson that has to be picked up during this period is to learn from ones mistakes. Such educational institutions do not give students the freedom to fall, to make mistakes. They ignore the individuality of a student. They figure that every student can be replaced by a number against which violations can be marked, offenses can be fined and civil liberties can be conveniently neglected. One number to rule them all. However, they fail to realize that these numbers, when pushed and shoved for too far, too long, can behave unpredictably.
The destruction left behind in the wake of such behavior is devastating: A student's aspirations shattered, a family's dream destroyed and a section of the students body left emotionally scarred, perhaps for life.
This incident and the destruction it has sowed, is unlikely to shut down the college. I can only hope that this incident is a grim reminder of why 'we dont need no education', at least not of the strict kind.

UPDATE: I had written this post thinking that strict, nonsensical rules were a bane of the private educational sector. This post from Shishir tells me that these problems have started creeping into our premier educational institutes, including the IITs.

The Willing Fundamentalist

Just as my kitty of topics to blog on was running dry, i run into this post by Silverine. It got me thinking on fundamentalism, and how people can readily recognize it in the newspapers and on TV, but not in their own life. Recently, one of the long winding conversations with my cousin, landed on the topic of how certain elders in our family have a rigid set of value systems and how they expect us to conform to the same. The set of value systems, under its umberalla would cover everything from trifle things, such as what sort of music to play in the car, to the more serious things, such as what career stream one should follow. In their defense, let me note here that these people are not cracked eggs by a long shot. They live happy lives, take good care of their families, help out their neighbors and are, in general, fun people to hang out with.
One of the earlier conversation with my cousin had to do with fundamentalism, and how in today's world, we only notice one ugly face of it, namely religious fundamentalism. The other forms of fundamentalism are either ignored or are not recognized. Perhaps it would be easier to recognize fundamentalism, if we knew what it was. Wiktionary tells me that fundamentalism is 'Strict adherence to any set of basic ideas or principles'. Definition wise, this cannot be a bad thing. Living your life by a strict set of principles, is mostly a good thing, provided the principles are not taken out of a bad slasher movie! So when exactly does fundamentalism go bad? In my opinion, it is when we impose our principles and ideas upon someone who subscribes to a different school of thought and expects them to conform to our ideas/principles. This definition would place a lot of people on the wrong side of the fence. It might place NGOs, who oppose movies based on touchy topics and Journos, who cant take criticism, in the same league as our famed 'Moral police'. However it is high time that we classify them for what they all are : The Willing fundamentalist. This badge of shame may provoke a few "Fundamentalists" to mend their ways. Only then can we hope to eradicate intolerance from our society.

The alarm is ringing, to snooze or not?

As the dust settles down on what has been termed by our Media (in clichéd terms, I must say) as 'India's 9/11', we can introspect a bit on the change being felt around us. The Great (only to be read sarcastically!) Indian Middle class (GIMC), which has never been interested in civic responsibilities, has woken up. There has been a general consensus that the very leaders that were elected into power by us not voting, are not going to stand up and accept blame for the carnage that took place. I have been a silent follower of the blogosphere that till date, was absent of civic charged entries (I chose to emphasize the fact that politically charged blogs are very much different from civic minded blogs). The change that is happening now is visible everywhere from this blog entry by Silverine to this rally in Mumbai.
It has dawned on the GIMC that as long as it refrains from exercising its suffrage, its voice will not be heeded by our politicos. It doesn’t matter if we cry ourselves hoarse in our blogs or in editorials, in India the crying baby certainly does not get any milk, the voting one does. As far as our political bosses are considered, we are an anomaly in the system that does not effectively translate into any vote bank for them. A lesson learnt in the US presidential election was that, galvanizing a youth segment to get up and have their vote counted, translated into victory for the President elect. Once we have caught the attention of our politicos in this manner, they cannot choose to avoid our voice. As depressing as it may be(to be herded together as a generic unit), the GIMC will become a votebank that they will have to answer to.
The scheming overlords may take this opportunity to make this a case of the affluent vs. the poor. The divisive politics of the British have been inherited by our Politicos, who have refined it to an art form: North against South, State against State, and Religion against Religion. We should be wary of these designs and cast our votes for those that do not sing this divisive song. It should not matter who these people we choose are: their Political background, their religion, their caste. Elections are on in many states as we speak, and the rest of the country will soon follow. If we finally decide to stand up and have our voice counted in the electoral booths, this could very well be the silver lining in a very dark cloud for us.

For those of you who are in my situation and are just as confused about voter registration and the like: this site really helps.