Nothing to say

It’s surprising but as the year comes to end, I just realised that I've had nothing to post in months. My life has been through so much; good and bad phases. A lot has happened in this period. Still I find it hard to believe I couldn't come across a thought or an observation to bring up here.

One of my writer friends and a senior at one of my earlier companies once was discussing about the joy of writing and how he would go about it. During the conversation, he told me that an effective way to get around a ‘writer’s block’ is to write about it. So here I am, writing about ... well, nothing.

Isn’t nothingness strange? I guess it is a key emotion that we never acknowledge. It could take forms of bliss and later on, boredom. But it certainly forms an essential part of our lives, doesn’t it? It could make you see the beauty of life and miss it at the same time.

Incidentally, nothingness could also be a big void in a train of thoughts. The mind probably works like a train and you need to take out one thought in order to let another come and play. So probably getting out the nothingness might make way for somethingness. I really hope that made sense.

Now that I really have nothing to write about and have probably stopped to make sense, I'd just conclude by saying that there might be many more similar writings on ‘nothing to write about’ coming up. Anyways, here’s hoping I wouldn't need any.

The Great Indian Pendrive

They say education aims at making us better humans. But how effective is it, if it makes us underconfident, prejudiced and practical failures. Welcome to India, where education aims at making you nothing but another brick in the wall, to put it in the words of Pink Floyd. Even though that was a generalised take on education, I'd just like to add that it personifies India like no other.

Since the days of the gurukul education system, we've only been made to memorise and recite like parrots. Reasoning and questioning is never encouraged by parents or teachers. But in this era of google.com and virtual reality, isn't memorising a job that's just left to pendrives?

Talking about education as a whole, it is not a process that just starts at school. It starts from home. And our teachers and elders have the perfect ways of killing any interest that a kid may cultivate. We're so insecure as a nation and society. This insecurity combined with false pride and ego takes a toll on a kid's future. Job security rates higher than passion and the kid is made an instrument for parents' ego.

We would like to believe in chasing excellence in stead of success. But the truth remains that we succumb to "what has scope" and to "what our neighbour's son does". Just for the record, India would be one of the very few nations in the world where people want to become engineers for the fear of not getting another job that suits their "position in the society" otherwise.

We teach our kids to believe in idols, century old scriptures, holy books and superstitions. But make it a point to NEVER teach them to believe in themselves. A post graduate in India goes around asking help to fill a resume while even a kid in the west would know how to sell himself. The same theory of "give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, teach him how to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime" applies here. But unfortunately, we're least interested in learning how to fish. We're glad being highly educated, complacent and less readier to face the world.

Albert Einstein once said that Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school. And here in India, once an exam is over, we're formatted pendrives.