Education: A Hoax

Education is clearly wasteful if people are still thinking 30 years behind.

The real question is that whether top class education is really educating us on how to lead life with at least some integrity.

You know it’s all just a hoax when a fully educated grown woman allows herself to be cowed down by marital pressure, into thinking that the man (also fully educated) by marrying her is doing her a giant favour, which she would probably otherwise not deserve (according to her). And this man feels extremely justified in having the bride’s side footing the bill at every stage; so much for his Ivy League education!

Clearly, 25 years of so called Education, spanning kindergarten, primary school, high school, junior college, undergraduate university and postgraduate university have taught her/him nothing about fairness, equality or abandonment of the caste system. Never mind them; the girl’s parents go even beyond, thinking “The boy and his family are good, at least they’re not asking for Dowry!”

You try to educate them, tell them that it’s against the law (Dowry Prohibition Act) to ask for dowry, they could be thrown in jail for doing so. But no, “It is that way for YOU!” of course! Coz the law doesn’t apply to us backward people, because we live in a world of our own.

They say that, you’ll see when it’s your turn to get married. All this idealism is all good in books and movies. This is the real world baby! All this doesn’t fly, when you’re purchasing 50 lakhs worth of Stridhan!

I wonder why it is that women are even educated, if this is how they are expected to live. In my opinion, it’s a lot more hurtful when you Know that you’re being wronged and are expected to bear with it due to convention and societal norms. I’d rather just be an illiterate and not know the difference. That way nothing could seem wrong or right, just normal. Right?

So it is my plea, parents of India; Don’t educate your girl child. Seriously, she’ll be happier this way. At least she doesn’t know what she’s missing.

Utterly Different

It’s quite disheartening to have your own father telling you to conform to standards. That he doesn't believe that you have it in yourself to change the system, that nobody as ordinary as you could do that. They say, “You cannot change the world, you must jump on the bandwagon.” This is the way the cookie crumbles.

Now if everyone believed that, we would never have revolutionaries or pioneers or even inventors for that matter. Progress, be it physical, mental, technological, spiritual, in essence would halt.

Belief is indispensable, for the sake of progress. The courage to believe, that someday something will change for the better, it Will be different; that You could be a placard bearer of that movement and that you mustn’t wait for a Messiah to do it.

I hear that everyone would have themselves believe that they’re “Different”, unique somehow; that they aren’t one of the thousands alike. It seems that it’s a wishful notion, but most often considered untrue.

I disagree. They are “Different”, however so similar; they do possess their own personal brand of DNA. A unique identity, which can never be stolen. They are entitled to believe themselves to be anything; nobody has the right to typecast another, to put them down. To showcase to them their unnatural ordinariness.

Revolutionaries weren’t born, they were made so by the times and circumstances they lived in, the hardships and social sickness they faced. They had parents like ours too, ones who told them to live a normal life, not go against the odds, do as the world dictates you must or you’ll be ostracized. But they fought for us, for the faint hearted. They went ahead and faced Social Siberia, all for the greater good, so that one day a parent finally says, “You will change the world, son”

Maybe, one of these days we won’t sound ridiculous anymore when we say, “No, I’m not like the rest...I’m different!”

Maybe, just maybe, one of these days someone will actually believe you when you say that you’re out to change the world.