Herd Nerd Intensity

I have over the years become inured to shocks droughts and farmers committing suicide, floods and people drowning and now the annual SSLC/CAT results are a season for suicides. Teenagers senselessly torture themselves on the alter of their parents expectations. These ambitious parents want their children to excel at every subject, and that too at an age when they should be involved in childhood activities. My mind drifts into my own childhood of mornings spent in playing basketball, of lazy summer afternoons spent on tree tops playing ‘Tarzan’ or Cops ‘N’ Robbers or plucking mangoes from the neighbours garden, drinking or rather sucking plastic tubes which were called pepsi in those days, Cricket in the evenings and cycling and forming gangs.

The last place you would be likely to find me at school/college was in a stuffy classroom/lecture hall elbow to elbow with sweaty students scribbling away furiously while the teacher tried to cram us with information of dubious quality. I am shocked to see today’s children and teenagers lugging tons of text books, running between classes and tutorials like athletes in a relay team which eats up their childhood and when they grow up they cannot handle real life. The Irony is that it is educated parents who are trying to make their little ones into rocket scientists.

I had spent many years perfecting the art of bunking classes or getting thrown out of the lecture hall along with my friends. As we graduated from cycling we discovered that there was something unresistingly attractive about those lissome lasses. Crushes, heart breaks and liasions were the next lessons we learnt in the school of life. Motorbikes, beer and pretty girls were a deadly cocktail and I have run over a few cyclists in my day.

Of the serious front bench students a few were okay, most were perfect shit, a confederacy of dunces who would end up in a employee type career, a cubicle in some large organization.

Today the coaching classes are an industry unto themselves with condensed-crash courses for budding scientists, engineers with their own bogus technological language and they will cost a fortune. IIT and IIM’s are not a success passport just a lifelong employee in a Corporation. A recent study shows that 40% of those leading men from the Forbes List 400 don’t even have a degree. Excelling in life is different from scoring 90% in exams and excelling in class, these class toppers come croppers and can’t cope with the real world. We have to realize that each person is unique in his own way.

Either way ten minutes of heavy petting with Rekha is better than any coaching class or unique degree.

For most people education is a means to an end i.e they think education is over when they get a degree or MBA and land job with an MNC or large Corporate and work to earn money. In the quest for money they work hard hours, earn more, pay more taxes and even more for the mortgages on car, flat and other loans, thereby creating wealth for the banks and employer, while he becomes more insecure and life passes by. Only very few realize that education is required to seek new frontiers and opportunities and that learning will continue long after the degree and the essence is to enjoy one life without being a slave.

Often it matters less what one studies in college but more what one acquires in life and how to cope with the vicissitudes of life.