“What is the capital of Slovakia?” intoned my younger brother working on his assignment. To me, this was too much stress and embarrassment to suffer in one sitting. During the last couple of hours, I had already feigned a couple of restroom trips to sneak a peek at internet’s take on Genghis Khan’s lineage. Did one really care about whether the Mongolian marauder lived in a ‘ger’ or drank fermented mare’s milk called ‘airag’? Life seems rather unfair that one is now required to help out with one’s sibling’s homework. I am forced to revisit my school days that had happily ended over 3 years ago. Memories of what one learned then escape me. But honestly, hasn’t the world kept on changing ever since? Whoever had heard of an Arctic hamlet called Resolute or an Eskimo tribe called the Inuit before all that talk of global warming? When was anyone interested in the geography of Uzbekistan or the people of Tajikistan before the mighty USSR crumbled into fragments of free thought?
At times I stop to question- where has all the creative thought gone? Is it left behind in those day-dreams we used to spin on the last bench in the classroom? Is it lost in the endless brooding on “Why did the chicken cross the road?” or “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” I long for the times, when one simply used to sit n’ try to pry open the nearest bit of machinery one could lay hands on (considering it as a hyper-beam laser to blow up planets!), the ultimate childhood engineering fantasy. Kiddos today prefer to stick to internal combustion engines being published in those Autocar journals (Boy, they do understand those!).
Likewise I eschew my brother’s science homework. The subject, Introduction to IT - one declares loudly for the entire family to hear-was included only a year back! I wasn’t taught that in school. Or, take for that matter the entire world of New Vedic Math that was just digging the roots of the Indian education system even as one was slipping away from the grip of my final school years. Disjoint sets or unions were not in the same league as age-old equations to calculate the height of a tree using the length of its shadow as a parameter. Having reassured myself that one could not possibly know everything that young children expect us to know today, one tackles them with stern confidence. “Check it up on the Internet.” The other day my brother whooped in joy. He had picked up a social studies project needing to describe the development of the Indian classical music. The music buff I am, this must surely be a period he expected me to be intimately familiar with. Save the rock cult one gets to read about in the Rock Street Journal, my memory of the topic in our social studies books is only a blur. “What is the basic difference between the Hindustani and Carnatic gharanas of music?” he commenced his barrage of questions. “I am busy” one replied, pretending to reach out for the phone. “Go, ask mom”.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
To Conform is To Enervate
should've added this a long long time back...anyways, better late than never...
Through the entire matrix of human development, from the Stone Age to the man and his civilization as we know it to be today, CHANGE is the only constant. All human progress is the outcome of a mind that questions what is, and dares to dream and realize what it could be. All growth can be attributed to this courage, to step beyond the tangible into the realm of creativity, to question the relevance of traditional practices, to innovate with a zeal to contribute, unfettered by social conditioning or the need to conform to an unserviceable law or a custom which has lost its validity.
This attitude exists as a commonality in all great personalities who have made significant contributions towards growth and development of man. If a handful of people can contribute path breaking views such as the Energy Equation, Theory of Relativity, Laws of Gravity etc., then imagine the huge potential of the millions of human minds which can go unexplored and unexpressed; wasted just because they were constrained by a mind conditioned by convention, restrained by a fear to step beyond the known.
The quantum leaps in the quality of human existence have resulted only when someone believed that there is a better and more efficient way to do something other than the traditional methodologies that we are comfortable with, and that there is something more to life than what meets the eye. It is only then that man has outperformed himself, and rediscovered his true potential.
A case in hand is the developments of the communication systems, in history from mere beating of drums and using smoke signals to sending messages through birds and couriers, followed by the e-mail and the latest avatar , the SMS.Incremental improvement only leads to incremental change. As a result of ever-developing technologies and fast changing socio-economic situations, change is avalanching upon us, and if it is not met with certain preparedness, its speed may overwhelm us. The trouble with being on the right track is that you still experience the risk of being run over if you just keep sitting there! Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if not altered for the better, by design. He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery. Growth, after all, is the only evidence of life. In the words of William Blake- “The man who never alters his opinions, is like standing water. He only breeds reptiles of the mind”
Flexibility, adaptability, and open-mindedness are far greater virtues as compared to the non-threatening, safe haven, of the known systems and predicted results. Unpredictable, valuable discoveries have been made and exponential learning has been made available due to the out-of-the-box thinking whenever a questioning mind has ventured assertively to explore higher possibilities.
This courageous act is the direct outcome of a man assuming absolute responsibility of his life and actions which in turn provides for the ultimate experience of true freedom for it is then when life and situation do not control him, and man actually steps out of the cocoon of a comfort zone to create his own set of rules, live his values, realize his dreams, fulfill his possibilities and express his true potential- living and experiencing life and freedom, truly and fully, to the hilt.
It is only in man’s imagination that the truth finds an undeniable existence. Rules of the society as we know them today, and our sense of reality is the creation of our own minds. If we created these, we should realize and exercise our ability to create a new order- to reinterpret reality, to recreate life itself.
Through the entire matrix of human development, from the Stone Age to the man and his civilization as we know it to be today, CHANGE is the only constant. All human progress is the outcome of a mind that questions what is, and dares to dream and realize what it could be. All growth can be attributed to this courage, to step beyond the tangible into the realm of creativity, to question the relevance of traditional practices, to innovate with a zeal to contribute, unfettered by social conditioning or the need to conform to an unserviceable law or a custom which has lost its validity.
This attitude exists as a commonality in all great personalities who have made significant contributions towards growth and development of man. If a handful of people can contribute path breaking views such as the Energy Equation, Theory of Relativity, Laws of Gravity etc., then imagine the huge potential of the millions of human minds which can go unexplored and unexpressed; wasted just because they were constrained by a mind conditioned by convention, restrained by a fear to step beyond the known.
The quantum leaps in the quality of human existence have resulted only when someone believed that there is a better and more efficient way to do something other than the traditional methodologies that we are comfortable with, and that there is something more to life than what meets the eye. It is only then that man has outperformed himself, and rediscovered his true potential.
A case in hand is the developments of the communication systems, in history from mere beating of drums and using smoke signals to sending messages through birds and couriers, followed by the e-mail and the latest avatar , the SMS.Incremental improvement only leads to incremental change. As a result of ever-developing technologies and fast changing socio-economic situations, change is avalanching upon us, and if it is not met with certain preparedness, its speed may overwhelm us. The trouble with being on the right track is that you still experience the risk of being run over if you just keep sitting there! Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if not altered for the better, by design. He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery. Growth, after all, is the only evidence of life. In the words of William Blake- “The man who never alters his opinions, is like standing water. He only breeds reptiles of the mind”
Flexibility, adaptability, and open-mindedness are far greater virtues as compared to the non-threatening, safe haven, of the known systems and predicted results. Unpredictable, valuable discoveries have been made and exponential learning has been made available due to the out-of-the-box thinking whenever a questioning mind has ventured assertively to explore higher possibilities.
This courageous act is the direct outcome of a man assuming absolute responsibility of his life and actions which in turn provides for the ultimate experience of true freedom for it is then when life and situation do not control him, and man actually steps out of the cocoon of a comfort zone to create his own set of rules, live his values, realize his dreams, fulfill his possibilities and express his true potential- living and experiencing life and freedom, truly and fully, to the hilt.
It is only in man’s imagination that the truth finds an undeniable existence. Rules of the society as we know them today, and our sense of reality is the creation of our own minds. If we created these, we should realize and exercise our ability to create a new order- to reinterpret reality, to recreate life itself.
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