IIT, Disillusion and Intelligent People
In continuation of my rant about the education system…
Assuming that truly good colleges require effort to get into (versus money/being born in a developed country/’influence’), the standards that IIT sets for its students must mean it’s the best in the world.
Unfortunately… the lectures are dull, there is a repeat of the marks-centric system everybody went through in school, the students are expected to ‘perform’, which translates to work hard enough to not have time for anything else. The hostels are untidy, like they are everywhere else. I highly doubt that they have any resources for subjects that aren’t maths- or science -related. Going by the only book on life there, the overhyped Five Point Someone, it’s just like every other mediocre college in the country, and only better if you’re truly interested in your subjects – which, if you are by that point, you’re either superhuman or brain-dead. (Or maybe one means the other; who knows?)
I’ve met ‘alumni’ from IIT – the first time I did was in school, when one of their students came to talk to us about our handwriting. He obviously worked for The Hindu, the way he went on about how he ‘didn’t have time to read the paper’ when he was in college and made it up to himself by reading the editorial page. I doubt that he did that; I doubt he ever read anything in his life, even the editorial page of a third-rate newspaper (sure, it’s the best in the country, but that doesn’t say much for it either).
I’m not trying to be biased here; I’ve been as open-minded as it’s possible to be about IIT and IITians. Why else would have put up with everything I’ve put up in school and after? But you can imagine how confused it made me when this guy started talking to us about the kind of handwriting that conveyed the best things about your character. He went to the extent of saying that tilting the letters too much to either side made you crazy.
All the teachers treated him like an intellectual worthy of all kinds of praise.
The second one – I didn’t really meet this guy but it’s a story worth telling anyway – was the father of this (male) friend. He was a ‘topper’ in IIT and and a ‘topper’ when he did his PG from there too. He was now bankrupt. He refused to let girls talk to his son on the phone or in person, because their family was the ‘traditional’ type. It was funny at first, and I could always threaten my friend with phonecalls to his house, but frankly, that is not how I imagine a highly educated person to behave.
A number of others followed, but I don’t remember them so well because they were such obscure and shady characters. I only noticed that a lot of people were in awe of their so-called intelligence, which they confused with their abilities (I don’t know how they got into IIT either, but I was more in awe of that than their ‘intelligence’).
It’s hard to write about this without talking about how annoying it is for anyone who doesn’t tell themselves they’ve got to ‘play a role’ and ‘do their duty’. I’ve had friends tell me that I have too high expectations from the education system, and by extension, from life. This was right after I complained to them about how unhygienic our canteen is. I was told: ‘At least you have a canteen’ and the other friend said: ‘He has a point you know.’
Am I so wrong to expect basic hygiene? Is it so wrong to expect the college authorities to do their job well when they expect so much of us?
Of course, you know what they say in answer: You can’t be handed everything on a ’silver platter’ when you’re putting in no effort. You don’t come to college regularly, you don’t do your assignments on time, and then you complain.
I don’t go to college because it’s so depressing and so unworthy of my time that I would rather stay on the terrace, pretend to go, and read. In a month’s time I learn more than my class has – and they haven’t done their assignments either. Then, when I go back, they yell at me and ask why I don’t come to college. ‘What’s the point?’ doesn’t count. Doing your assignment over that month doesn’t count, even if you’re the only one who submits. Who do I think I am, coming whenever I like and cheating on my assignments? Who do I think I am to complain?
Purity
In other news, here is some new crap the Indian government came up with: Virginity Tests in MP. Apparently the women were given money, about Rs. 6000/- because they refused to comply at first. The tests were also denied, called ‘pregnancy tests’, and ‘routine examinations.’
The Dream
I’ve been down lately. I don’t like the fact that I can write that on my blog; give me other things to write about, things that will take my mind off it! Alas, there is nothing to say.
But since I’ve already started I might as well tell you a story. It’s going to be a highly unoriginal and obscure tale, and even though I shouldn’t try to influence the preconceptions you already have from having visited this link… you’re better off knowing. You see, I dislike being read. I’d rather this was all just between me and my shadow, but it’s always between me and my shadow. I interact with about three people every day, barring my family, and not face to face, often not even on the phone. It’s out of choice – but I still write to the faceless stranger tonight, especially the one who won’t read me.
I was once walking through a park when I came to a wide old tree stump. I looked at it as though it reminded me of something, and after a point I sat down on a bench nearby. People were doing the kinds of things people do in parks, there were old and young people but no couples – it wasn’t that sort of park. I looked at the stump, memorizing what it looked like so I could make a sketch of it later on, assuming I could make sketches.
A man with a grey beard and a wooden cane came to sit next to me. He had rugged brown skin and wore his pants high on his wide stomach. I looked at his shoes. They were grey, old-fashioned and worn. He sighed, cleared his throat and pushed his glasses back up his nose. I stared at my own shoes, blue sneakers with a semi-functional button to one side. Opposite us was a woman yelling at her young girl to get down from the tree before she fell. Her panicky mother was now threatening to leave her there and not come back. The girl climbed higher.
The sun was setting and there was an orange-pink glow above the trees. I would stay until night fell, and sit on the deserted swings in the cold for a while. I’d swing until my chest felt like it was being left behind in mid-air while the rest of me got warmer and kept moving. Then I’d walk home.
The man leaned on the cane between his legs and the woman stopped shouting. The pigeons flew in great ugly clusters back to their nests. A young man in a leather jacket walked past carrying a guitar. I followed him with my eyes; he reminded me of something too. I stretched out my legs and arms, yawned and looked at the sky. It was hard to tell if it was getting more or less colourful. The man next to me leaned one hand on his cane and another on the bench, pulling himself up. He sighed, said: “I wish I could paint.” He walked slowly away and I closed my eyes.
Four people, two cats and a dog in Hyderabad
I found this highly entertaining blog a while ago, by an American family in Hyderabad; do read: The Fluegge Family in Hyderabad.
Dinner Party
Last night, we went to dinner at my father’s friend’s house. It was a reunion between four men who went to college together and had stayed in touch over a period of forty years. It started off as: ‘Why forty? Say fifty!’ ‘S, you never knew any maths.’ ‘Say fifty anyway!’ (All proceed to make fun of S.) Then the men all went to the terrace, to drink and smoke, while the women and children stayed downstairs and talked about clothes and food and swollen feet. I had for company a couple of pre-teens who lived in Uganda and a 22-year old girl from Australia, D.
D’s brother, R, was upstairs with the rest of the males. I’d met him a couple of years ago when he was in India, but we never exchanged a word. He got along well with my brother, though; I remember being annoyed and bored because there was nobody to talk to. It’s usually normal for me to feel that way in these kind of social contexts, but I couldn’t help noticing that he hadn’t changed at all. He avoided eye contact, didn’t say hello, and preferred male company in general.
I’ve lived all my life in India and I know that that sort of behaviour is quite typical of the male who’s trying to be polite. I’m used to not taking offense by now – I find it hard to care that much, having passed the attention-craving adolescent years. But it struck me as curious because R has never lived in India for any length of time; as far as I know he’s always been in Perth. I doubt that it would be acceptable for him to ignore all the females around him in his interactions with people there.
When he came downstairs he smelled of cigarette smoke, so D asked him if he had been smoking. He pinched her, hard, and indicated that he didn’t want his father to know. I’d got my hint: the parents saw themselves as upholders of Indian virtue and instructed their children on what was unacceptable. I knew, also, that the father smoke and drank, and that this particular group of men had tried ‘everything’ (meaning pot and bidis, I assume) when they were young.
They weren’t allowed to date (or at least not openly) and there were separate standards for D and for R. You could tell she didn’t like it much, but being the sweet thing she is, didn’t protest too loudly.
The funny part about the whole thing is that I’d had a conversation with their father over the internet once, about the Shiv Sena activists who beat up the girls in the Bangalore pub. I said to him that the reason people thought it was acceptable to act like that was because they were brought up being told that women were supposed to act a certain way; it was considered virtuous for them to be vocal with their protests when they didn’t. Using sticks instead of harsh words was only a step away from the normal course of things.
He forwarded the email to my father, and from his reply it seemed to me that he didn’t really understand what I was saying. I couldn’t make sense of what he said, so I didn’t reply either.
Nobody else noticed this, of course; R is a fine young man, goodlooking and presumably intelligent in the ordinary sense of the word. Why does it make me sick to think about how he’s going to treat his wife and daughters a few years from now? And that nobody is going to think that it’s objectionable?
My Deaf Waiter
At about 9 am in the morning, there are very few places you can go to sit and read in Hyderabad. There are very few places to go to do anything at all, but most public places don’t open before 11 am, and that’s a problem to those people who want to find a quiet place to sit and read a book instead of going to college like they should. Cafés and eating places that open early are often noisy, and no matter what you do, you cannot make them listen to ‘Could you please turn that down?’
And so, when I found this one Coffee Day with a deaf waiter that had no customers before 10 am or so, I was a little pleased.
I wish I had a picture to show you, but pictures don’t often do people justice, unless it’s only one thing I’m trying to show you, or a thing that doesn’t really exist. This tall thin man with a moustache is probably the best waiter I’ve ever had. He has an uncanny ability to listen to what I’m telling him, and this is even odder because I don’t often have anything to say to waiters. A typical waiter, when taking my order would say ‘Coffee?’ if I said I wanted cake. I don’t know if it’s the communication gap or the fact that they usually have music so loud that you can’t talk and be heard at the same time. You have to point at the menu – whether he’s deaf or not.
All the same, it’s not every day that you get to watch two people talk in sign language across an empty café. They always laugh so much.
The Great Anti-Indian Post
I’m sick of it all: the Indian sentiment, their patriotism, their shitty news channels and newspapers, their protests about how they’re treated in countries they go to to play with the automatic doors, their incessant talk about how their country is so great and how their culture dates back several thousand years… what have they to show for anything that’s ‘great’ about their country? And alright – I’ll say ‘we’ and ‘mine’ too, if for no other reason than that I’ve been subject to the same things they have. What do we have to show for anything that’s great about our country?
The argument I’ve been hearing ever since I was little is that the British came to India and took away all our wealth and culture and so on. For two hundred years they pillaged us thus and then, as a final blow split the country into three and told the Hindus and Muslims to fight each other like the barbarians they were. We obliged, and that’s how we ‘won’ our independence. Indians and Pakistanis are so proud of this history that they still harbour these sentiments towards their neighbours (notice how they behave during cricket matches, for example). Excuse me if I sound crude and a little more annoyed than I ’should’ be; this is what I see and this is what I’m going to say. If it displeases you, by all means click on that little cross near the top there. I do not, repeat: do not intend to please you by saying things you want to hear about your beloved country, you who in all likelihood don’t even know the meaning of your national anthem (and if you do, try Vandemataram).
It seems to me, very oddly, that life here was a lot more bearable when the British were here and right after they left. We actually had libraries, and book stores that had books! People studied Shakespeare in school – I didn’t, and apparently I went to good schools. My mother thinks the books she read when she was young are now out of print. They aren’t; nobody reads them in India anymore. Tagore was the last literary genius this country produced: any others now either never lived in India or don’t now because they have fatwas on their heads. Those obviously don’t write in Indian languages.
As far as the film industry goes, I’ll try not to make a big deal out of it, but I know I’ll fail. I know Bollywood has fans – all over the world even – but for the life of me, I fail to see how. Each time I even hear part of a Hindi movie playing (lets not even go into regional languages) a part of my brain shuts down. I try extremely hard to avoid looking at billboards for fear of this happening. I know Slumdog Millionaire, the latest ’sensation’ (it wasn’t even Indian, for fuck’s sake) had everybody think Indians were cool because they made ‘music’ that won an Oscar… but honestly, Rahman stopped being good at what he did when Lagaan came out. In fact, the last song he made that I remember made me think he had potential was Jiya Jale. Then he just stopped using his brain and went with the mainstream; but with Slumdog Millionaire he hit his all-time low. I have never heard such uninsightful crap in my life (other than occasionally in mainstream Western pop music today).
The ‘new’ generation of Indian filmmakers want to make us think that it’s going to change. Unfortunately, if change was possible in India in terms of ideology – and I’m just waiting to see proof of this in the comments I get on this post – we would have solved a lot of our problems by now instead of compounding them. Ever since the British, and until now, all of us are on this colossally idiotic trip that says the ‘goras‘ are to be looked down upon, what with their loose women and blasphemous habits that don’t even involve religion or ‘respecting your elders’. All Indians also invariably think they’re better (smarter, more ‘cultured’) than the goras (who invariably hate all Indians and are racist bigots).
I’ve been hearing protests defending our ‘rich and varied’ culture all my life. I have yet to see evidence of it. The things we pass on as culture are just mindless rehashes after rehashes of other peoples’ ideas, usually warped so much that they no longer make any sense. At this point I’m naturally going to refer to our devoted Hindu gentlemen who beat up a bunch of girls for sitting in a pub in Bangalore. On TV. What did the Indians do then? Argued about whether the gentlemen had a point or not.
That alone should rest this case, but it won’t do. If we’re discussing culture, we need to discuss the arts. Hindustani classical music is well known all over the world; it has students in the West; George Harrison, etc. But if anyone has ever looked into the training that goes into creating these musicians, they would agree that a monkey subjected to that would learn to play an instrument. Ali Akbar Khan’s father made him practice eighteen hours a day; he hated it. He said he didn’t “understand” music until he was fifty. Also, Hindustani classical music is famous for being the most rigid in terms of structure, in that a lot of sounds that one would hear in say, jazz, simply don’t exist in Hindustani music. Jazz, I admit, is far removed from classical music, so lets compare it with Western classical. Hindustani music didn’t have a notation until a few decades ago; musicians had to remember the music or lose it forever. By contrast, in the 1800s Claude Debussy, the French composer, had already broken the ‘rules’ by using uncommon scales in his compositions. It’s now known as Impressionist music, the equivalent of which in India… doesn’t exist.
I realize that a lot of people are going to dismiss the above paragraph by talking about a lot of stories wherein a group of musicians sang a ‘rain’ raga and it started to pour. I would ask them if they listen to a lot of Hindustani classical music, and whether they can honestly (we’re talking dead honesty) relate to any of it. It’s the extremely rare Westerner today who can appreciate and regularly listens to the more ‘varied’ Western classical music, and one that does usually also plays it.
The dances: like ballet in the West, they are too forced and unnatural. The same thing has been passed on with little variation over generations; it’s like the schools where they make the kids yell ‘A for Apple B for Ball’ for an hour, so they don’t forget. Find me an (original) equivalent of the Indian moonwalk and I will talk to you.
Modern painting and sculpture, as far as I have seen, is treated as, and mostly is, a joke in India. If you have trouble believing me, ask any Indian student (and I mean any) who wants to take them up seriously what his parents think. He/she will say: “I should do it as a hobby and take a professional degree in Engineering.” He/she will then go on to either give up art, or to become extremely eccentric – not in a good way. Another more popular joke, much like Slumdog Millionaire, is M. F. Hussein, the much-celebrated barefoot artist. How did he make so much money with his doodles? He’s talented, just like the people in Bollywood.
Literature – we covered that, but I’ll repeat. Indians don’t read. Ask any number of Indians you know and they’ll tell you that at one point or another, and possibly several, their parents told them not to read too much. They ask their children why they want to read serious stuff when their studies are done. They find it unhealthy for their children to sit in one place and read for extended periods of time. If the parents are Muslim, the child will usually be allowed to only read religious texts.
It’s depressing, when it isn’t outrageous, to think that a country that takes so much pride in its mere existence and never once stops to think, let alone evolve, talks so disgustedly about the West. I never intended to come to a conclusion like this when I first started giving it thought; I was, in fact, willing to give the impoverished Indians a chance. However, I find myself sympathizing more with the British, whose White Man’s Burden seems on the reasonable side for their time of apartheid. It seems like they’re being more cooperative than they need to be today, going to the extent of watching what they call us, while ‘gora‘ is still an acceptable term for white people everywhere. Indians made a big deal out of the Australian ‘attacks’ – why don’t they talk instead about the number of people who go to hospital and kill themselves and sometimes each other in their own colleges? What about the foreigners that are attacked in India by hordes of beggars? The white women who can’t walk in our streets for fear of being groped? But of course, that’s different. You see, the British made us this way when they came here and stayed for two hundred years, looting and pillaging….
If I can rhyme, so can You. Perhaps.
On a cloudy breezy day I rested
Out in the noisy balcony
I looked down at the kids that tested
Wildly my temper: “BALAJEEEEE!”
I did what I did best: ignore;
And turned to what interested me -
A driver at his daily chore,
A street-cur hunting down a bee
I followed the four-legs out of sight
Then looked around to better see
The car and man, both black as night
I watched: he washed and wiped the screen
And Tollywood-hit music played on between.
Idly lost I watched the driver wet his
Cloth; the vulgar beat it kept on going;
Now I just sat there, sipping fizz
In the breeze that kept on blowing
Then the black man – he looked up
He saw me there – I was sitting – I wasn’t staring!
This I swear. As if this should just be my luck
He looked at me, his music blaring
Already loud, he turned it louder
And fatly started his half-tuned singing
(That tried-and-tested ‘way to woo her’)
Is peace too much to ask for today?
I’d like to trust them to stay away.
