The Bulimic Hermits

One fine evening as I was traveling the metro back home, through a corner of my eye I caught a sharply colored pocketbook in the hands of a guy on my left. He had just started it and seemed to be engrossed through. From the typeset it looked like the ones the missionaries sell. I read a statement – “If you have faith in all three hundred and thirty millions of your mythological gods, and in all the gods which foreigners have and again into your midst, and still have no faith in yourselves, there is no salvation for you. Have a faith in yourself and stand up on that faith.” It had to be Swami Vivekananda. And so it was a Ramakrishna Mission’s discourse.

I kept on reading coast the guy till a few pages ahead until I saw this particular remark: “The present system of education is all wrong. The mind is crammed with facts before it knows how to think. Control of mind should be taught first…… I t takes people a long time to learn things, because they can’t concentrate their minds at will.” This statement, easily more than 125 years old makes more sense today than it did then. Being a product of the same system, criticizing itself sounds like development. My schooling years were spread into 7 different schools as is typical of progeny of civil servants. So schooling was a diverse input from different learning curves, methods, taboos, class freaks and pranks, etc. In all one common thing that was staunchly enforced was an acme discipline level especially in missionary schools. And in retrospect, I do think that discipline is a strong foundation to build the rest of self on. Meanwhile college life is discipline-resistant and working lives involve discipline forced down the throat. So school discipline is one flavor that nears the concept of control. Since its type is primarily extrinsic, it doesn’t emulate mind control which ideally should be intrinsic.

Learning theories rely on basic premise of a mind to assimilate, process, structure and store info that later can be invoked to be of use. A critical point here is that in Indian education all the stuff we learnt in our schools or even graduation degrees was limited till the sheets of the examination. We don’t find it of practical use or to promote our bases. Mind control hasn’t thus been having fodder to chew on with lack of avenues to creatively apply and qualify information. Moreover, the recent bulge in amount of enticing information we come across has skyrocketed with 3G enabled handhelds, bit torrent, hard drives and friendly neighborhood WiFi. Introspection can easily tell we are not filtering what we are exposing ourselves to. It’s like an unending movie in a glitzy mall screen. The mind control that we should have learnt while imbibing stuff, now amiss, makes us “Information Bulimics” with insatiable urge to keep devouring any sort of audio-visual-mental-gustatory input. The issue isn’t the urge, but how it develops into a justification of being a “consumer”. We won’t mind overstepping the border for sensory appreciations disregarding the spatial and temporal compulsions. We want it right here, right now. Maybe that’s why even phones have reached quad core processing; pizza more than 30 minutes late is free and using the term delayed gratification in a conversation sounds like Na’vi.

We are a lost lot aren’t we? As a generation lost in a huge crowd made up of our own selves? Meanwhile there’s a kid next to your knee tugging on your pants trying to ask your phone to play candy crush. 🙂 We are a generation of Bulimic Hermits….