God of learning!

Yesterday I was so pissed off that I didn’t go to school!

The Chandranagar school (where I teach) is a public space that is utilized for everything, including tying up cows, parking tourist vehicles (sometimes with music blearing out of them) and such. For the last 3 years Asha Bangalore has been trying to get a compound wall around the school so that there would be a sense of a separate school space within the community. The hope was that it would bring a notion of sanctity to that school space. We could have easily raised funds to get that wall built. But, as you all probably know by now, we don’t do things the easy way. We do it in a way so that we can complain and gripe about it, may be just so that we can get another blog entry!

We wanted the local ‘community’ to make some contribution towards this compound wall. All the usual reasoning like ‘ownership’ and ‘empowerment’ has been thrown around quite liberally in this context. For three years we have been trying, trying and trying. Recently one of the parents who happened to be a construction person even made an estimate of the costs for the wall, plus additional toilets and drinking water facility. It came to about a lakh of rupees. This included around 15000 of labour charge. Since many parents are construction workers we were trying to see if they can contribute labour in kind along with Asha volunteers (our volunteers have no skill in the construction industry or for that matter....). No movement... “how can we work for two days without wages”?

Yesterday I go to the school and I see this huge Ganesh pandal. So many lights and decorations and I asked the guy working on it how much did that cost. He said it was around 10,000 rupees. The local folks are quite happy about the pandal. I don’t think they paid that out of their pockets, some local politico-goonda must have. Nevertheless, why couldn’t they channel that to improving the school infrastructure? What do they expect this pandal would do to them? Do they really believe that Ganesha, god of learning, is going to help the children learn better? This country, I tell you...

In any case all this fretting and fuming (and blogging) has helped me calm down. With tail between my legs I am back to school today. Out of the 43 kids I teach may be one of them might find reason not to invest in Ganesha pandals, may be not... It seems like any focus on the end-result is a route to disaster. Just focus on the process...just focus on the process..

No more relevant

There have been some constant pursuits for humanity ever since it moved into ‘civilization’ from being a hunter-gatherer society.

- The need to know. Intellectual curiosity of how certain things happen and why do they happen and such questions.

- The need for social order. When we (ok, most of us) moved from to a ‘civilized’ society there was a need for maintaining social order (whether it was just or not is debatable, in fact it was usually unjust). But order was required nevertheless, some rules of the game for living together. This part also includes morality and ethics.

- The desire for transcendence or can I say feeling ‘high’. That thing which goes beyond the mundane.

Historically, religion has played a largely successful role in satisfying these needs to humanity. Religion has also aided in our lack of humility. If one can be humble enough to accept one’s ignorance and boldly claim ‘I don’t know’ I think religion is irrelevant in this age. Let me try and explain.

We will take up social order first. Democracy and the related institutions like the law enforcement and judiciary have taken up this role and performed much more effectively than any religious code. For any liberal minded person there is no question about this. Of course there are a large number of folks who believe (rather blindly) that Sharia is a much better code but they don’t let anyone argue against it! Morality and ethics are secular and not necessarily religious. Even in ancient times either in Greek philosophy or in Tamil Purananooru ethics have been elaborated without any religious undertones. To think that only religion maintains a moral society is very naïve. In fact the evidence is entirely contrary.

The method of science is a far better system to satisfy our intellectual curiosity than religion. This is where the crucial ‘I don’t know’ comes into play. Religion becomes irrelevant if you can acknowledge ‘I don’t know’ for things you really don’t ‘know’. The standard retort against science is that it does not have answers for everything. Of course, it definitely does not have answers for everything; otherwise there would not be scientist anymore in pursuit of those answers. I don’t know why certain things happen or don’t happen, I would rather say ‘I don’t know’ than say that it is God who is making certain things happen or not happen. I am not resting when I say ‘I don’t know’. That admittance is the starting point for finding out that answer. And science seems to provide the most reliable method to seek than answer.

For transcendence there is art and sport. The high you get, unless aided my substances that alter the brain-chemistry, is usually due to that total ‘living in the moment’. Getting immersed in music or appreciating poetry or literature or enjoying a terrific game of badminton lets you have this pleasure too!

Religion definitely had a role to play in different stages of our history and filled in where institutions were lacking and provided answers where better methods for seeking answers were not discovered yet. But now it is only intelligent that we are not just creatures of habit and leave religion for museums.