Bachchan — 404
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“But felt extremely good about the fact that I have never ever received this amount of comments from EF during my entire life with the blog. Thank you dear EF’s. Your generosity with the words and expressions you used, the conviction that you expressed and the support that you gave was historic. This does not by any means take away anything from those that opposed the motion. Contrary to belief some of the arguments given were most intelligent and one that could very well have turned the tide for me.”
May 31, 2009 at 3:24 PM
[“when the ‘hurly burly’ was done”
One admires your ‘literacy’ so much among other things! I mean ‘literacy’ in the deep sense of the word and not just the accumulation of degrees. We live in a world where ‘education’ let alone confirming to any ancient notion of the word which from Greece to India implicated the ’spiritual’ actually (and sadly) only indicates technical expertise of one kind or another. We have all become plumbers! This is not meant to denigrate plumbers. I only mean to suggest that ‘education’ increasingly leads to expertise in fields where only such technical ‘know how’ is called for. There is no larger sense of community or society or history or anything related to these involved in ‘modern’ education. Not for the most part. I think this is tragic because this leads to an evaporation in imaginative life. The very same imagination that is required not just in the ‘arts’ but in sciences as well and really every field of human endeavor. The economy of the current ‘global’ moment, to regurgitate a Marxist claim, really makes automatons out of all of us. It seeks sameness. In the older paradigm those belonging to a ‘labor class’ seemed replaceable and expendable. Because those weren’t ‘high skill’ jobs. Today more and more people fall into the same bracket. From investment bankers to computer specialists it is the very same logic of ‘labor’ that governs their lives. They can be imported into countries for fixed periods of time, they can lose their livelihoods in a minute and be instantly replaced even after years of experience, so on and so forth.
So there is a pragmatic consequence as well. It’s not just that the imagination suffers, or as I would argue our understanding of the word is altered for the worse or even our self-awareness as humans, it is also that this education increasingly puts us into narrower lines of ‘inquiry’ where we become ‘laborers’ completely divorced from any intellectual or imaginative pursuit alongside this.And of course what goes hand in hand with all of this is bourgeois domesticity which has actually been enjoying a resurgence in many parts of the world including India. The students that you studied with were assuredly more ‘revolutionary’ (whichever way one chooses to define the word) than the same today. Today we see conformism everywhere. Even what comes across as greater dynamism (this is certainly true in many ways) in the ‘young’ today is really but a recalibration of ‘Western’ attitudes in areas ranging from corporate structures to domestic ones and indeed extending to all manner of private and public life. The ‘dynamism’ then is also an import.
I am not being a ‘nostalgist’ for an older age when from the West to the East the stress was on the ‘arts’. I am simply arguing for better integration and even in our own world there are educational systems that do it better than others. But at the very least this is something that we should pay the greatest attention to.
‘Literacy’ is not or ought not to be only the ability to read and comprehend an alphabet or a script. It should also index a wider set of ‘knowledge’ and skills. There is nothing romantic about this idea at least as I see it.
‘when the battle’s lost and won…’]