After the fourth Lockdown
when some parts of the country started opening up, PM Narendra Modi came out with yet another grand idea of India turning
yet another corner. He called it “Aatmanirbhar”.
In translation, self-reliance or you cook your own “Roti”. Many saw it as an
implication of avoiding Chinese goods and beating Chinese products and creating
Indian substitutes for them. Although Modi made no mention of Chinese products
in his sermon. This “Self-reliant” stuff is not new. It has been going on since
the days of MK Gandhi with different words such as “Swadeshi” or “Make in
India”. It is just another hogwash to dodge serious problems facing us.
Some of the modern
refrigerators have a two-door frame. One door opens to regular storage of milk,
vegetables and stuff. The upper door opens to a deep-freezer which is mostly
used to store meat and frozen foods. Some families have more items to store so
they cram the fridge beyond its capacity. Such cramming makes retrieval of
items difficult. To pull out one item, one may have to pull out many others. And
just like an attic, there are many items thrown into the fridge that are never
used beyond once and they stay there for centuries. Such items finally get
thrown out only on the day of annual “Diwali cleaning” when the item has rotted
and is probably stinking when you open its container. In short, the fridge has
a limited space and there is a limit to how much you can cram inside it. It
might sound like an odd comparison but a child’s brain too has a limited space
in which it can absorb new facts and information. It is like a sponge that can
absorb a lot but beyond a point it will just throw out the excess. That’s why
frequent tweets like this surprise me:
Dr Frawley is an admirer of
Hinduism and Yoga and everything that goes with all this. All he wants is “one”
chapter on Yoga. But there are others demanding Vedic this, Vedic that. Someone
wants Gita as a regular course. Someone wants Sanskrit to be the medium. Many
others who send their kids to English schools want the teaching medium to be
local language. The actual need is
reducing the load on what is being to taught to children. What is taught
and what is tested. There are endless morons who demand that like Japan,
France, China or Korea India must teach only in the mother-tongue of the state.
This demand is now redundant as parents themselves seek English medium and
pushing for a change that is neither going to happen nor is feasible is wasting
one’s energy for all the wrong purposes. A few days back, with nothing to do
during the Covid Lockdown, PM Modi and some of his Cabinet members got together
to discuss “education” once again:
I had to laugh at the tweet
and the image. I wonder what these people discuss discuss discuss without
having made any change in the last six years. I can understand time-pass. But
the foundation of a country rests in its schools and education system. India
burdens its school children very heavily while its higher education system is
rotten to say the least. We have a PM who has never attempted a competitive
academic test in his life yet lectures kids with “Exam warriors” and “Pariksha
pe charcha”. Of course, his idiotic slaves will jump to say he passed many
electoral tests. Well then, take your kids out of school and let them practice
passing election tests too if that is the equivalent of academic achievements.
But it is not. Schools are meant for mass production of educated citizens some
of whom, we hope, will become great innovators, inventors and scientists.
Unfortunately, what India produces is nothing but mediocrity in mass-abundance.
Education is FREEDOM. But it becomes great only when the good ones exit India.
Education is the freedom to
acquire knowledge and add a lot of independent thinking and value to it. But
Hindus lament that the brains of their kids are being filled with nonsense of
Akbar, Aurangzeb or Shahjehan being the only historical figures or filth in the
name of social studies or abusing Hindus:
The above is just a sample.
I am sure if you browse the SM and Twitter you will find lots of images of
absolute garbage that fills our school history and social studies books. People
were hoping that the so-called Hindu Narendra Modi will form a govt that addresses
these assaults on Hindu culture and change it. NO! Evidence suggests Modi is
more interested in pleasing his Islamic masters and getting some cheap awards
to polish his stained image. In fact, the BJP and its parent RSS have been
bowing to Islamic diktats for quite some time now. So, Hindus should forget
this particular govt will attend to any Hindu issues like school books, RTE,
Temple-freedom or any such matter. To
teach your children Hindu culture, history or Vedas is now up to you.
Schools are not the place for such education and never will be. Our higher
education is now even more systematically streamlined to produce mediocrity:
So, for PM Modi to claim
that India should become a “knowledge
superpower” is as empty as his “Make in India”, 5 Trillion economy, “Vishwa
Guru”. Modi likes to use such bombastic words and phrases in his speeches –
Like his 56inch-chest claim. People understand this is empty rhetoric but it
doesn’t do India any good. The only real ones who aspire to be a “knowledge
superpower” for the purpose of putting that knowledge to good, productive use
in India are Hindus. But the Hindus are the ones most deprived of the
opportunities. This mental blockade for Modi doesn’t come out of his poor
education alone. It also comes from his political pursuit much of which is now Islamic
appeasement and winning Islamic hearts and awards:
Repeatedly, ModiSarkar
lights up Mughal monuments in Delhi. Earlier last year was just a decorative
exercise. Following the Covid lockdowns, the first pic above celebrates some 21
days of Covid lockdown by lighting up these Mughal monuments. It doesn’t stop
there. They once again light up a Mughal tomb on the 41st day. All this, when Islamists and Mughals are
not known for lighting candles or diyas at all. They don’t have a culture
of worshipping light and therefore they don’t light any lamps or diyas. Someone
in ModiSarkar is being stupid – very, very stupid and your guess is as good as
mine on why this stupidity is being undertaken.
In terms of arguments,
India does possess the capability to match or beat China in mass production and
quality but it will NEVER happen. The simple reason is that the State in India
is the biggest discriminator and stymies talent and skills. An earlier report
and pic above show only 4% will make it to some medical course in the open
category. The rest will be less on merits. In an article, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple explains why he prefers China as the
producer of their products:
“China
has moved into very advanced manufacturing, so you find in China the
intersection of craftsman kind of skill, and sophisticated robotics and the
computer science world. That intersection, which is very rare to find anywhere,
that kind of skill, is very important to our business because of the precision
and quality level that we like… I visited ICT--they manufacture, among other
things, the AirPods for us. When you think about AirPods as a user, you might
think it couldn't be that hard because it's really small. The AirPods have
several hundred components in them, and the level of precision embedded into
the audio quality--without getting into really nerdy engineering--it's really
hard… There's a confusion about China. The popular conception is that companies
come to China because of low labor cost. I'm not sure what part of China they
go to, but the truth is China stopped being the low-labor-cost country many
years ago. And that is not the reason to come to China from a supply point of
view. The reason is because of the skill, and the quantity of skill in one
location and the type of skill it is”.
You can read the full article. Cook’s comments are very interesting because his
choice of China is not merely about low cost and production capabilities. It is
about the high skill and engineering quality also that makes a difference.
India will shamefully lag behind as the present ModiSarkar as the others in the
past are still struggling with rebuilding school curriculum. Half the subjects
taught in schools are GARBAGE that shouldn’t be taught at all. What we produce
from schools hardly makes for a great country that is going to see a boom in
innovation and scientific thinking. Modi counts Samosawalas as a great
employment sector too. Maybe it is but don’t brag about being Vishwa Guru or
Aatmanirbhar if your basic school education is in shambles. They do hold out a
promise though:
After 15 years schools to
get new curriculum says the report above. Obviously, there won’t be change in
subjects like Math or Science but even this new curriculum is only a “proposed”
one. If you read the full report, you will learn that a committee will be
formed by April 2021 which will then process the new curriculum which may be
implemented by April 2023. It is to the credit of PM Modi that he is a school
and college pass compared to the Class-5 qualification of SoniaG. But
effectively, Indian govts have consistently killed school education, killed
merit and killed the future of this country. I don’t see any stupid
Aatmanirbhar blabber solving any great problem. You need dramatic change in
education and the process of admissions to higher education. Until that happens
India will produce only mediocrity.
