Education - basic or higher

I am really not sure how i should present this topic - where we should stress more - basic primary education or higher education. As government after government spend huge sum for primary education (although i don't know whether it really goes to the actual needy), let me tell you the bleak picture of our higher education. As i have come from a very backward district of West Bengal, i can at least try to give you the real picture.

i studied till 10th standard in a school which can boast of anything but good quality students. we had a strength of about 100 students at Xth standard appearing for the board examination. Out of those 100 students, just three got first class. And out of those three probably i am the only one who could break the wall of the small town to come into a life to compete with the global workforce. Now you may wonder what has happened to those unlucky 97 students who could not make it big. i can tell you very few of them have become financially independent in lives. please don't take it otherwise. i am trying to give you a statistics not to boast about myself, but the real picture of education in small towns.

so my point is all of the 100 students had got the basic education. most of them came from well-to-do families. then why is this failure in building a career out of their good basic education? hence providing basic education is not the solution, but to provide an education so that a student can earn a livelihood out of that education is the challenge.

i think we are stressing too much on just the enrollment of students at the primary schools. but it is important at the same time to see whether those students are able to earn a livelihood out of that education. making a student self sufficient so that he can earn a livelihood with his basic education should have been our motto instead of just getting the students enrolled at the primary schools. i can bet that in small towns and villages, even with education up to 10th standard in so called local schools, people end up in doing menial works.

now as we stress too much on primary education, should not we start thinking that people with good higher education can build a society where the students having basic education can be absorbed? there should be a balance between the stress given to primary education and higher education. its a different matter, although, that even with good higher education, people remain unemployable.

Education - Basic or Higher

I am really not sure how i should present this topic - where we should stress more - basic primary education or higher education. As government after government spend huge sum for primary education (although i don't know whether it really goes to the actual needy), let me tell you the bleak picture of our higher education. As i have come from a very backward district of West Bengal, i can at least try to give you the real picture.

i studied till 10th standard in a school which can boast about anything but good quality students.

Ignorance is bliss - burden of knowledge

I don't know how I should tell people about the problem of burden of knowledge. However, I think this has become a phenomenon with people thriving to aquire more knowledge. The more we know, the more we try to see the world from behind the colored glasses of that knowledge. Thats why probably we have stopped seeing the world as seen by a child with his simplicities.

To give a practical scenario of the problem, let me give you an example. If someday my wife can't lit up the gas stove of my home, i would probably try to see if there is any gas in the cylinder, then try to unscrew the burner and then lodge a complaint with the concerned person. However, i may not try to lit up the gas with an alternative lighter, say with a match box. Hence my thought processing goes from complex to more complex logical flow of events. However, my wife would probably try the last method, say try with an alternative lighter.

All of us know that we start our programming career with the Hello World problem. In a simple C++ environment it is few lines of code. However, the same poblem can be solved by applying knowledge of distributed computing, design pattern, UML and so on and so forth. May be when we start applying all these knowledge to print a simple Hello World sentence on the screen, it may not be possible for a newcomer to decipher the code.

As i was a student of Electronics & TeleCommunication engineering, i have felt it strongly that if the basic purpose of the subject of communication is lost in the wilderness of some fourier analysis and frequency domain-time domain analysis, then it does not meet the need of the education. i believe that if the purpose of subject like economics go away from the well-beingness of people to the maze of some probability and calculus equations, then the basic purpose of economy is defeated.

Hence i believe knowledge is powerful as long as it makes our life simpler; otherwise it becomes a burden. My Mom used to say one adage quite often which goes like this...

"Je Janena Uttor-Pub...
Tar janbe saday sukh..."

Thats why probably it is said that "Ignorance is bliss"......

So we must utilize our knowledge to simplify our lives or else it becomes a monster.....

I would like to conclude this discussion with the following words of wisdom from Hindu philosophy:

"
asato ma sadgamaya
tamaso ma jyotirgamayo
mrityu ma amritum gamaya
"

This means

"O Lord! take me from the world of untruth to the world of truth...
O Lord! take me from the world of darkness to the world of lights...
O Lord! take me from the world of death to the world of immortality....
"

When the life dries down...

I wrote this piece of write-up when I was in the USA thinking about the real purpose of my life.

When professional life, career, work, schedule, deadline, people management take its toll...

I remember this Tagore song...

জীবন যখন শুকায়ে যায় 

জীবন যখন শুকায়ে যায়

করুণাধারায় এসো,

জীবন যখন শুকায়ে যায়

করুণাধারায় এসো,

সকল মাধুরী লুকায়ে যায়

গীতসুধারসে এসো।

জীবন যখন শুকায়ে যায়

করুণাধারায় এসো।।

কর্ম যখন প্রবল-আকার

গরজি উঠিয়া ঢাকে চারিধার,

কর্ম যখন প্রবল-আকার

গরজি উঠিয়া ঢাকে চারিধার,

হৃদয়প্রান্তে হে জীবননাথ,

শান্ত চরণে এসো।

জীবন যখন শুকায়ে যায়

করুণাধারায় এসো।।

আপনারে যবে করিয়া কৃপণ

কোণে পড়ে থাকে দীনহীন মন,

দুয়ার খুলিয়া হে উদার নাথ

রাজ-সমারোহে এসো।

বাসনা যখন বিপুল ধুলায়

অন্ধ করিয়া অবোধে ভুলায়,

বাসনা যখন বিপুল ধুলায়

অন্ধ করিয়া অবোধে ভুলায়,

ওহে পবিত্র, ওহে অনিদ্র

রুদ্র আলোকে এসো।

জীবন যখন শুকায়ে যায়

করুণাধারায় এসো,

সকল মাধুরী লুকায়ে যায়

গীতসুধারসে এসো।

জীবন যখন শুকায়ে যায়

করুণাধারায় এসো।।

"

Transliteration

Jibono jokhono sukhaye jay

karunadharai eso

sokolo madhuri lukaye jay

eso sudharose eso...

kormo jokhon probolo akar

garaji uthiya dhake charidhar

hridoyo prante he jibononath

shanto chorone eso...

aponare jobe koriya kripon

kone pore thake dino hino mon

duyar khuliya he udaronath

rajosamarohe eso...

basona jokhon bipul dhulay

andho koriya abodhe bhulay

ohe pobitro ohe anidra

rudra aloke eso...

"

Let me try to translate it (of course if I can... it's not a word-to-word translation, though)...

"

When life dries down. O, Lord! Please come to me like a spring of calmness...

When all the smoothness of life goes away...O Lord! Please come to me as a balmy breeze...

When work becomes a monster and darkens the surroundings...

O, Lord! Please fill in my soul with calmness...

When I cheat myself with a miser soul...

O, Lord! Please open the door and come like a king...

When materialistic wish cajoles me and makes me blindfold...

O, Lord! Please come with blazing lights.....

"

I think at some point in time or the other.. many of us feel like this...

Patriotism Vs Strong Nationalism

Are patriotism and strong nationalism the two sides of the same coin? Some would say yes. But I would say no. Love for one's nation gives rise to Patriotism and obsession, on the other hand, gives rise to strong nationalism. In this world of globalization, where technology has made the world "flat", this distinction must be well understood. So we may get a person who is staying outside his/her motherland but still loves his/her nation and hence can be called patriotic. On the other hand we may get someone who is staying in his/her own country but still has a strong national feeling and sometimes may be xenophobic.

The reason why I am writing this blog is my concern about some of our fellow countrymen, who are so obsessed about their culture and roots. With a bare minimal provocation, they think their cultural history is at threat. Hence all these vandalisms in the name of cultural distortion. Very recently we have found such incidents in India which happened because these bigot people thought that a film can distort their history. Whose history is this anyway?

In this regards I would like to quote from a famous poem which I had read in my childhood. It goes like this-

"
Dwar bondho kori diya bhromotare rukhi..
Satya bole ami tobe kotha diye dhuki...
"

What it essentially means that if we close our hearts for bad things, then even good things cannot enter.

We must open our hearts to accept new things - be it good, be it bad. Our sanity should be strong enough to differentiate between these two. There is no wrong in becoming a global citizen as long as you love your country. However, its not acceptable to be obsessed about one's own country and culture.

"India Shining"

Today as I was going through a newspaper article named "Rebuilding India" in which the progress of India is being glorified, I started thinking differently. Does development mean building infrastructure only? What about character building? I think the most important developmental index of a nation is measured by the character of her people. The first picture an Indian draws about another Indian is of disbelief. People in Indian cities are highly insensitive about other people. Fellow-feeling is just absent in cities.

The first taste of the insensitivity of the government officials that I had tasted was when I was selected as a Trainee Executive Engineer in a so-called premier PSU of India. Being an Electronics & TeleComm engineer, till today I cannot understand why I was rejected in the medical test of that organization on the basis of the fact that I have partial color-blindness. Even today I wonder, was there really any work done in that organization that I could not do because of this genetic disorder? And this happened in the year 1994 when a good job was really scarce.

Today our country is sitting on a time bomb which will blast anyday. We have created many divisions and hiearchy in our society. Besides digital division between the haves and have-nots, we have created quota division, SC-ST-OBC-General division, Hindu-Muslim-Christian division, APL-BPL division, english-speaking/non-english speaking division.

These days if someone switches on a TV news channel, he/she can hardly become excited about the progress of the nation. There will invariably be news of rape,murder, molestation, kidnapping or some political bluff.

All these make me wonder is India really "shining"?

Life from a technical point of view

Sometimes I wonder how I have managed to work in the hi-tech field for such a long time. Its not that I am not capable of understanding the nitty-gritties of these software technologies. But basically I was a person who was a bit averse of technologies. You may say its because of the socio-economic background that I had in the childhood or the academic atmosphere I had gone through during childhood. Although I was pretty good in science and mathematics (maths being my favorite subject), but when it comes to the applied science I was very ordinary at it.

Therefore, when I entered the engineering college I was a bit amazed, rather open-mouthed. It was not easy to understand the Electronics & TeleComm subjects from practical point of view. I picked up Engineering Maths (be it Laplace transformation, or Fourier transformation or FFT or convolution theorem or matrix algebra or vector algebra or complex algebra) very nicely but it was difficult for me to handle all those bread-boards and CROs in the lab.

These days when I understand WiFi security protocol or when I go through the RFCs of some advanced Telecomm technologies, I wonder how I managed the engineering degree even without knowing the difference between a GSM phone and a chordless phone. These days I wonder about what I thought when I first came to know about the term “computer virus” during a discussion with one of my fellow classmates. You won’t believe that in our college we had a computer lab having air conditioned atmosphere and soft carpets and I used to think that all these are there to protect the computers from viruses.

And I used to crack a joke on my telecommunication engineering degree

That I have become a telecommunication engineer without even making a single phone call.

You won't believe when telecommunication revolution didn't happen in Bharat, I used to become very nervous of thinking how to hold the dabba phone after picking up from the cradle - which side is for the speech and which one for the ears.

You guys can laugh me out, but I am sure many people of Bharat might have faced the same dillema.

Now I really wonder how I had managed without Google. Probably this is Life. It goes on like this…