Education as Gang Rape: The Dark Tropes in 3 Idiots

You don't have to be Rancho to tell  that Aaal eez Naat Well with the Big Bad Indian education system, which boasts of being one of the biggest in the world. Some Hindi films have dealt with this monster in an interesting way : I can think of Gulzar's Parichay (1972), Aamir Khan's Taare Zameen Par (2007) and Rajkumar Hirani's Munnabhai MBBS(2003) and 3 Idiots (2009). All these films are extremely funny, sensitive and are critical of the very idea of education in India. The attack is on coercive aspects of mass education system and how it murders the student's instinctive curiosity, spontaneity, creativity and individuality.

The films are  also critical of the undue emphasis on examination which only tests information retention capacity instead of thinking skills, creative problem solving skills and knowledge.The chargesheet against education system is well known. However, the films also take into account the fact that education system is a social institution and hence it reflects the widespread social values of success and failure in life. The cut-throat competitiveness either produces cut throats or people with deep inferiority complex. A society which believes in rat race produces mice. The films also try to persuade parents against imposing their expectations on their children .All these charges, of course are well-known.  3 Idiots, too, tries to persuade people about rethinking the whole idea of success in contemporary Indian context. It argues against measuring success in terms of marks, wealth and fame and sex. The film is not intended to be profound or artistic, but deliver its message in an entertaining and contemporary way and needless to say it succeeds in its objectives.

Though very glossy and hilarious, it has its sinister undertones. It talks about suicidal tendencies among todays youth which are abetted by the educational system and society's notions of success and failure.The media is hasty in making connection between the film and a wave of suicides among students in Maharashtra. Media also accuses the film of encouraging ragging. It is like blaming Sholay for the rise in dacoity.The films like 3 Idiots are sugar-coated comedies which are really tragedies.

The education system is an integral part of society. The roots of the problems of education system lie in the social values. If society defines success as acquisition  of Fame, Fortune and Fuck (though not necessarily in that order-Freud, I think, talked about Fame-Female-Fortune as three basic motives behind man's actions) either by a crooked hook or a crook-with-a hook using all the shortcuts possible, then education is reduced to the function of ladder in the brutal game of social snakes-and-ladders. If it fails to be a ladder, it is perceived to be a snake. Education, however, is neither a snake nor a ladder.

Though lot of idealistic bullshit is parroted by the mikephiliac educationists regarding the basic purpose of education, when it comes to implementation of educational programmes,  it is seen as  more of a mass-producing factory for producing low quality skilled labourers for an underdeveloped economy. Though it is widely accepted that education is about development of ability to think and behave critically and creatively, the success in educational system is measured in a small minded way of measuring one's ability for information retention. Hence the outcome of the examination, is obviously no indicator of one's intelligence.And though there is lot of blah blah regarding `examination reforms', hardly anything is done on the front and no genuine alternative to the present system has gained wide acceptance. Consequently, what goes under the name of `education' in India is actually a monstrous machinery which has brutal impact on the child's sensitive mind. However, most of us are forced by the society to feed our children to this Rakshasa.I feel that what we do to our children is similar to marital rape in India. Just like marital rape is not seen as a rape because its done by socially accepted partner, education is not seen as a form of torture just because it is seen as `doing what everybody is doing' and hence legitimate.

Hidden beneath the banter of 3 Idiots is the dark trope of rape. In the famous Speech scene, Rancho replaces the word ` chamatkar' with `balatkar' and `dhan' with `stan' in a speech which Chatur Ramalingam- a student who wants to use education to get Lamborghini and Green Card by mindless mugging- is going to deliver in the convocation and in a language he does not know  , simply by rote learning it. Chatur delivers the speech without any knowledge of distinction between ` balatkar' ( rape) and ` chamatkar' ( miracle)  and between `dhan' (wealth) and `stan' ( breasts). What needs to be emphasized is that today's society, including students, teachers and parents have lost the ability to make the crucial distinctions between `miracle'( of becoming successful) and `rape', and between wealth and breasts. Males, the film just hints, seem to think of wealth as if it is woman's tits or mother's breasts from which they have been weaned.

Hidden underneath the hilarity is another dark trope of sodomy or anal rape. In the famous ragging scene, the juniors are supposed to undress and tell their seniors pointing to their own bottoms, `Jahapanah, Tohfa Kabool Karo' or `O Mighty Emperor, please accept this gift'. Ragging which is seen as an `initiation ceremony' is also an initiation ceremony of the novices to the Big Bad Darwinian World of Survival of Cutthroats. Initiation into the World which only worships the Winners-- Prof Viru Sahasrabuddhe or Virus ( played brilliantly as ever by Boman Irani) points out the no one knows the name of the second person on the moon--is traumatic and extremely humiliating experience. People who participate in this ragging and gang rape of the young minds are Parents, Employers,Teachers, Senior Students (PETS)- in short, the entire society. Growing up in society such as ours amounts to mental, emotional and even physical rape by the perverted societal arrangement.Education seems to be one of modes of violation and torture. The only way to change it is by EDUCATING Parents-Employers-Teachers(PETs).

It is very fashionable and so very easy to blame Our Big Bad Politicians for all the Evils of the Society from Terrorism to Tuberculosis. It is very difficult to accept our own responsibility and act with integrity. We want to impart `morals and ethics' to our kids without we ourselves having it in the first place. We feel we have to `find out' role models for youth and like everything else we expect OTHERS to be the role models. We feel that teaching moral amounts to PREACHING, when in fact, it is about ACTING honestly and responsibly. Corrupt, dishonest, inefficient, and ignorant parents, employers and teachers produce a society which is corrupt, dishonest, inefficient and ignorant. We are the serial killers of the dozens of students committing suicide.
We have become rapists by allowing ourselves to be raped -we offered it our assholes, didn't we, saying ` Tohfa Kabool Karo'. It is a vicious circle.

Recall WH Auden's 1 Sept 1939

" I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return. "

In fact, this has been going on in India since ages- think of caste-system, feudalism (the Palace Paradigm in Prof Handoo's words), dowry related violence, the convention of Sati ( both literal and symbolic),colonialism and what not. All these things were systems of rape. No doubt our education system is as bad as our society: it is casteist ( Rancho says that marking is creation of new caste system, but it is casteist in many more ways), feudal, patriarchal, and colonial. It will be modernized only if the society is truly modernized ( not in superficial sense of modernity as fashion, but in terms of critical and creative thinking).

Here in lies our Paradox for Today: education will be modernized only if society will be modernized and society will be modernized only if education is modernized.We have to go in circles to break this vicious circle. But we HAVE to break it, if we want to save our children and grandchildren from abuse. There is very little choice in this matter.

The Aging Caliban

I was in Pune for a national seminar on Indian Writing in English and in English translation and guess who came for the key note address? Our good ole' Nemade! He is the Asharam Bapu of Marathi literature. I saw him for the first time. He looked so pitiable that if I had seen him earlier, I would not have said nasty things that I have said about him. He was gloriously inane and went around flogging around the non-existent bush for an hour or two and said absolutely nothing. He said hilarious things like,`Bilingualism is a disease. Monolingualism is health' and such similar things. Well, he said all these things in English. This guy has made his living teaching English and chairing the Tagore Chair of comparative literature at the University of Mumbai. He did his MA in English, instead of Marathi. I think it is hypocrisy that is a disease and not bilingualism or multilingualism. An Aging Caliban is a pitiable creature, especially when he goes round in circles like a dog trying to catch his own tail. I felt sorry for him. May God of Tukaram confer peace upon him and may he be reborn in the 17th century in his next birth.

Otherwise the conference was as good as or as bad as any other conferences of the kind. The older teachers of English looked like as if they were teaching a fifth standard classroom and the younger teachers were equally superficial in their pursuit of more fashionable trends. Boring. I don't see any hope for the Eng. Lit academia.

My paper was on a comparative analysis of Indian Writing in English and in English translation from the point of translation studies. My paper provoked a lot of discussion. According to Madhurita it was because people understood my paper.The discussion, however, was not regarding my paper but on basics of translation. The same old debates regarding `loss' of translation, transcreation and how will you translate... kind of elementary things. I said the idea of `loss' or `gain' in translation is relative to the position of the observer. If you know the source language then a translation from that language will probably always look like a loss and if you don't know the source language, that is you are the person for whom translation is done, than any translation however `bad' is a gain. People are unable to understand relativity. They think their location is absolute. Then there were questions regarding `transcreation' and I replied that there is no need to float this word as the idea of creativity and divergence from the source text is already implict in the term translation. Then there was this senior gentleman who claimed to have read `the latest' in translation studies and that there was this term `transcreation' which was applied to freerer versions. I said that I did not mind if someone uses this term but I do not see the point of using it and that ` rewriting' is a pretty good term as it is more inclusive of various forms of cross cultural interactions. I also said that the term translation has many meanings and was more of a metaphor a trope. The senior gentleman who had read the latest did not understand what is a metaphor or trope. So much for his seniority and his latest reading of translation theory.

There were questions about the role of translator and strategies of translation. I replied that how one translates will depend on why one wants to translate and who you are translating for. Madhurita asked me which analogy or trope will I use for translation between two bhashas. I said that the Sahitya Akademi uses the term `aadan pradan'. I said that translation between the bhashas does not mean that there is no inequality between the languages and I gave example of the Bengali and the Odiya languages. Come to think of it, a metaphor for translation between the bhashas can be ` cross border terrorism'. But overall, I enjoyed my trip as I could catch up with friends and relatives.

Gray Globalization

Gray Globalization
Piracy as Globalization and Globalization as Piracy

We, the people of India solemnly declare that we give a damn about intellectual property rights. I, for that matter declare that the colour of globalization is gray.
I distinctly remember picking up a pirated copy of Alvin Toffler’s Third Wave off a street in Baroda in the nineties when I was a student pursing my post-graduation. I threw away the book but it is still very much with me, within me. It changed the way I looked at the society around me. In those days, I hardly knew the difference between a used book and its pirated cousin. I also remember buying Eric Berne and other well-known writers off a pavement in Baroda. This was indeed a criminal thing to do. Nevertheless, the entire Indian society was criminal, buying pirated software operating systems, books, music, and so on. In short, the entire Western culture was/is being pirated and sold cheap in the Third world society. If knowledge is wealth, as Toffler argues, I feel that piracy is nothing less than anti-capitalist and anarchist act and is obviously condemnable.
Royalty is the return a person gets for her contribution of intellectual efforts, as the defenders of intellectual property rights correctly argue. Yet I feel it’s the intermediaries, as in most of the cases, pocket the large amount of profit. Here the writer, or the producer, gets very little compared to what the distributors, publishers, retailers and others are making. In piracy, only the pirates earn the financial profit. I use the term financial deliberately. The society like ours is largely poor but is very famished for knowledge and piracy comes as a blessing to an educated lower middle class person keen on reading outstanding books or using the best software. I recall that in my student’s days I possibly could not have been able to buy the original copy of the Toffler or Berne book, thanks to the pirates, I could afford it at that time. Piracy is a curse and crime from the author and publisher’s perspective and a boon from the perspective of an average Indian reader who is not able to afford expensive `intellectual property’. My stand, of course is ambivalent as I am both – a writer and an average Indian reader. My entire sympathy is divided between the writer and the reader. So typical of our times: it is impossible to take sides.
Easy availability of used copies of paperbacks in the post world war period on Mumbai streets, remarks Dilip Chitre, a reputed Indian poet and thinker, in his introduction to the Anthology of Marathi Poetry (1967) played a very important role in moulding the modernist sensibility in Marathi. Something similar can be said about pirated books and software in the post nineties third world societies. They have played a role in ushering in the software boom by equipping students and the would-be engineers in the field with cheap pirated copies of essential texts on the subjects as well as software.
Piracy seems to play a vital role in the Third World societies in the Era of Globalization. Once we start looking beyond `pro-piracy’ -`anti-piracy’ debate, we can clearly understand that such `gray acts’ play a pivotal role in the mechanics underlying cultural changes. Once we start looking beyond the blacks and the whites of market, we realize that it is the gray market that’s immensely powerful and unacknowledged in the age of globalization. All serious students of culture today will

Republisizing the Spirit of Republic: Owing up the Responsibility

Today is the fifty ninth Republic day for our country-one more festival and a holiday for most of us. Though we are keyed up over festivals and holidays, the spirit behind `republic' doesnt seem to have appealed to us. Hardly are we aware of what it is about, except for a vague notion of `giving' our selves a text called ` Constitution of India', most of us arent very sure of whats the big deal about it.

In theory, this day is about empowering the people of India. It also we are solely responsible for what we have done to ourselves. If India is a poor, underdeveloped, semifeudal and corrupt state, it is because we have chosen it to be that way. It is the day on which we should ownup the responsibility for the state we are in today. We have chosen and elected the people who decide the future for us and if they are not capable or if they lack will to take us ahead, we solely are to be blamed.

The constitution of India, that idealistic document, framed by some of the wisest people in our country has remained merely a paper tiger. I wonder if we were ever fit to be `republic' and it is high time we understood the notion and the spirit of republic once again. It is high time we republicized the spirit of republic.