ख़ालीपन

लबों पर मुस्कान, आँखों में गीलापन है

सीने में जलन, पर दिल में एक अपनापन है।

ये कैसी याद है तेरी, मेरे साथी?

कि बाहर भीड़, पर अन्दर ख़ालीपन है।

जानता हूँ कि परे हो मेरे छुअन से

दिखते हो पास पर हो दूर कितने मन से

एहसास तो है होने का हम दोनों को एक दूजे का

पर दोनों के मन में एक सूनापन है

ये कैसी याद है तेरी, मेरे साथी?

कि बाहर भीड़ पर अन्दर ख़ालीपन है।

जी चाहता है लपक कर ले लूँ बाहों में तुम्हें

चुरा लूँ जग से और उड़ जाऊँ लेकर तुम्हें

पर कुछ तो है जो रोक रहा है हम दोनों को

वरना दिल में तो दोनों के बेहिसाब पागलपन है।

ये कैसी याद है तेरी, मेरे साथी?

कि बाहर भीड़ पर अन्दर ख़ालीपन है।

उलझे हो तुम भी दुनिया के झमेलों में

खोया हूँ मैं भी बेकार की बातों और मसलों में

न तुम ही निकलते हो इस उलझन से न मुझे ही राह दिखाते हो

ये कैसी बेचैनी, ये कैसा सूखापन है?

ये कैसी याद है तेरी, मेरे साथी?

कि बाहर भीड़, पर अन्दर ख़ालीपन है।

लबों पर मुस्कान, आँखों में गीलापन है

सीने में जलन, पर दिल में एक अपनापन है।

ये कैसी याद है तेरी, मेरे साथी?

कि बाहर भीड़, पर अन्दर ख़ालीपन है।

Education Priorities

Yesterday I was reading an article on how the new government should 'correct' the history syllabus of our schools and why secularists are scared of this move. As I am in the government service, so am not supposed to comment on government policies, yet as a citizen who has benefitted most out of government subsidised education I would like to express my personal views on the things that should be prioritised in the sector of education.

In the field of primary education, the issue is not of content but of quality of dissemination. In a country where a class 5 student is not able to divide 27 by 5 and find the remainder, (ASER report), I don't think it will matter whether she grows up thinking that Aryans invaded India or otherwise. When a bright student of a remote village lands up at IIT because of his sheer talent but feels cheated when the entire course is in English, he really doesn't care if Akbar was a bigger hero or his rival Rana Pratap. I come from a typical middle class family and all that my parents wanted out of my education was to ensure a job for me. Most middle class and lower middle class parents in India still send their kids to school in the hope that they will become employable in future and will be able to earn for themselves. Our education system must cater to that need without taking any moral high ground. 

I was always interested in history and my father never discouraged from spending time on it. My grandfather was a Gandhian freedom fighter, my father is a communist trade union leader and my brother and I have attended 'shakhas' run by RSS in our localities as kids. I have heard different versions of history from these different sources. Even now I keep re-reading history books to know more about India and love reading books which contradict each other. That is what makes history interesting- it changes depending on who is narrating it.

But that is not the case with Mathematics and Science. They do not change with the educator. And hence the scope of improvement in dissemination of maths and science becomes so much easier to implement.  Our existing economic setup is hugely biased towards students of Mathematics and Science. A science student has a much higher probability of employment than a commerce or humanities student and hence the rising madness for engineering colleges. So if you want to change history in school books, first change the economic setup where history students can get a good employment.

Our government schools are hiring the worst talent in the society. Anybody who is a an above average student either makes a career in the private sector or at least ends up as a clerk in the public sector. The leftovers are the ones who apply for government teacher jobs. So the worst student in the class ends up becoming a primary school teacher in a government school. Yet we find some exceptional teachers in the government setup and people like me are the handiwork of such brilliant government teachers. There is a lot of improvement that needs to be done in the way we teach our kids. Recent experiments in primary school have really deteriorated the quality standards. Recently I was appointed observer for evaluation of answer sheets of state board examinations of 10th and 12tn standard and some of the random copies that I checked were very disturbing. The quality of answers were so pathetic that it made me cry. Not to mention that my job was to ensure that the teachers who were empolyed as examiners did their job well, and that too wasn't easy. They were the least motivated lot that I had ever witnessed.

Teachers, especially primary teachers are the most neglected as well as the most politicised group. Neglected because they are given no inputs to teach more qualitatively and are mostly busy with the administrative work like distribution of school uniforms, free textbooks, mid day meals, and minor construction works in their schools. They are also the most politicised as they are the largest number of workforce in any state government and hence their postings and transfers etc are highly influenced by local politicians. I remember that in Bihar and Jharkhand there was always a flood of teacher recruitment so just before assembly elections, just to gain votes. This is not to say that our primary teachers are good for nothing. They excel in all the non-teaching jobs that they are assigned. Census of India and Election Commission of India claim to be the most efficient of the public organisations and both of them hire teachers as the field workers. Sadly, no thought is spared for the kids who are rendered teacher less during census and elections.

A lot has been tried in training the teachers but hasn't given us expected results. And when we are hiring a very poor student as a teacher, we should not expect miracles at his/her hands. Thankfully technology is at our aid now. Smart classes like educomp, virtual classrooms like Khan academy are making primary education more interesting and dissemination of knowledge more efficient. The MHRD needs to focus on scaling up the inputs in these directions. Our existing school systems can only produce clerks and that is why coaching institutes produce doctors, engineers and managers. The way science, mathematics, technology (including computers) and English (to enable global employability) is taught in government schools needs a total overhauling. Things like biometric attendance of teachers, GPS enabled apps to track presence of teachers in schools, optical fibre connectivity to all villages are things that should be on the minds of the people dealing with education policy.

History is,and has always been, an important subject of interest for mankind. It is taught in schools only to give a cursory view of how the country and the world came into being in its present form. Out of the same school syllabus that has been taught over years, we have produced intellectuals from the extreme right to the extreme left in our country. So for heaven's sake, let's not waste our energy and resources on rewriting history or in 'correcting' it. People who are interested in knowing the counterview shall know them later (provided books are not banned for providing counter views). Let us focus on quality of the various other subjects that are taught very poorly at our primary schools today, namely Mathematics, Science, English and Computers. 

Afterword- my constant emphasis on English is also because all technological higher education institutes of engineering, law, medicine, management as well as commerce and chartered accountancy are i. English only and we should not be unjust to students who aspire to do big in life but are forced to compromise because their school education in English was not of a good quality.

False Gender Consciousness

In my present charge in a remote block of a backward district in the state of Madhya Pradesh, I received a complaint from a woman. The complaint pertained to a sexual assault done on her by a man who is presently in jail and there is a compensation amount that he is to pay her. The woman carried a letter from the Jail which required her to furnish her a few documents to claim that money. One of the documents that she was required to produce was a certification of her Photo Identity card by the Gram Panchayat. I had no jurisdiction over either the case of sexual assault nor over the payment of the compensation. The complaint also did not pertain to either of them. The complaint was against the Sarpanch of the village for denying to certify the Photo Idenitification card. I, in my present role, looking after village panchayats, was expected to ask the Sarpanch to do what he is obliged to do.

In an attempt to provide speedy relief to the aggrieved woman, I decided that rather than writing a letter to the concerned Sarpanch or the Panchayat Secretary, I would rather talk to the Sarpanch and get done with the issue. I had my office call up the Sarpanch who turned out to be a lady. I thought my job would be easier as a female Sarpanch would understand the agony of another woman. I thought that probably the husband of the Sarpanch may have denied signing the certificate, assuming, that like many other villages, the lady Sarpanch must have become a rubber stamp in front of her husband. I saw this as an opportunity to help two women simultaneously; helping one get a certificate and helping the other assert her political power to help a fellow woman.

I called up the Sarpanch and was shocked when the lady on the phone told me that the complainant is characterless and is wrongly implicating the man, who turned out to be a member of the Sarpanch's family. Between choosing to side with an assaulted woman and a man of her family, her choice was natural. She pleaded that I should ask the complainant to settle the matter out of legal boundaries. I denied doing any of those and told the Sarpanch that neither I nor she has the jurisdiction of deciding the case of sexual assault on its merits. All she has to do is to certifiy the Photo Identity or else I shall be forced to take action against her for misusing her political authority to favour or deny rights to individuals. Despite my initial reluctance to do paper work on such a minor issue as to get a signature, I was compelled to issue a show cause notice to the Sarpanch to do her duty or to face legal expulsion by the competent authority.

What left me disturbed was that our understanding of women and villages is so distant and unrealistic. I have often been criticised as a chauvinist when I point out that most cases of physical and mental torture against women in their home is done by a woman of the husband's family and that there is no such thing as women solidarity in our existing society. Most of the abuses of being characterless are being hurled upon women from fellow women. The hatred that sex workers face mostly come from house wives. Despite being given political power in form of reservations and local governance, women are not able to think beyond the boundaries of family, clan, caste etc and their decisions are marked by these prejudices. 

For a brief time that I had to take statements of rape victims in my earlier assignment, I saw that while the mother of the victim was mostly the person who gave her courage to file a complaint, I also saw that the accused was either from the victim's family or a known person and in almost all cases, the wife or mother of the accused blamed the victim to be characterless and wrongly accusing the man. At these times, one gets confused when all women are termed as victims of violence or assault by men. That is too simplistic an understanding of the problem. Women are segmented into as many divisions as men are. The economic and physical exploitation of domestic servants (mostly women) also happen at the hands of women home owners. 

This is not to say that patriarchal mindset is not the root cause of women related problems. It definitely is. And the prime reason of a woman's exploitation in most of the cases is a man. What is disturbing is that patriarchy is not being kept in operation just by men alone. The women too have a 'false gender consciousness' and are as much a carrier of patriarchy as men are. The cases of mother-in-laws torturing daughter-in-laws are so common that the television is full of soap operas on the subject. The cases of female foeticide and female infanticide are also mostly occurring either with the will of or due to silence of the grandmothers of the babies. The fact that the power of mother-in-laws over their daughter-in-laws is mostly exercised through the 'man-in-between' speaks about an undisclosed facet of Indian patriarchal family.

Thankfully the tribal societies fare well when it comes to gender equality, at least statistically. The block that I am posted in, has a Sex ratio of 1000 plus as the societal culture of the tribes in this area does not differentiate much between men and women. Drinking is common between both genders but the problem of drunkardness is predominantly male. Similarly, the gender ratio in schools is again in favour of girls. In most of the political bodies at the village or the block level, women have started exercising their powers themselves, not asking their husbands anymore. Yet I do find incidents of sexual assault on women and in such cases the victimised woman is mostly left alone to fend for herself, the rest of the women immediately blaming her as characterless. It is no wonder that in urban educated class as well, the moment a woman complaints of sexual harassment in office, 'slut' is the first remark that fellow female workers pass on that woman. Most women refrain from complaining just because they are too scared to face the judgemental looks of the fellow female employees.

I know I am soundning chauvinist again, but that's not the point. The solution to women's problems can never be found with men. They have to be found with women. Women need to feel more connected to other women. From a 'false gender consciousness' of beauty, 'laaj-sharam' and family duties, women need to gain a 'true gender consciousness' of their real existence and the reasons for their exploitation. Or else a man will always exploit the animosity of a woman against the other. 

Afterword: apologies in advance for simplistic and sweeping arguements.