If you lived in the same city through your school and college days, you might be able to relate to this more readily. I got all my formal education in Mysore. Most of my fellow students from primary and higher primary school went to the very high school I did; then, many of us attended the same Pre-University college; quite a few of us pursued our Bachelor of Engineering degrees on the same campus.
When you grow up with someone, you trust you know them. Then, you discover some traits that threaten your surety, and often go on to confront aspects so radical that you're convinced that you never knew them. Much of this experience is, of course, mutual, and in keeping with the evolution of individuals. You do, in fact, go through a similar course of recognition, realization, and repudiation while considering your own evolution. And, while the circumstances you find yourself in fuel this evolution, some happenings catalyze and rapidly crystallize your worldview. Admission to educational institutions is among these most impressive events.
Throughout your early school years, you're taught many things you forget. Yet, one idea is inculcated and repeatedly reinforced: the idea of achievement. Achievement, you're led to believe, is determined simply by how much of your lessons you can faithfully reproduce in classroom Q and A, tests, and examinations, and the degree of your achievement is quantified by praise, marks and grades, and ranks. The highest scorers are celebrated and awarded prizes for their feat. Your parents urge you to study and stand first in your class and school. The formula is simpler than any in your algebra textbook: study harder, retain more, and succeed. The path is straight forward till you reach the stage where you graduate out of school to join an institution that caters knowledge appropriate to the next rung of education.
You apply to the institution, and are then forced to wait for admission list to be brought out. On the day the list is published, you walk in and find your name missing from it - the list names all the people who have scored more than you in that qualifying exam, and fairly so. As you're walking out of the gate, you meet X, a classmate from your old school, and he's wearing a wide grin. You're certain you've scored more than him, and so find his facial expression flummoxing. As if to avenge all those moments when you'd hogged the teacher's attention at his expense by promptly mouthing the teacher's words from her previous class, he tells you he got in. In truth, however, there is no malice. He is only sharing his joy, and his enthusiasm gets subdued when you tell him you have not made it to the list. But you're trying to reconcile what you've been taught at school with what you've just learnt, and you don't notice that he is almost apologetic about abounding in his admission.
Having failed to make sense of it, you inquire with your parents as to how it could all have come to pass. They tell you that he belongs to a community for whom a percentage of the seats are reserved and students from that community have a lower cutoff to ensure a fair number of them get access to the next level of education. You ask what distinguishes that community from yours, only to be told that the government has classified them as backward because they have to battle adverse circumstances along with learning at school. But he studied in the same school as you, you protest, he had access to the same facilities, same teachers, and his family isn't even poor! That's the way it goes, you're told, and that you'll have to be among the top few scorers to be shooed into institutions. Your name figures in the third list and you get into the institution. Many of your classmates don't make it despite scoring more than X and a few others.
For the rest of your educational career, whenever your parents feel the need to prod you to study, they have a slightly altered and ominous refrain: study hard to get a high percentage if you want to get into that college of your choice, you don't have reservation, remember? You cannot believe you're having to put in more effort than many others simply because you belong to one of non-backward communities. Nor can you figure out why some of those backward community students are backward when they ride fancy bikes and own the latest phones. Your mind is now fertile, tilled, and one frustration in the college admission process away from sprouting resentment; Your own roots are itching to reach deeper into your psyche and take over your personality.
In school, you'd studied about human anatomy, but no one had bothered to tell you to whom the liver and heart and lungs you'd learnt about belonged to and what his community was. You'd had Ram and Rahul being partners in business and sharing profits in a 2:1 ratio, but you didn't know if either of them belonged to a backward community. Moving through the levels of education, however, you had learnt the community to which each of your classmates belonged. Your classmates, the ones you had known as kids, are now appending a surname to the name you'd always known them by, the name they'd always been called by when the teacher took attendance in school. The surname identifies their community. You're highlighting your community, too, despite knowing that it is unlikely to help you gain any 'advantage' apart from the friendship of other students who also need to work hard to get an education. To different degrees, you're all more aware of the legends about your own community, of the inherent or impending glory, of the once high status or the past oppression. If growing up to be an adult entails the evisceration of innocence, you are on the cusp of being a grown up.
Yet, there are moments when you wonder how different it could all have been if only you could go back to waving at them, smiling at them, and talking to them without immediately being reminded of their community and being distressed over privileges they had and you didn't. If only you knew why those communities had been classified as backward. If only you knew what adversities people from those communities were defying in addition to learning their lessons like you did. If only social studies had actually had something to do with studying the society you lived in!
Madame Smriti Irani, perhaps you could help?
When you grow up with someone, you trust you know them. Then, you discover some traits that threaten your surety, and often go on to confront aspects so radical that you're convinced that you never knew them. Much of this experience is, of course, mutual, and in keeping with the evolution of individuals. You do, in fact, go through a similar course of recognition, realization, and repudiation while considering your own evolution. And, while the circumstances you find yourself in fuel this evolution, some happenings catalyze and rapidly crystallize your worldview. Admission to educational institutions is among these most impressive events.
Throughout your early school years, you're taught many things you forget. Yet, one idea is inculcated and repeatedly reinforced: the idea of achievement. Achievement, you're led to believe, is determined simply by how much of your lessons you can faithfully reproduce in classroom Q and A, tests, and examinations, and the degree of your achievement is quantified by praise, marks and grades, and ranks. The highest scorers are celebrated and awarded prizes for their feat. Your parents urge you to study and stand first in your class and school. The formula is simpler than any in your algebra textbook: study harder, retain more, and succeed. The path is straight forward till you reach the stage where you graduate out of school to join an institution that caters knowledge appropriate to the next rung of education.
You apply to the institution, and are then forced to wait for admission list to be brought out. On the day the list is published, you walk in and find your name missing from it - the list names all the people who have scored more than you in that qualifying exam, and fairly so. As you're walking out of the gate, you meet X, a classmate from your old school, and he's wearing a wide grin. You're certain you've scored more than him, and so find his facial expression flummoxing. As if to avenge all those moments when you'd hogged the teacher's attention at his expense by promptly mouthing the teacher's words from her previous class, he tells you he got in. In truth, however, there is no malice. He is only sharing his joy, and his enthusiasm gets subdued when you tell him you have not made it to the list. But you're trying to reconcile what you've been taught at school with what you've just learnt, and you don't notice that he is almost apologetic about abounding in his admission.
Having failed to make sense of it, you inquire with your parents as to how it could all have come to pass. They tell you that he belongs to a community for whom a percentage of the seats are reserved and students from that community have a lower cutoff to ensure a fair number of them get access to the next level of education. You ask what distinguishes that community from yours, only to be told that the government has classified them as backward because they have to battle adverse circumstances along with learning at school. But he studied in the same school as you, you protest, he had access to the same facilities, same teachers, and his family isn't even poor! That's the way it goes, you're told, and that you'll have to be among the top few scorers to be shooed into institutions. Your name figures in the third list and you get into the institution. Many of your classmates don't make it despite scoring more than X and a few others.
For the rest of your educational career, whenever your parents feel the need to prod you to study, they have a slightly altered and ominous refrain: study hard to get a high percentage if you want to get into that college of your choice, you don't have reservation, remember? You cannot believe you're having to put in more effort than many others simply because you belong to one of non-backward communities. Nor can you figure out why some of those backward community students are backward when they ride fancy bikes and own the latest phones. Your mind is now fertile, tilled, and one frustration in the college admission process away from sprouting resentment; Your own roots are itching to reach deeper into your psyche and take over your personality.
In school, you'd studied about human anatomy, but no one had bothered to tell you to whom the liver and heart and lungs you'd learnt about belonged to and what his community was. You'd had Ram and Rahul being partners in business and sharing profits in a 2:1 ratio, but you didn't know if either of them belonged to a backward community. Moving through the levels of education, however, you had learnt the community to which each of your classmates belonged. Your classmates, the ones you had known as kids, are now appending a surname to the name you'd always known them by, the name they'd always been called by when the teacher took attendance in school. The surname identifies their community. You're highlighting your community, too, despite knowing that it is unlikely to help you gain any 'advantage' apart from the friendship of other students who also need to work hard to get an education. To different degrees, you're all more aware of the legends about your own community, of the inherent or impending glory, of the once high status or the past oppression. If growing up to be an adult entails the evisceration of innocence, you are on the cusp of being a grown up.
Yet, there are moments when you wonder how different it could all have been if only you could go back to waving at them, smiling at them, and talking to them without immediately being reminded of their community and being distressed over privileges they had and you didn't. If only you knew why those communities had been classified as backward. If only you knew what adversities people from those communities were defying in addition to learning their lessons like you did. If only social studies had actually had something to do with studying the society you lived in!
Madame Smriti Irani, perhaps you could help?
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