Educating InfoZombies?...

This blog may read like a bit of a rant, that's because I am a very worried man, you could say scared and it reminds me of a youth, or possibly even very early teens, when while reading about formal world war history in text books we were also great admirers of comic books, and there used to be the Commando series of mainly tales of heroism of the British or Allied forces against Axis powers. They were set anywhere, in the north Africa against Rommel's Afrika Korps or in some Burmese jungle, or in the dark cockpit of Bombers heading for Hamburg, sometimes even behind enemy lines in Nazi occupied France.

To our childish minds, war, the reality of it did not seem so horrible, but there was always this nagging suspicion, and slowly as the real facts, the bits and pieces about real people killed or maimed, about the Holocaust, the racial and ethnic-cleansings, mass murders, brutal regimes began to sink in, as did the reality of the troubled political times in the hills in the eighties, it became pretty clear what Pete Seegar's song "What did you learn in school, today, what did learn in school?" ("I learnt that war is not so bad, I learnt about the great ones we've had, we fought in Germany and in France and someday I might get my chance...") meant, the post second world war was not as peaceful as I thought. The Vietnam War, the Pol Pot regime, Koirean wars...  the theory of perpetual war, "1984", and the horror became real: it was scary. Doomsday prophecies, Kali Yug, the end of times was not some silly superstitious notions simply fantasies of the superstitious, it could be bedcome a reality brought about by one of the nuclear super powers, and even be the THIRD WORLD WAR with a just remote-controlled ballistic missile launch by accidental or deliberate by some power-crazed lunatic, a  state or non-state actor who had ceased power just long enough to do the damage by triggering a set of events when M.A.D becomes inevitable.



Then came that delightful man called Gorby, glasnost and perestroika, and the Wall was broken down by jubilant crowds, and we basked in the light of a new dawn: the dawn of the 21st century. Y2K was not even a fraction of the scariness that we learned of about or became  aware of during the seventies and eighties when the world was still in the grip of the Cold War...

Not even a decade has gone in this by in this century and there already eems to be new hope: an African-American with some Asian roots at least by schooling is today maybe the world's most powerful man: almost a miracle and the proof that democracy works. In the intervening wars, I have changed, changed so much I can barely even recognise myself... what happened to the shy boy from the Himalayas, who had no social skills to speak off... where is he now? The world was becoming a village, a global one; optimism, hope, love, and friendship despite the insularity of races, and  the narrow parochial mindset of closed cultures, was being replaced by the joie de vivre for being alive in an amazing era of globalization, a phenomenon unparalleled by anything in the entire history of mankind, made daily life idyllic to spendd happily, working away at what one loves best, and enjoying the fruits of man's pioneering enlightened state brought about by rationality and intelligence. The gloom and darkness of the seventies, and eighties, the trauma of the Cold War, and other "lesser" ones, the purges, mass murders, and genocides were part of a history we would perhaps never ever have to contemplate.

Sometime during the nineties the digital revolution began to overshadow our lives in more ways than one. It was not only restricted to the professional sphere: those were heady years with text only access with people like maddog in Brooklyn and Eddie in Copenhagen in now non-existent communityware.com, an all text virtual community, ... and multimedia,... the addiction to information,... infojunkies is just a cliché today, but that's what they called us back then. Today, those of us who have not been seen on FaceBook, people, like our decades old friends, even childhood ones whom we have lost contact or who might have somehow fallen behind in becoming tech-savviness, they too are easily foun: it's all a part of popular culture now. It' is generally accepted now that you'd be online on your favourite IM client even though you might have put a "BRB" status on it perpetually (after all who wants to world to know you are lurking around at the edge of online presence even in some ungodly hour when you are supposed to work or sleep).

Wait a minute, I was talking about education, right?... And about fear, about wars, about darker things, and ... zombies,... yes, right. I am scared again. In the last few years of this decade we have seen with increasing cynicism of the events that followed 9/11. The British are now conducting an inquiry about Iraq. And sanctions that would not stop their dictator from stopping what he did,- manufacture and stockpile WMDs in form of chemical weapons and wage bio-warfare against is real or perceived enemies,- did not even make sense,  and sure enough, he was soon found a disheveled old man hiding in an underground bunker and after a mockery of a trial in which he put up a spirited defense, was finally "defeated", and sent to the gallows hastily where he put on a brave and defiant face before being blind-folded and dangled at the end of a noose until his last breath.

What do we make of these facts, these bits of "info". Scientists have come up with momentous discoveries about the digital basis of life itself. There is some new optimism that biotechnology will eventually wipe out the pain of killer diseases by eradicating the root cause of those diseases. I am thinking of even staying alive longer, only hope against hope in the polluted cities of India, hoping that stem cell research will replace a lung or a liver just in time by the time I am older. Just good to be alive, and what harm can a little naïve and childish day dreaming about the good technology can do like a little bit of fantasy even in good science fiction?

Meanwhile another oil-rich nation's fundamentalist hard-line dictator has dared the world with the announcement of ten new nuclear reactors defiantly in face of international criticism. Sounds vaguely familiar to happenings in another era: the Japanese walkout after the Manchurian incident from the League of Nations. Or the Nazi party's continuing defiance of the defunct League and arming itself to the teeth for world conquest with blitzkrieg. Oil-rich,.. oil, didn't that start it all in the gulf? The crazy search for more sources of fossil fuels is like chasing big billionaire day dreams while we have made our atmosphere just what we had feared our geography teacher talked about back in the eighties: if the ocean sea level rose by even a metre, most low lying areas will be flooded and inhabitable. Climate change will start taking its toll in a major way brining back  a planet level extinction event like the mythological Great Floods or the very real ones after the meteor strike which killed almost all species the dinosaurs except for some avian species.

Yesterday it rained in the Gulf, flooded Jeddah...

Nuclear energy is the only way to go. No amount of viable friendly energy source can replace the global village's addictive dependence on oil. But it's far too dangerous: there are traumas that are so real that a centre for nuclear research for peaceful purposes was not allowed to be opened in any prefecture of Japan, except in their northern most of the Hokkaido island, a relatively poorer and currently "out of political favour" of the centre administration. At Aomori, a multinational team of scientists take helicopters every day back and forth to a research and manufacturing facility leaving their families living at the village of Rokkasho, the nearest human habitation. But as their children need education too, there's a tiny government-sponsored international school in the village which is quite in probably the one of its kind in Japan where they traditionally and still today look down upon foreign educational systems, and even make it pretty difficult for ordinary students to access to the international curriculum as a matter of strict policy ever since the end of the war followed by the occupation. Well, in all countries, it's pretty much the same: few government likes to let foreign education systems or educators to dictate their ways, especially in education.

There was an article in the papers today about schools, and inevitably the older and more traditional organisations of repute commented about "the latest" international schools and their curriculum of being elitist, a bit of a show and not really, this is damaging, worthy of inculcating the values that brings to front the real purpose of education.

There was an old man in the bus a few days back. He was talking to young chap who came from a different ethnic community, Nepalese. And he was offering his wisdom freely to him incessantly in a patronising manner to a point that I felt compelled to rescue the boy by speaking in his local dialect and asking him to ignore the old man's rant. It was basically a sorry monologue about his knowledge about education: he had invested many years and hard-earned money to so that his son could "grow up" and become an engineer. And now the son earns about a thousand dollars a month, a small fortune in these parts. And his advice to this young man was seek counselling. Just studying architecture followed by a course in civil engineering won't help you, son, you have to go through right counselling at study in the right "professional" academies. "RICE", that's where he had sent his son. Wait a minute, early in this century wasn't it the same racket who were running a technology campus and wanted a website done, I recalled. They hadn't even paid me for booking their domain name (at that time it was already down to $15 or so I think, from $70 in mid-nineties)...

Yes, "the more sugar you pour in it, son, the more sweet it will be"! Values? Whoever said education was about values? It was about learning how to make a big buck. What was this old man anyway? If his son earned so much, then why didn't he travel in a car or a taxi,... or was the son-investment not really his value system? Yes, Indians, a generation ago, and now too, mostly DO "invest" in their sons' educations, and of course, also their daughters too. Slightly less priority there though, but that's how it is mostly. I remember my own father: he cared nothing about it;he told me to go make it for myself. He can only do this much... he never objected to anything I did: drop out from high school, then art college, then even French literature. But he sure did show up in my exhibitions. And one day, when he somehow got to know about my new interest in a computers, he did a minor miracle by providing me enough to buy a second-hand Apple MacIntosh desktop (LC 630) taking a loan from a friend whom to he returned the money in instalments.

Sure he did a lot. But not for just himself, he just gave what he thought I could make him proud with. He never asked money from me and expected I return it in some way. He'd always caution me not to be a spendthrift but did forgive a little excess now and then without a word except, observing that I might regret my actions one day if I indulged in them. But the best thing he ever gave me in life was his own example and the complete freedom to make what I wanted to do with mine. Make no mistake about it, those dropping off from courses did not go unnoticed: in our middle class society dropping out is a major, yes, major disasters. It surely leads to a "spoilt" son, a lost career and the nightmarish fear of becoming a working class labourer or some low down clerk, even worse, some small time trader at best. Not an engineer? Not a doctor? Oh, I see. Tsk, tsk, couldn't make a "man" out of his son...

My father never felt that way. He was from another generation. Born in the twenties, he loved history, collected rare coins, was a member of the numismatic society of India. He even tracked down some coins of the Emperor Kanishka from some obscure village in Gujarat in the western India, the opposite side of the country, and presented some of the best ones from his collection to Indian Museum in Calcutta. In his youth, he saw revolutionaries, and the fight for freedom from colonial rule. He was involved in some politics but never seemed to have affiliated to any big sounding ideals, left or right, however passionate he might have been about some issue or agenda. He was issues-based as we say today, and lost faith in many a leader he worked directly or indirectly with, fell out with them for his uncompromising stance against what he thought was unethical but never ceased to be an optimistic man till the end of his life.

Most of all, he made us feel the pride for being one of those rare civil servants who was never ever corrupt, never accepted a bribe and actually fought all his life against his superiors who had power over him and were more of than not, thoroughly corrupt. He retired as a first class officer, but was denied a lot of promotions early on for his ... uh, should we say brash aggressiveness? He had seen second world war as in his youth but was too young to be drafted and apart from an odd Japanese bombing or two, this part of the world was unscathed by open aggression yet experienced another kind of genocide in form of an artificial famine which saw miilions die of starvation while Chruchill callously diverted food grains for feeding Greek soldiers rather than the natives of Bengal (and remarked why has Gandhi not died yet when reminded of the condition); he saw India become a free democratic country and had hoped to see much more progress in a positive direction, and later in life openly spoke against politicians who had failed to deliver; but he was pragmatic in his thinking, did his work in a thorough way so that he built a reputation of a doer, even so much so that the Indian Railways would not throw him through disciplinary action as he was the reliable person when work to done was of utmost importance and no one could be entrusted by the superiors to see no stones unturned. Being in the unique stressful commercial department, he was once the awfully busy controller of reservations, later an officer who handled the rates and claims department which was full of controversies due to corruption, and planner behind many large scale and complex projects which were personally dealt with by the railway minister himself, and no doubt, had he been even slightly greedier, he could have easily his position to amass a small fortune, which many openly thought of the natural thing to do and the reason why one should take up a government job for.

No, he did not leave behind a large Salt Lake two-storey bungalow, or even the one storied kind we were accustomed to when he was in service as the free residence of officers with a staff that comprised of a gardener and many other perks, a relic of the colonial era. His pension was peanuts when I think of it, for the amount of work he did, and there is no concept of monetary rewars ion the civil service. He had some savings, and all he could do was a buy a tiny apartment for all the four of us after his retirement and also being forced to abandon his father's house the larger part a large mansion with a garden and a pond, a property belonged to my grandfather biut developed mostly by his earnings of which another large part went into the living costs and education of his four sisters and as many brothers, most of whom were still getting an education when he sacrificed his own to join the Indian Railways at the an age he as barely seventeen or eighteen, perhaps lying by increasing it for the sake of escaping feeding a large family reduced to to relative poverty. Even after buying this apartment, whuch was every bit his own, although he got was cheated  again by the promoter who promised much and delivered very little so that he was compelled to fight yert another bitter decade long civil (and criminal) suit which he eventually won, but after being even beaten up by a local thug and at every step, facing all kinds of hardships including two pace-maker changes, once an advanced liver disease which could have been fatal, diabetes which turned his hair to white very early on, not to speak of so many other hardships he did not deserve... but he lived, and slept well, and he was not scared and never expressed even the slightest bit of self-pity or complained in a bitter way ass is the habit of many a jaded man who faced hardships like him or much less.

On a bus, if I could picture him, he might also have turned to talk with the young student. He would find out all about his interest in architecture and other career too, perhaps make an observation or two about one great building or architect he admires. Then he would may be even start telling him a story or an anecdote about how he once got into a town planning project or some related topic. We would wink to each other, our family members,- here he goes again,- his often repeated stories which were more or less the same he told it and we already knew by heart except he never tired of telling them as if it was the first time he had ever done so. Now, as in the towards the later years of his life, quite opposite to how in my late teens, I felt embarrassment whenever he started to to tell one of his stories to a complete stranger, triggered perhaps by a casual exchange, or a small incident knowing immediately which of his stories it will be, this is what I looked forward to hearing  and even asking for clarificarions, and this is precisely what I miss about him the most.

Oh, have I ranted a bit too far away from what I was talking about. Yes, sorry for the diversion. I could go on and on for days. But yes, fear, he did not seem to have any. But deep down, he had it too, a fact I learned about much later in life. He loved life like anyone else and his eyes glittered at the prospect of a small meal of his favourite dish, of which he had many. He had a full life or made sure he did in whatever circumstances he found himself in. My elder brother took him touring across Europe twice and I know he loved every bit of it. The year before he died he was travelling again with my mother and spent months across India. including a whole month at Pondicherry, an erstwhile French settlement. I had seen fear in his eyes only a few times, only the times before the operations to install pace makers, and once when he had a bad case of the dreaded liver disease, ...why can't I suddenly remember the name, worse than jaundice, of the class B or C which could make it fatal if you did not rest completely and control your diet strictly for at least six months?*

Mom and dad touring India in 2003, the last of year of my Dad's eventful life

But he had survived. When three years into my marriage and living separately away from my parents although we were in the same city, we my ex-wife and I decided to leave the country to start afresh in a new city, Jakarta, I still remember him bidding us farewell as the taxi drove away. I am sure he was so happy for us: He said, "Go and make a good beginning, and above all, live well". I had bought some first-day covers, stamps and "sens" (coins he had mentioned in his last letter to me) but little did I know that farewell as the taxi drove off was the last time I would see him again...



Anyway, what is it like to be afraid? I know it again. We are not infojunkies any more, we have become like zombies... like that song: with our guns, and our bombs, zombies, infoZombies. How do we educate, what are the real values, what's us and who's them? What is intelligence and what are feelings? What are we? Where are we going? Why?

Paul Gaugin: Painting entitled "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?" (More ..)

*  Hepatitis.