subject: Relative To Me [print this page] Relative To Me Relative To Me
A normal situation in an Indian college (or perhaps any college):
While a teacher is teaching, some students ask questions that are not at all required. They ask deliberately, knowing that asking questions to the teacher might give an impression that I am attentive in the class. This act of theirs has a cumulative effect, in the form of sessionals they get (sessionals are marks given by teachers of the respective subjects on the basis of a student's performance in class, lab and exams) . And many others who couldn't do the buttering get lesser sessionals. Files of the practicals are made and checked. There too, the presentation, not the content, matters. Not all teachers favour such sincerity, but most of them do. This is what I meant when I said," it scares me". And this does not stop here. It has infiltrated eveywhere. Two students remain good friends as long as they are able to achieve their means out of the other. There's no actual bond between them. Those who could not do so are overlooked.
These might sound obvious and part and parcel of today's life but is actually double dutch. It has far reaching and serious consequences. In order to achieve what one wants from others, one hides one's true nature and starts pretending. And this pretending nature unknowingly becomes our true nature. We lose our original self. This leads to discomfort, chiefly mental and emotional. In my opinion, this is the main cause of tension or stress, particularly among the youths. A person when learns or gets educated becomes more humble. But its antonym is prevailing at present. And this is not just limited to education. It has dissolved into the routine life so well that it is a part of the assumed common sense. All this leads me to compare the situarion to the one in the movie Matrix, where actual world was not what people living in it thought. It was something else. We need to free ourselves from it, or else we would become the likes of the many- faced Agent Smith.
