The art of Rumination

The confessions of an overachiever in the Indian education system and the inexplicable agony of having went through that and sucking in life.

Anthropologists say, man came from monkey. Can I doubt it, I can't. I have been trained my whole life to repeat it again and again. Man came from monkey. Man came from monkey. Man came from monkey. so, now I can’t argue it and go on doing research leaving behind all my life. But I have a new theory to propose which doesn't contradicts with the above one but suggests a new angle to it.

My theory states that the Indian education system came from buffaloes, at least the one I went through. Yes ! buffaloes. You might ask, what wrong they have done to compare this bullshit system to the the beautiful animals who just go on working their a*s off for the good of mankind and resting in the shade and ruminating the cud.

Yes ! that's where the resemblance lies..

All your life, in the Indian education system you are trained to repeat after what have been told and without thinking even for a moment . Repeat after the teacher as they say it loud and remember it. Repeat it in the exam without flunking.

You are not supposed to miss even a single word from the book. You have to eat the words bit by bit, only in the order given in the class notes, chew them carefully so that they won’t lose their strand and take it in.  Then after the school, you have to go to the “private tutions” and start rumination and bring back the cud and chew it. Then go home and if you are lucky to have parents who think that the maximum you chew your cud the more benefit, you might go through the process once more. This process of re rumination continues until you get the cud in and out in the same order in which you have chewed for the past one year.

Then comes the final day where your ability of the rumination process is tested. You have to spit out beautifully all the stinking cud you have been chewing throughout the year.  This is the important part of the process. Don’t worry, the pedagogical experts in the school noticed this beforehand and train you to do this by conducting the annual, half yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily cud spitting tests. You don’t have to worry about what you are writing as long as it it there in the book. You will be given the marks to your appetite for storing cud and the cud spitting skills.

Then comes the age where after all this training in rumination, If you do well, you are a master and everyone worships you for your appetite. The teachers points out some special lessons and questions which you have to chew more.  Your friends who think you are born with this skill adore you. Time and again you find yourself spitting out some cud and you see your friends flocking like seagulls to get on to it and easy their chewing process and save their appetite for other things like movies and girlfriends. But you the “Master Ruminator” without flunking just go on about the process of rumination and won’t spare a word from the book. One day you will find yourself giving some rumination gyan to your fellows.

After successfully ruminating for years in your well,  you end up in a bigger city. Yeah, thanks to the rumination and your appetite, you are destined to go there.

Now you will come to meet the master ruminators from various places and find out the different techniques they are using to chew their cud and spitting it out. They will show you techniques like cluecharts where you just symbolically remembers how many s’s are there in the definition for strategic management. How many words start with p’s and how many words have the rhyming of c in the definition of policy and to remember that you have to remember the word policy as policcce and pronounce it as policcccce instead of policy with special stress on the cccccc. Yeah, and the master ruminator assures you that it’s the new age way of rumination and will definitely improve your appetite.

So you will, and you pass out with stinking cud.

But none of the people, in all those years, realize that, its not what you want for the life outside the schools and colleges, the real world.  

You must have skills. You must have knowledge. You must have the opinions on various subjects, you must have the skill to express them, share them, and even argue about them in GDs. But they provide none of these....

I see lot of people, including myself being shunned from reading books other than the school ones and even newspaper, by their parents and teachers. What are you going to do by reading newspapers, open your book and read it, will be the usual command. And today I lack vocabulary and people who are expert at it say that reading newspaper is the best way to improve it.

I see a friend who find it so hard to write a letter to the police when he lost his passport. Its not that he doesn't have thoughts to write, he has. But he don’t have words and the training to express it.  How will he have it ,when the essay writing exercise in English was just to get 15 marks and you will be given the important questions and of that the effect of the television on the society is a damn sure question and you mugged up the whole essay word to word never giving a thought of what it is. The how will you write a comment on the recent gang rape incident in Delhi which made your heart wrench and want to express it.

Without teachers having the techniques to make the children engage in the subjects ,they are inventing techniques like repeating loud with them the whole paragraph, or asking them to write the paragraph 3 to 4 times. And even some experts inventing things like "clue charts" which make me puke, thinking now.  

Allow them to read books, a lot of books. Which exposes them to a lot of new thoughts and subjects and cultures and  “New Worlds”. Make it a fun exercise. Start with short interesting stories. Once you make them interest in it, you don’t need to push them. Ask them to write, a lot! Make it a fun exercise for them. Ask them to write about the recent movie they watched. After they have the necessary thought and the power to express. They will not just write 750 words on the subject but their opinion on it.

Give them some new thoughts, make them think and give the skills to express their thoughts...
That's what I think the real education is.

- confessions of a ninja ruminator for years.

p.s. Phew, haven't wrote this much in year. I was browsing through a blog and found some articles relating to the Indian education system, which made me recount my personal experiences and want to put it out in some way. So, here it is. May be not true for the whole Indian education, but at least in my place and the schools and colleges I went through.

Author's Note

Actually, the idea for this came as a reply for an article in one of the blogs on inter-webs. I was just reproducing it here. Its just my humble beginnings, mostly written in a free style. I want to improve, Please tear it apart.