We didn't start the fire - 1

We didn’t start the file

It was always burning

Since the world’s been turning

We didn’t start the file

No we didn’t light it

But we tried to fight it

 - Billy Joel

Wealth

They say it is the one-percenters, who hoard more than 70% of global wealth while the other 99% scrap for the rest. There were global movements - the Occupy showdowns, the constant fixtures of friction at WTO and Davos summits etc - in the recent times decrying this unfair imbalance in the society handing undue advantage to the rich helping them pull more and more away from the baseline. While there is certainly no argument that rich are indeed getting richer (when was it not?), never before in history has there been a greater democratization in the process of getting rich, where anyone worth an idea and a will to see the idea to fruition is rolled a red carpet into the balcony section of the society. What was once natural resources - air, water, land, oil, mining, gold - that minted millionaires, technology has now levelled the playing field and turned pimpled and gangly teenagers into instant billionaires all the by the virtue (and the marketability) of their ideas. The innovation revolution that started chugging since the late 80s, gathering up the steam in the 90s and roared to its full speed in the 00s, proved to be the greatest advertisement for the capitalistic ideology, aided amply by the fall of the communist empire over most of Eastern Europe and Russia, decimating the concept of pure socialism once and for all. Times were good, stock markets glossed over the systemic issues in the society, the main of which was the growing class divide, money was thrown indiscriminately around at practically every problem that plagued the world. And then the bottom fell.

Dot-com crash, 9/11 and housing market collapse, the three epochal events that razed down all that had been built over close to couple of decades, brought prosperity to its knees and made the world realize the illusion and fallacy of its wealth based economies. Before the turn of the decade in the new century, some companies were wiped off the face of relevancy, some countries were left gasping for a helping hand and society, in general, was cauterized against dreaming big (and foolish). In one of his rip roaring routines, 'You are all diseased', George Carlin, the clairvoyant comedian, cautioned against this current situation, that all the safety and comfort that materialism offered were merely a fog that would just melt away at the first sign of trouble, specifically mentioning the issue of latent terrorism to be the first domino that would set the ball rolling....and all this prophecy in 1996, when everything was just going swimmingly well. Well, it doesn't really take a seer or a soothsayer/doomsayer to look at the fault lines and the instability of the system and then glance at the glossy towers being built upon with a gusto, and predict that it would all come crashing down soon enough. After each of the three major crises above, when the society settled down to pick up the pieces, out came these naysayers out of the woodwork waving their theories and models that they claim they had been warning the society with but to no avail. While it would seem painfully obvious, 'What goes up must come down' which is just another way of saying that perpetual growth is a fallacy, something that prognosticators at stock markets loathe to agree, it is the fallout of the painful falls that is anything but. A Dotcom crash might have had the think-tanks think twice about making blind investments in invisible products, but that's the extent of it. But the fallout of 9/11, the body count is still rising 17 years after those embers have died down. Closing on those heels, the global economic shutdown following the housing market collapse saw a fallout of a completely different kind where security concerns of the society went head on with the economic anxieties giving rise to xenophobia, protectionism, nationalism and other forms of ideologies that called for societies to close down to anything new or foreign and retreat to safe compounds of the tried and tested.

It had been all done before empires rising and falling, civilizations cresting and crashing, societies tumbling and turning, so much so that every subsequent evolutionary cycle appears to have incorporated the lessons from the previous iterations and was better for it. This is where Twain's quote about history not repeating but rhyming comes into play. Where once was anarchy bringing about downfall of societies, monarchies took to power next, held the society by some rule of law, which over a period of time created its own imbalances and inequities, due to the concentration of power in a single seat and with it the inexorable tying of the fate of the collective to the whims and fancies of a single individual, fomenting resentments and fostering revolutions. Monarchies fell and then it was the turn of the autocracies, plutocracies, and dictatorships, each with its own share of blame games in power distribution. Like Churchill who said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others, there was no choice for modern society but to embrace this rule of the ruled. It looked natural and logical, there was no permanent ruling class, the subjects have a say in deciding whom to hand over the reins to and when aggrieved, they have a non-violent release mechanism in elections. What could go wrong now? While it may seem the reasons and causes for why societies fall and rise (since the period of enlightenment) center around power struggles, it is in fact the uneven distribution of wealth and the ungainly measures taken for the protection of that wealth which is in fact the true motive for social upheavals and uprisings.

After the breakup of Soviet Russia into independent states, the monied class, whose vested interests spread across every wealth generating avenue of the modern society - banks, oil, steel, mining - took indirect control of the government, an oligarchy, with the sole intention of protecting their business interests regardless of whoever is the high seat of power. An interesting phenomenon in Indian politics too in the past decade or so, where businessmen, who earlier propped figure heads to be their mouthpieces in the administration bankrolling their costly campaigns, started to take control of their destinies and speak for themselves by entering the election fray directly, making the Indian democracy a refined version of oligarchy. Be it in more advanced societies, like Western Europe and US, or authoritarian regimes, like China, or a mix of the two, like India, it is strictly money that is calling the shots giving rise to a class schism, this time around, quite ironically, by capitalism and democracy. While the present day turmoil in Western democracies appear to be stemming from their immigration policies and migration crises, where people from impoverished and war ravaged nations and fleeing from and flocking for more stable pastures of the West, the seeds of the suspicion were sown much earlier in another concept that capitalism itself peddled and exported to the world, globalization.

It would appear a double standard of sorts, going by the plain definition of globalization, which calls for a near borderless world where goods have to freedom to move about freely with no obstacles put in the way between the producing and the consuming ends, while the true effects of it calls for erecting walls and imposing sanctions once the osmosis truly happened. In the days of General Agreement on Trades & Tariffs (GATT), bilateral relations were in vogue with countries handing out the prized Most Favored Nation status to whomever it wished to go to the ball and dance with, and in case of any violations of the terms agreed upon, an arbiter was called in to resolve the crisis. But contentment was never Capitalism’s strongest suite. Why settle for one country when the entire world can be brought under one ambit and dictated terms to, prying open tough and stubborn markets with a carrot and stick approach (buy little of theirs to selling a lot of ours) and create even more avenues to its products. Industries and sectors which were once setup in safe and stable societies soon moved away to place where they both could be compromised at the altar of profit. Consider what just happened here. The communities from where these industries were uprooted crumbled, while the countries where these have been moved to often condoned sub par working conditions, building up anger and resentments on both sides of the globalization equation. While the corporations certainly stood to benefit with this new mantra of capitalism, better margins with lower costs, a far cry from its founding principle of better profit through continuous innovation, this move certainly uncoupled the traditional symbiotic relationship between an organization and the ecosystem it was housed, benefiting only a tiny slice of decision makers and stakeholders, leaving the rest disillusioned, disenchanted, disenfranchised and ultimately divested of the glowing notion of capitalism.

The firms that have moved away have naturally seen a surge in their profitability quotients and consequently an uptick in their market value, all contributing to a surge in global stock indices. Stock market, once a bellwether for the health of an economy, now turned into a cruel sport brandishing the spoils of the privileged. And what does that disconnect between the apparent and the reality manifest as?

Cont'd in next part - Migration

The final frontier : Identity

May be this is the one last push before the fort is breached, the one last stance before the inevitable decimation, the one final effort of humanity to reassert and retain its individual component flavor before it collapses one big pile of homogenized self, where the only distinguishing factor remains at the gender level than at one of those tens of different offerings currently in vogue - race, region, religion, country, culture, caste, language, dialect and such. For it certainly seems so, considering the current turbulent and volatile geo political social scenario prevalent all across the globe where every little community worth its identity is launching its own pocket sized warfare of its own to preserve its way of life and have its voice heard over the din of other more vociferous groups engaged in the same activity. Science fiction, which is usually considered the bell weather of societal change, has conveniently skipped over this painful step of these individual groups elbowing each other for a little space of their own, and jumped directly to the near future where all the cultures and cliques and cabals are coalesced into one single entity as to represent the entire humanity as a whole, so that in the off chance when aliens visit upon the earth, there would only be one voice speaking for the entire mankind and one front representing its stand. Perhaps this has been the vision of science for the future that there would cease to exist the multitude of hues and colors that humans choose to be associated with, and for better or worse, a monochrome selection would finally emerge as its default (and only) color palette. And it might still happen too, but the process of getting there is throwing up such a violent reaction, with each digging in their heels too deep in their positions and stances that it becomes impossible to visualize a scenario when all these diverse ideas can come to a common ground and allow themselves to be influenced and affected by the other, leave alone all these ideas fusing into one single collective thought.

Propagation of information has always been the harbinger of change. Guttenberg's invention of the printing press served as the first catalyst whence ideas started to travel across the breadth of the globe inviting unforeseen upheavals in the status quo. The second significant 'intifadah' (uprising) on the information highway is the invention of internet. Where once it took some significant time for a revolutionary idea to travel the length of the global road, internet reduced it to a billionth of a second for the speed of propagation to match the speed of thought. So what Guttenberg's press did for Christianity,  with the spread of the printed Bible across all continents inviting debates, conversation, critiques and criticisms forcing a reformation and a re-imagination of the faith, the internet is currently serving that function by applying it to culture, this time around. And with the winds of change come the reflex action of resistance. From the cauldron of the raging Middle East to the nationalistic movements sweeping across the traditional societies, from the ever contentious race wars raging in the modern worlds to the calls of casteist pride in their age old counterparts, it is quite apparent that the free flow of information has dredged up some new thoughts and along with them some new found fears that the old world order is about to lose its role and relevancy, unless the calls to change is countered with equally combative campaign to discredit the very purpose of the oncoming change in the first place.

No where is this line of thinking more pronounced than in the casteist campaigns currently holding the progress of the nation at ransom. The dichotomy in the arguments put forth by both the traditionalists and the reformists in this context is quite baffling. The traditionalists chest thump about the rich cultural lineage and heritage of the nation, extolling the virtue of thought that appears advanced, liberated and enlightened even back in the times that presaged much of the progress made by the modern man, which they claim now serves as the cultural beacon and moral compass of the nation. Yet this is the same culture (or thought or pratice) that made job assignments a family legacy, and worse, categorizing a section of those essential jobs as menial  while exalting some others ethereal, and the only criterion for the job allotment is not merit or talent, but arbitrary birth. The question isn't as much as allotment of labor as it is about the dignity of labor. And so the caste system which created a great sense of resentment, discontentment and disenchantment among the bottom half of the labor force against the system became responsible for the fault lines that crept into its ethos permanently dividing a nation entirely on the grounds of who is born where. When the oppressed class started clamoring for a reformation of a system by advocating for essentially throwing out the old order and scripting a new tale, the pendulum didn't just stop at the equitable center, it went further and farther to the other side, taking a position diametrically opposite to the one that it railed against, refusing to come to the bargain table for any compromise, claiming that historical injustices can only be undone by administering the antidote for the same amount of time as they have suffered at the hands of the system, meaning, a little over couple of thousands of years. And there in lies the rub. It is the turn of the oppressed to wear the caste tag as a badge of honor, asserting their identity and refusing to move in the direction of creating a casteless society once and for all. So one side doesn't climb down from its high horse and the other side doesn't step back from its avenging stance.

The solution, however, doesn't lie in the middle ground or any ground. In fact, it exists in a wholly different realm, money. Money, castigated as the root of all evil, this time, is going to root out all evil, at least the caste one. Money is the greatest leveler of all. It can hide caste, it can mask identity, it can even camouflage color. Eventually economy is going to create the even playground that social reformers long dreamed about. But how it gets there, through socialism or capitalism, through market economy or regulated practices (reservations, subsidies and helping hands) is still to be decided. And society is going to go through each of those iterations in a trial and error fashion before settling on the final solution. And what makes this a sure thing? The answer lies in nature, physics precisely. Two pressure systems of varying intensities cannot coexist side by side forever, unless the high pressure gradually yeilds to the low pressure before ending up with an equilibrium. This is an inevitable as it is imminent.

The next in line is nationalism. Isn't it ironic that the majority of the nations that are currently struggling to deal with the tidal waves of migration were themselves unwanted guests (turned rulers/colonizers) of those same countries just a few decades ago - France, Britain, Netherlands, Spain, Italy and others? And now when the shoe is on the other foot with people from those same colonized lands turning up at the shores and the boundaries of their erstwhile masters, it might not feel right, fit right, but it definitely seems just. With this forced marriage of completely different cultures and value systems comes the automatic hue and cry to save, protect and preserve the original flavor of motherland without letting it contaminated with the incoming exoticism. These voices become even shriller when the economy is caught in a downward spiral (the other half of the cyclical nature of development and doom, prosperity and penury), when all the fingers are pointed towards these new arrivals, who are accused of overwhelming the system by taking in a lot more than filling it back up. One glance at the political scenario in all these nations above reveals the rise of the right wing parties whose agenda consists of the lone item of restoration of lost glory and status of the motherland often at the expense of the latest entrants into the society. Man, if anything, has been migratory by nature, for food, security and betterment. Movement has always been at the center of progress and prosperity of flourished societies. So, the question becomes when two strong and different identities are forced to share the same space, which one gives and which one takes? The answer surprisingly is, none. Eventually both of them would lose their strong individual flavors and fuse to form a wholly different face that retains traces of the individual components but loses any resemblance to either. One needn't look far for examples of such amorphous fusions (obviously achieved over a long period over strifes, consternations, troubles, blowups and missteps, but nevertheless the ends justify the means) than the present day Indian and American societies, the former forged over a few thousands of years absorbing disparate cultures in its fold and the latter formed over a few hundreds of years treading similar path. And now it is the turn of Europe to chart that course of homogenization.

Lastly, the other great front where the battle lines are currently drawn pertain to one of religion. And this is by far the hardest of all, because, unlike caste and nationalism, which to some degree operate on some principle, flawed or otherwise, religion is all about belief and thus the hardest to dissuade from or persuade about. Ask any Hindu what he thinks of his religion and pat comes the reply Vedas, Upanishads and the distillation of human thought in the most precise form, Gita. Ask an oppressed person on the other hand what he thinks about the same, and the answer could not be more contradictory - restrictive, discriminating and divisive. And both of them are equally right. Same goes with Christianity with universal love and compassion on one hand, and bigoted stances on slavery, homophobia and even the role of women on the other side. The religion currently in the cross hairs all across the globe, Islam, has its share of contradictions and controversial ideas to even out the purity, piety and practice of the faith. Which leads to the conclusion every belief system is as enlightening and it is plain stupid, every religion has its share of good that it contributes to the world as it has the pollutants and effluents mucking up the thought process. Every belief system goes through the process of genesis, consolidation, propagation, corruption, implosion and rejuvenation and no religion is an exception to this. And it is the time of Islam now, being the youngest of all faiths, to publicly takes these painful steps towards ultimate reconciliation. The current militant brand of Islam that is earning the faith a bad reputation is more a product of political and economic tussles that is pulling apart the religion from every which direction and less to do with the (mis)interpretations of the actual word of the Holy Text. And there is always that question of the literal truth vs spirit behind the idea, when it comes to following religious texts that have been written thousands of years ago meant for vastly different social conditions.

The antidote to extremism or ignorance isn't isolation or persecution. It is education. Just as money for caste, migration for nationalism, education offers the correct counter weight to religious dogma forcing the faith to confront with its insecurities and instabilities and therefore be richer by the critique and conversation (just like how a mathematical theorem is enriched by its corollaries, converses and exceptions). Surprisingly, among caste, nationalism and religion, the solution to the last prickly issue is also the easiest and most effective from an implementation standpoint. It doesn't need change of minds and hearts of the already battle-hardened, it doesn't call for any proselytization or even a total abandoning of one's own faith. All it requires is opening of more and more schools to expose the little minds to the pluralistic, scientific and multi-threaded nature of the world (and the universe) from a very young age. That's it, nothing more. And within a generation's time, the seeds of rationality would bring about the reformation/transformation of the faith from within, without the use of any weapons and without ostracizing one major chunk of the world population.

Identity should only be a front for individuality, and never a collective measure, for it is only natural that in a group that is identified only by a tag and not by its content, individuality would forever be lost in the sea of sameness restricting the answer to the question 'what are you' to a caste, region or a religion, instead of many diverse, artisitic, brilliant, scientific, human choices possible.

The 'i'dea man

Too soon man! Too soon!

Some lives are counted in years and some, in contributions. Steve Jobs belonged to the latter.

Did he cure cancer, invent a longer lasting light bulb, end world strife or hunger, or bring about world peace? May be not, but he certainly did change the mindset of an entire industry, in terms of what it thought devices should be and do. Big deal! how does that cure cancer? Charles Babbage, the inventor of the (concept of) computer, might not have directly worked on the NASA's missions to land man on the moon. But much later after his lifetime, did someone make use of the concepts he founded and made the impossible possible. The contributions of visionaries do not suffer from half-life decay; if not in material, their ideas enjoy exponential growth over the generations being put to use sometimes in letter and sometimes in spirit. As Newton once humbly submitted that he was but a small man standing on the tall shoulders of his predecessors, Jobs' efforts didn't rid the world of its maladies but they definitely made the world a much interesting space to operate in by changing the way modern technology related to everyday life. Jobs is no Edison, he didn't actually sit down and invent the digital music players or the tablet PCs. He just made them better, a whole lot better, in ways never thought before, both in applicability and in aesthetics. And that probably defines the life of the man, his single minded devotion to perfection, refusing to settle for nothing but the best. He made ordinary people, who till then were apprehensive to approach technology and so brushed it away as just a mindless indulgence for ones who had the luxury of time and obsession, actually care for it. He did turn around an industry, which till then perched itself on a condescending high ground and expected its consumers to approach it with reverence, to shed its 'complicated' garb and take on a more simplified stance, all without compromising on the quality. That is the 'what' of Jobs' life and legacy.

And now the 'how'. Truth be told, Jobs failed more times and at more things than he succeeded and was greatly rewarded for. In fact, in his short 56 years of lifespan, it was only during his last decade that his fame reached dizzying heights as he developed a Midas touch for end user products. During the rest of his career, all his victories were purely Pyrrhic, praised more for the effort than for the effect. Until his company, Apple, became the most valued and richest in the world, besting even the old oil boys in the process, Jobs reveled in his role as a rebel, an outsider, an outlaw, who never cared for the riches who had his own band of merry men, to constantly challenge, harass and mock the mainstream for its lack of imagination and inventiveness. That was the time when the world wasn't ready for him yet, when technology was still dictating terms to the needs and the requirements of the users, instead of other way around. The watershed moment in Jobs' resurrection as the second coming of Christ was in 1997, when, in some staunch loyalists' opinion, he made a Faustian deal with Microsoft to purchase some financial succor to his then ailing and failing company, on the verge of collapse, lacking both the direction and that drive that it was once famous for. The turnaround started with iMac, a brilliant and a gorgeous spin on the traditional desktop design. The usage of the prefix "i" for all its products post the revival, whether accidental or intentional, indicated the direction Apple, under Jobs, took, making the user the center of the technology universe, as against the prevalent configuration of having him somewhere on the periphery of the product experience. The shift was as revolutionary in the industry, as the geocentric to heliocentric shift once was in astronomy. That the change came to be known in the internet circles as 'Web 2.0', where user is the king and the content merely serves him, is an ample demonstration of how far ahead Jobs pulled away from the resident traditional thinking. That, in short, was the 'how', turning technology as the humble servant to the user.

There is a long standing 'chicken and egg' question in the business circles as to which comes first, the need or the deed. Conventional wisdom states that the need be placed in the front, with the deed following it, to fulfill it. Now, looking back at Apple's flagship products - iPod, iPhone and iPad, it is fairly obvious that Jobs turned that 'deed servicing the need' paradigm on its head and went ahead and sided with the action, and let the demand catch up with it. Before the arrival of the "i-" lineup, the world was just fine with the inferior alternatives, or in some cases, even the lack of them. But post the releases of each of those products, the world just couldn't live without them. That might his message to the business world - show the need and the world pays heed. They say, a man is known by his friends, which in business speak translates to, a man is known by his foes (competitors). Jobs' profile isn't complete without his bete noire - Bill Gates. Edison had Tesla to contend with, McEnroe had Borg, and Jobs had Gates. Similar backgrounds, similar drives, same age group, and almost similar rise to stardom, both of them relied on their marketing savvy and strong work ethic to reach where they did, but the roads they traveled couldn't be more divergent. Gates traded his wares on the functionality side and Jobs, on the possibilities. And the more Microsoft succeeded in the 90s, in great parts due to large captive market share, the stronger became Jobs' resolve in showing what the user community truly missed in design and innovation. Though the success that had been eluding him for better part of his life finally gave in to his charms only during his final laps, one look at his oeuvre, and it is clear as a day that the drive to be different had always been there, it is only now that it is being rewarded with general acceptance.

The mark of an innovator lies not in the end product, but in the initial idea that compelled him to chart a course of creation. What does an end user care about a bulky CPU in his PC, and the iMac was born with both the monitor and the CPU integrated within the same box; music is only data and therefore the question is one of designing a small enough portable hard drive, and thus ended the reign of CDs; why pay an entire music album for just one good song, and the idea of iTunes, a simple and an elegant distribution medium for music, saved the music industry at the time it was just about to close shop because of rampant piracy; and finally the iPad, the optimal PC for a casual end-user - why a bulky machine, if a majority of functions involved the internet. As seen, each idea challenged and changed the status quo. It is not about the need, it is about the drive of reducing a complex issue to its simplest size and providing a solution to it. Simplicity, as history shows, lies at the root of greatness - be it in men or material. One follows the other, as the life of Jobs has shown, who is reported to have left behind, besides his wife and children, a simple home with a cot, table and chair to his name.

Inventors have products, visionaries have ideas.

The ABCs of ABCs

'Talent', 'Exceptional', 'Concept', 'Techno', 'Brilliant' - you will not even be in the vicinity of rightness if you suppose that these hyperbolic accolades are doled out by, what has now become a standard TV fixture worldwide, a three judge panel, during some talent show witnessing a routine act that was only marginally better than the others. No sir! you'll be seriously remiss! All the above are the in vogue terms in a totally unrelated arena - Education. You'll be have to scratch your head hard to make that connection between those words and 'school'. In the model of standardized education and standardized testing procedures, what do the terms 'Techno', 'Brilliant', and 'Concept' even mean? Jog your memory back to those days when the word 'convent' meant success and so automatically you found institutions like 'Sri Ramakrishna Convent High School', 'Gita Mandir Convent', that stuck out like a sore thumbs, like those low end banner ads that read 'Grammer taught here'. Convents, which are the resident quarters of the nuns in the Catholic domain, were bundled together with the educational institutions, so that the nuns could teach school in the morning and practice their faith for the rest of the day, all in the same premises. That Catholic schools, with its martinet mistresses and stiff upper lip staff, stood for the perfect mix of education and discipline, gained the well earned reputation that kids - talented and torrid - would do well under the watchful eyes and the gaze of the nuns, who had maddening obsession for keeping order. That was how 'convent' became to represent a strict and a successful school, which immediately found poor, cheap and idiot imitators trying to replicate the success merely by using the right words, conveniently forgetting that fundamental consideration that a convent is a faith based institution and not a successful teaching methodology. That malapropism certainly did stop scores of eager parents lining up before the fake and mangled 'convents' trying to get their kids 'convent education' for a fraction of original's price, and the free markets gladly obliged.

That was then, when schools came in only three kinds - elementary, primary and high. Now the choice, and with it the confusion, has grown manifold. Walk down through any thoroughfare, a back alley or even a bi-lane in any Indian city, and billboards, posters, stick-ons of all sizes and shapes guilt you into believing that your kid is going to be long left behind in the race to the top if he is not enrolled immediately in some combination of 'techno', 'bright', 'brilliant', 'concept' school. When did this leap into ultra-competitive, pure paranoiac mindset happen from a seemingly subdued situation in what is first of all a dull and a drab field - education? Has education, right from the Kindergarten level, been re-engineered and retro fitted to suit the marketplace demands.? When the job classifieds scour for live-wires and bleeding-edgers in daily newspapers, the phrases immediately find ground in the mission statements and the prospectuses of the school - Want your kid to turn into a live-wire and an out-lier? Why wait till it is too late? Join him in our 'Exceptionally Brilliant Techno Concept Pre-school', and allow us to transform him into the over-achiever you never were and you never imagined him to be. Seemingly, schools have taken the leap from being merely the providers of the primary platforms to becoming focused and targeted vocational and professional trainers. Wait, this is not an issue of the ever-changing standards of education, which always change with each generation. It is about the selling of the education. Extra-large, extra-powerful, supreme quality, unbelievable results and unmatched whiteness - Surf has been touting to be doing pretty much the same thing since my childhood - drop your dirties, pour in Surf, and Voila, witness the whiteness that would put even chalk to shame. The product has been the same, but the words around it changed, a la, education.

Education, along with health, has sadly become a fantastic business model that leapfrogged the rising living standards, preying avariciously on the fears, anxieties, and uncertainties about the future. The forking point, SSC, that once decided which path the student would progress along in search for his bright future, got moved at least 3-4 years earlier, owing to the manic urge of the parents to get a leg up above the rest, and with it a new business model rose up to cater to exactly that - getting the tots ready for the long run well before their support systems are fully developed. And once the business is birthed and blooded, it didn't need much to become a self-sustaining and an immensely thriving entity within no time, and the words 'brilliant', 'techno' and the like are just the manifestations of a rapidly evolving field trying to outdo itself with each iteration. Add to that the rapid globalization that has taken place in the past few years which further muddled the scene by rough stitching varied teaching methods and processes. The word 'international' is the new 'abracadabra' in the schooling business nowadays, playing up to the gullible customers' (parents) blind craving for anything foreign. The wild demand for foreign goods during the pre-liberalization days boiled over into the new entrant into the field - education. That the smart business folk are alert enough to capitalize on the age old trend ('India - poor, foreign - rich, India - bad, foreign - good, and therefore, anything domestic - worthless, anything international - priceless') is the prime reason why even old establishments started decades ago are rushing to wipe out the archaic 'elementary', 'primary' and 'high' from their names and falling head over heels to get the much profitable 'international' moniker in its title, chucking the well established teaching methods in favor of the untested 'international' standards and practices.

At the root of it all lies omnipresent population explosion issue. On top of it lies the unwavering stance of the elite institutions to not increase their enrollment proportionately to the growing numbers, for their own personal fear of dilution/diminution of their brand value. What is it but the first theory of economics - resources are limited, wants are limited - being demonstrated on the biggest ever sample possible. This serious lopsidedness between the numbers on either side of the demand and supply equation, created a space for the profiteers to exploit the worries of the parents of locking a secure future for their offsprings, even if it is at an exorbitant premium. And so if one school comes with a 'concept' of hurrying the kids through the learning process and getting them ready for the start gates at the long race, by simple rules of business, another school comes up with a different 'technology' of reorienting the kids' brain to operate at super-human level to get the right results. And the slippery slope continues with different 'theories', 'foundations', 'headstarts' and such. All the keywords that had once echoed in the halls of haloed business schools now find a new home in the academic corridors, with the fundamental and dire difference that, if a business fails it might only affect a few, but if the whole schooling system careens out of control, the whole society suffers. And the schooling system just keeps pushing itself to the precipice with each round of new census numbers, coming up with highly unsustainable and self-defeating models, trying to capture the attention of an already crowded market segment saturated with innovation. And beyond that precipice lies the domain where the only law that prevails is the one of diminishing returns. Sure, the schools churn out great academic ranks and results, but how many great scientists, innovators, thinkers, visionaries, philosophers and artists do these stellar results account for? And if the percent of translation is miniscule, what right do these decision makers (parents and educators) have sucking the childhood out of the kids with the promise of handing a bright future.

Let's turn our attention to the teaching processes themselves, which are undergoing a radical change with the advent of foreign tools and ideas. Broadly teaching methodologies are of two types - rote and reason. And each of these evolved a period of time and is a subject of the social conditions. Where numbers are pronounced, it was found that rote worked well and where teaching had the luxury of space and attention, reason worked well. These are empirical statements that have been proved time and again over a multitude of populations. In thickly populated countries, math and science, learned through rote reigned supreme and in sparsely populated ones where the curriculum stressed on reason, analysis and expression, arts and humanities flourished. Each system has its own merits and pitfalls (while rote created far few thinkers, reason failed to create a strong foundation), the processes thrived in their own spaces with their own reasons for their success. But globalization has started a dangerous trend of importing ideas into unfamiliar territories and applying them with no regard to the underlying social conditions. And so a primary school with a sizable student strength that had till then relied on rote suddenly switched over the new 'international' standards, where the major share of the academics is supplanted by the 'creative' curriculum. On paper the idea sounds like an ideal combination that would activate and energize both sides of the brain (the ones responsible for memory and analysis). What else could a parent hope for, a child who is strong in academics while being a creative thinker? But there is a paradoxical catch with this scenario. The main aim of public education is creating a common platform (a Least Common Denominator, of sorts) where majority, not just a few, are imparted with the basic/minimum skills that would allow them to move forward and upward. Because, truth be told, real genius thrives free of any models and it is for the rest that a strong system be put in place that would equip them with the ways and means to adapt and survive. And this is the reason, the strong foundation laid down on the 'rote' platform allowed Indians to survive and prosper in many lands in many fields.

It is a fact that not every one of those is a certified genius coming out of that system, yet the adaptability that was acquired which emphasized on the employment of memory more than free thinking, forms the basis of survival and success. And so, regardless of the social imperative that education is the gateway for employment for the masses, when, in the name of greed, schools start to change their models to stress less on the hard parts and glorify the lighter aspects, so that they could collect more fees in the name of including more creative aspects in their curriculum, everyone (who is not a prodigy) suffers - the kids, the parents and the society. Now go back to those billboards and count the number of 'international', 'talent', 'techno', 'concept', 'foundation', 'brilliant' schools ready to take over the schooling universe and think who opened the Pandora's box first - the parents, who yearn to raise their offspring as per the 'international' norms, or the businessmen who try to cash in on this obvious weakness.

An adage went 'those who can, do, and those who can't, teach'. Not necessarily, in this day and age.