Bang Bang, Gang Bang

Okay, this is not a porn site. So all those who came here looking for a quick wack and something cheesy, just go back from where ever you have come. If you are still sticking around, then don't be disappointed at the end, if you are then I will have to go all "I told you so" on you. Though I don't hate doing it, I am sure you would. So that's brings us to the questions " what's with the cheesy title? Rupertt". I thought this would give me a few extra pageviews. Just kidding... The real reason is that's what I wanted to do when I heard of the gang rapes in Delhi, go all bang bang on the gang bangers.

I am pretty sure that most of you have heard something or the other about these gruesome incidents in the Indian capital. For those who, who hasn't, I will give a quick recap. A girl was traveling in a bus with her male friend, her boyfriend, colleague, just friend I don't know, not the point here though. So the bus also had some shady characters in it, starting with the bus driver and extending to a couple of passengers. So they starts taunting her, the male friend interjects. He gets beaten up ( awesome guts dude ) and then they go on to rape her and later dumps them some place. Sorry, I can't give a blow by blow account of what happened, principally because I don't know. But if you need to know just Google "Delhi gang rapes", it's huge news you can't miss it.

It is not actually breaking news that the Indian youth is sex starved, yes prejudiced mothers your son and daughter are too. I just exited teen age statistically, I know all the less than civil fantasies that rampage their tender minds, all because I harbor them too. I know how dangerous their intentions can be, because I know how dangerous mine is. I am not your occasional rapist, I wouldn't do that or so I believe. Even if I don't trust my intentions, I trust my upbringing and I have all faith in my rationale. But the point is this if I harbor such infidel thoughts, what would a less disciplined mind house, I can only guess with much terror.

What we must investigate is the root cause of all this evil, okay proprietors of child marriage, wait! You are not helping. We must try to understand the sexual need of today, I can tell you that it does not one bit good to look upon today's sexuality with the conservative eyes of yesterday. Today's youth knows more of sexuality than you would know in a lifetime. The progressive Indian teen who is exposed to the freedom of sexual expressionism prevalent in the western way of life cultivates in him a desire for such freedom. Freedom once tasted leaves a hangover spanning a lifetime and inculcates a strong desire to achieve it. This desire when suppressed by the Indian way of life and it's taboos does what a pressure cooker does to its contents. Some become submissive others rebel.

But even when that underlines the injudicious way the teenage India's mind works, it still does not justify its misdemeanors. It is not supposed. What I stated is not a justification but a problem and its anatomy. What we need to do to counter such onslaught of civil and cultural unrest is what we have to look into. One may argue for more stringent punishment for these vile creatures. It sure will serve as a better deterrent but doesn't really solve the problem does it? Even with the surety of death penalty men will continue to rape women, because they don't think when they rape they just do.


What we should do is not for me to offer with my limited intelligence on bureaucratic red-tap-ism in India. but what I tend to offer as a possibility is what I feel is necessary for the next generation of citizens to know what they hold in terms of civil and civilian responsibilities. I believe a strong and compulsory session must be there in the upper school years when the children are at the most vulnerable from their own sexuality. It is a matter of utmost importance that a teenager be made to understand his sexuality and realize that it is not a taboo. The banner of taboo-ism must at all cost be eliminated from the society so that they wont end up doing shady things in their pursuit of sexual liberty. 


I know I don't have much to offer in curbing the criminality in today's men, but I think a safer world for women can be created by tendering to the children who would soon take over this world from us. We have to make them understand that the other gender is to be respected and acknowledged and not to be looked down upon. This must go either way to ensure that we have a new India when gender equality is predominant and is an underlining principle of its existence.

The Link

The sci - fi me was having a rather good time enjoying the discovery channel when I stumbled upon a curious looking and sounding program called "The Link" and hence my title. The show focuses on how seemingly unrelated discoveries or inventions are related and how one invention let to another and finally to the technological marvels that today we take for granted. The National Geographic talk about the show such:

"Technology is all around us. From computers to cameras, cell phones to sat navs – our dependence on technology has never been greater. But how many of us ever stop to question how these inventions actually came about? Challenging the commonly held view, that they appear fully formed, out of nowhere, The Link reveals the surprising origins of some of the most important technological breakthroughs, of the modern world."

So, why am I talking so much about a random show I happened to watch in National Geographic? The reason is simple. This is what is missing from today's educational system the worldwide. Lets take India's case for example, from the days we start learning we focus on passing exams and mugging up most things. It is a very selected few who go into inquiring about why it came to be. The fact is that education has reduced to more of studying and less of learning. How many of us, the educated mass as we call are able to explain why some certain things came to be and how they influence people, society and humanity at large. Take the case of fire or agriculture or the production line, do we know why it came to be, how it came to be or what it did to the society then? Isn't that what education was supposed to impart to us?

What I am trying to say is that at some time along the way we have lost sight of our goal and has gone astray. We don't need to overhaul our entire system, that's is not possible and even if its possible its not feasible. Our educators are good, our institutions are equipped enough. I don't mean at any point that all our schools are in surplus of facilities but I do believe that our schools have just enough infrastructure to create a thinking and capable tomorrow. What we really need is a change in the systems and its priorities. The priorities should move away from scoring marks and more on understanding concepts.


When one starts to speak about de-prioritizing marks people usually come to conclusions that exams are the villain and they should be taken to the guillotine. In fact that will only cost us dearly, exams should be there otherwise how will we evaluate our children, how will we ensure their progress? What we need are exams that evaluate children's understanding of a subject and their ability to correlate and infer. We need exams that will ensure understanding and model our syllabus and curricular to attain this aim. This does not involve a major over haul of anything but a few fundamentals of our educational system. 

Let our children be Einsteins and newtons, let them make and create and innovate tomorrow, let them know that they alone have the ability and the power in their hands to craft tomorrows dreams. Let them understand that their dreams are not simply dreams but visions for meeting tomorrows challenges head on, solve then and conquer them. When they understand this and cherish this revelation then only we will have completed our responsibility towards our children and completed our link to the next generation.

"Do watch "The Link" on National Geographic if you can its a great show to watch if you are a technological junkie or just a curious homo sapien!"

Wiki-ing, Goggling and more

Look how the world has changed! I still remember around the time I was in 8^th grade and so, every time I ran into something interesting, finding out more about it was an uphill and upbeat task, you had the reference books, then there was occasional newspaper write-ups, the not so frequent shows in the discovery channel or the National geographic and then there may be the library, a teacher who could help me out and many a times a really good dictionary. Those were my close friends’ every time I found myself fascinated by something or the other. But that’s all history now!

Goggling the World

I don’t even bother opening the dictionary these days and the last time I touched it was to dust it! Every time I see something I go to that fabulous website that can be termed nothing short of a window into the world outside. I Google! The refreshingly clean and no fizz home page of mine that gives me an answer to all my awkward questions even the ones to which my mother’s answer would be “stop asking such stupid questions”.

Simply enough Google has literally revolutionized the world and the rise of Google has been nothing short of a revolution in itself. But of all things it revolutionized it revolutionized the education sector most, free and open information was now freely available and any person who had a question in his mind had a place to ask it and hope to get an answer to it. You could follow anything you want you could study all that you can and want; there were no longer any restrictions. And the education was becoming more fun as it is meant to be. The single most important factor that made it possible is the ability to select and study any subject you want without the walls of a curriculum closing on you or any pressure being put on you. For the first time you were free! But what Google did was simple enough, it put everything there was on the internet and put it in a shelf so that we could find it easily, it opened the way to a hoard of services.

Wikipedia : Creating a world with Free Knowledge

Then the next revolution in the world of world education ought to be the Wikipedia, a site so simple yet so powerful that it just changed the way we learn things altogether, the very definition and purpose of an encyclopedia is rewritten with Wikipedia. There is practically nothing under the sun that the Wikipedia doesn’t have an article about. Even the organizational hierarchy is worth the praise, an encyclopedia anyone can be part of the making. Whenever I want to know something, a place, a thing a concept, whatever it may be it’s a one stop place for information.

The internet has just realized its potential and is coming up with innovative ways to enrich the experience of education; the days when education was confined to the walls of the classroom and monochromatic black board are history. The education today is more an holistic approach and when its powers are truly extracted education can be real fun and an experience worth experiencing.

The Crap They Sell Us at Schools

What is India heading to? It must be total anarchy or may be something worse. When confronted with the question of what I would like to change in the society if I could, I went over an awful lot of possibilities. I considered personal stuffs like changing my hairstyle to my stop biting my nails and universal stuffs like a world without boundaries (we ought to talk about that some time sooner). But then it struck me very of handedly that the one thing that must be changed in India is its Victorian ‘tailor made for slaves’ education system by our huge hearted well-wisher Lord Macaulay. But with all the crap that we are being fed in our schools now one has to ask themselves is it still called ‘education’ anymore.

I must be unfair in placing the blame on Lord Macaulay; in fact I am wrong in doing so. His intension was not to create the entrepreneurs scientists and thinkers who would one day propel the nation to unprecedented heights but his was an even harder job. His job was to create an educational system that would create enough donkeys who would work on the largely underpaid and ‘sub-standard‘ jobs that they could just not watch an English man do. And he was fair in churning out our matriculation system that we still proudly uphold today. One cannot call them schools they must be called cattle farms. He was a complete success in what he did, but we were the real idiots who bought their sinister plot with not a thought going into it.  

But, now our educational system which, I was once a part of a few years back was indeed not all that bad. There were some good things in it too like raisins in a cake. But now it’s just like a nightmare gone horribly wrong. Each person adding his whims and fancies into it doesn’t really give us a comprehensive and informed educational system. When todays educationalist go on to the extent of defining a forest vaguely as ‘a group of tree’ , the doubt starts arising in one’s mind whether they really are educated enough to be called educationalist. I think they get some kind of sadistic pleasure by ruining the life and dreams of today’s bright ones.

We need to revolutionize and revitalize our educational system or at the very least make our ‘antique’ system catch up with the today. What the nation now needs are brilliant entrepreneurs, stratergicians and researchers who would become the corner stone of its continued success. When a nation such as ours finds itself in the middle of a fast evolving world it need to put up its best face to be part of that world and to continue being there we need educated and capable people’.

Simply copying any educational system from the west may not be a very good alternative. Though highly successful in generating quality research and enriching potential, the cultural aspect and the mindset of the prevalent society play a significant role in its success too. What we need is not a ditto copy, but of possible inclusion of its best practices to our educational system and make the exaggerant focus on marks must go dim. It’s true we need more quality people but that doesn’t mean more people with maximum marks but we need more people who understand what they do.

If one thing must change about the mindset of the people then it must be this, the parents should stop pursuing the career of their children. They should realize that they can’t live their child’s life too. They should give their children a chance to live out their dream. Children may not be best judges of things but they know their hearts and their odds, if they believe they can succeed, shouldn’t they be given a chance to try. If this one factor about our society does change, there will be a reciprocating change in our educational system and a transformation in it for the best. The only thing that drives entrepreneurship and research is passion and its severe shortage is what the nation is suffering from, and why is that? The simple answer is the overwhelming focus on a ‘safe career’ forced upon today’s children.

Indeed our educational setup is plagued by a hoard of problems; the only reason for it can be the lack of timely changes that never happened. Now we are faced with a problem, whether to radically alter our system or slowly change it such that it can play catch up at the cost of valuable time. I incline towards a radical transformation, I believe a couple of unrest in the department will be all the resultant problems from such an action but it will produce the desired results in time. But I need not be the final say in that matter. It is a complicated and sensitive issue and requires an equally though-about and subtle solution. But one thing is sure, we have already reached the precipice now all we have is total oblivion or a resurrection and the choice is ours to act about.