Nightmares and Meandering Thoughts
First of all, apologies for
the long absence. Also, I know I promised a surprise, and I was supposed to
host a writer-friend who was going to talk about his new novel, but I went on
vacation, and then he went on vacation and somehow it didn’t sort of work out.
To make up for it, here are not one but two whole disjointed rambles. Do let me
know what you think in the comments and share if you like them.
1
Last night I dreamt I was in
school, going to class to learn calculus and having a generally miserable time
of it. I keep having some variation of this dream at long intervals, usually at
times when I am stressed or worried or sad- dreams where I go to class and the
teacher has covered so many chapters of the math book that I have never studied
and have no clue how to answer in the exam and then it takes me a while on
waking up to remember that I didn’t in fact need to sit for that exam again.
And so it was last night, except in the dream I made a very definite decision
of quitting something that obviously was against my temperament and interests
and then I spent some time wondering how people would react to a school
drop-out. But then I remembered- within
the dream that I had in fact already done school and that I taught at a
college now and was in fact a little more accomplished than my subconscious
fears would have me believe.
 |
| Life takes you where you need to go. |
This isn’t a post about my
anxiety. The point of this anecdote is that the plus 2 years were a
particularly stressful time for me. I had a great time with friends, I wrote
not one but two abandoned novels, helped organize Start-of-Hogwarts-term and
Halloween feasts with Little Heart Biscuits and Fish Chops and Lays, was
introduced to Tolkien, disowned my friends as they kept a whole train compartment
awake with their dumb charades and music and realized absolutely, irrevocably
that I wanted to study English Literature in college. But the other half of it
involves stress, frustration, a tremendous amount of pressure and school work
that had become an almost joyless compulsion. For someone used to being a good
student, it was hard to become suddenly average, or below. I made up for it by
being fanatically hardworking when I finally went to college- first bench every
class, library every morning, reference books loaned every week, or sometimes
twice a week. But the point was, when I went to college, at least the first few
months, I missed school so much it was like a constant terrible ache. And
although I keep dreaming about the part of those years that I dreaded and
hated, I have no regrets of having gone through that road, because it helped me
form ties that has shaped who I am. Which brings me to my first half-baked
inference- Sometimes, we are in the wrong places for the right reasons, or
maybe we think we’re somewhere for a particular reason- to further a career
goal, for instance, when you’re really there to pick up the pieces that will
shape you along the way- relationships, people introducing books or music,
ideas, and influences. And those are the things we carry forward. And maybe, on
the whole, the processes of Life work out fine, taking you where you need to
go, at the right time.
Yeah, but I’m not sure I can
go back to doing it all over again, though. The nightmares are bad enough.
2
“I can’t go back
to yesterday because I was a different person then.” (Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland)
 |
| Some goodbyes are inevitable. |
Not all goodbyes come with drums and colours
or heartbreaks. Sometimes, goodbyes can
happen without anyone noticing, and people carry on without noticing out of old
habits till one day, they realize that they don’t speak the same language any
more, and it doesn’t matter that they don’t.
And maybe they stay on,
speaking different languages, feeding different stories, but staying nevertheless-
out of nostalgia, or fear of the unknown or the ease of habit, or out of
loyalty to the myth of permanence in a world where every moment is fleeting and
temporary- including the sun which sets every evening to remind us that one day
it will be a cold, dead ball of gas, having spent all its warmth in all our
loves and hates and strivings for life. But we will all be long gone before
that, playing out our little dreams in other worlds, not even remembering that
we had once bade goodbye to life somewhere.
I wonder if it has happened
before. I wonder if that’s the reason farewells feel so familiar. Perhaps we’re
all a collective diaspora looking for a promised realm, tearing ourselves up to
claim a piece of home somewhere. Perhaps that is the reason why we are so
frightened of goodbyes. But maybe it doesn’t have to be that way. And that
leads to half-baked inference number two- Saying goodbye doesn’t mean you lost
out somewhere, or you failed at holding on, adding up to your tally of lost
two. You were where you were when you were meant to be, to help you grow, and
now you’ve grown into a different path, and that’s quite alright. Excelsior.
 |
| I guess I should mention? Line credit to Coldplay. |
I would make a really bad
job at starting a cult, wouldn’t I?
And now, Bonus Ramble 3,
which admittedly is a brushed up piece I wrote for a blogging contest I didn’t
win, but some lovely people told me that they really enjoyed reading it, so if
you’ve not already been harangued by me into reading the thing, you can read it
here below.
3
Towards a Better
World, a Better Self
Long ago, a rather inept wizard who failed all his
exams at magic university and had a rather pointed aversion to being even
remotely heroic made a rather profound statement about creating social change:
“If you want to help people, build a big library or something somewhere and
leave the door open.”[i]
It is quite an obvious argument that building schools promotes education,
leading to increased employment opportunities, and employment leads to lesser
crimes. And that is true enough, and important too. If you have a legitimate
way to earn money, then you don’t need to steal or rob or kill to feed yourself
or your family. Schools enable us to physically sustain ourselves. But the
importance of schools run deeper than the degrees one can list in one’s
curriculum vitae.
For most of us, the school is a first look at the
world outside our homes, our first lesson in interacting with people we are not
related to by blood. Schools are thus a practice in socialization, and also in
discipline. It makes you part of a group, of a bigger world than your home and
thus doing, it opens up the whole wide world for you, while teaching you how to
act or behave in it. At school, a child learns to love outside the family, to
share outside the family, and to be loved back in return. It is also the place
where we discover our hobbies, our interests, our talents, and thus the place
where we come into our own, beginning the process of finding ourselves. For
those with unhappy or abusive family histories, school thus becomes an escape
route, but even for those who come from normal, functional families, it offers
a chance to expand and grow into one’s own identity, and to form and maintain
independent relationships. Of course, a child doesn’t learn these lessons on
their own. It is the job of the teacher to not simply teach letters and numbers
and chemical formulae, but also to ensure that children under their charge
treat each other fairly, and when they don’t, that they learn to own the consequences
of their actions. For a school is not simply a building, but a doorway, and it
is our teachers who hold the key to that door. Their job is not simply to
unlock it, but to walk the child through its threshold, and to teach him or her
how to unlock other doors on their path. At school, a child gets to meet other
people and hear other stories; he/she experiences a cross-section of the world
they’ll encounter as adults and finds the tools wherewithal to navigate that
world with understanding and empathy. And these are the keywords in creating a
less violent world, for if we can build a world where we can empathize with
others, then we are less likely to want to harm them. Less crimes equals lesser
need for prisons.
 |
| Let everyone share the fruit of freedom |
In his lecture for the Reading Agency
delivered at the Barbican, London on October 14, 2013, Neil Gaiman spoke about
a talk in New York he attended regarding the building of a private prison. In
that talk, he recalled learning that the prison industry could chart its future
growth by a very simple algorithm. The need for more prison cells was directly
proportional to the percentage of ten to eleven year old children who could not
read.[ii]
Increased literacy leads to a decrease in crime, and schools are our first line
of defence against the curse of illiteracy. But literacy, as Gaiman went on to
suggest in that same lecture was only a stepping stone towards true education
which involves reading for pleasure. Schools teach us to read, thus enabling us
to read on our own, to read beyond our text books, and thus inhabit worlds
embedded in print inside our heads, for letters are like secret codes that once
deciphered are the passwords to distant worlds. And by participating in these
worlds, not only does the child learn empathy and understanding, but also
imagination and a craving for something beyond the regular, everyday mundane
world that is available to us. This imaginative craving is the basis of what
makes us human, of why our ancestors made frescoes on the walls of prehistoric
caves or gazed at stars or crossed dangerous seas or wondered why the apple
fell to the ground. It provides the impulse to make a difference in the world
that is given to us, to move forward in a positive, harmonious manner towards a
better world and a better self. This craving to be something more than we are,
to discover something more than we know is innate to the human spirit, but
education is what fires it into action. And while it is possible to receive
education outside the confines of the traditional schooling system, in most
cases, by depriving a child of schooling, we deprive him/her a chance at
education, and by default, a chance at discovering his true self. Schools teach
us to think for ourselves- critically, analytically as well as imaginatively,
and it gives us the tools and language to create those thoughts. Thinking
determines how we shape our world and our future as a species. Education and self-discovery are both
life-long processes, but we can safely suggest that schools jumpstart the
journey. To quote Gaiman’s statement on libraries that we can perhaps equally
apply to schools- schools are the pathways to freedom- “Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of
communication.”[iii] In an ideal education system, school
teaches a child to ask questions and to find answers and thus begins the
journey towards wholeness- and wholeness precludes greed or anger or hate.
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Thank you for listening.
Photographs & Content © Ruchira Mandal
Pratchett, Terry. Interesting
Times. 1994. Corgi Books: London, 1995.Print. A Discworld Novel.
[iii] ibid
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