THE GREATEST
CHALLENGE
Alok Pandey
The twentieth
century has been a period of phenomenal advancement. It was a period when many
age old notions and long held beliefs and traditions were challenged and either
broken or else recast in a new form closer to the eye of truth. It was a period
when man explored distant Space and measured minutest Time. He raced with both
and even bent them to his use. It was an era when man played at once with the
atoms and the stars. And all his education was accordingly moulded
along this line that is a study of outer objects, of life itself as an object
cut into neat bits and pieces and reassembled in the classroom with the help of
reason. Truth was no more a mystery but stood naked and raw before the
searching gaze of Science that tied its body and limbs into new formulas while
remaining careless of its soul. Nothing was left unguessed,
nothing left untouched, nothing left to imagination.
Subjectivity was abolished to a minimum and along with it the subject too. Man
was a machine amidst other machines, the engine of his life driven mechanically
by organs that were nothing more than mud and water. With all his achievements
man was a soulless machine nothing more than an oversized worm wriggling in
spacious halls and in the skies rather than in the mud and water of earth. It
was as if the world’s disorder was hardening into law. But then somewhere
around the middle of the previous century or
perhaps a little past it a new force began to stir in
man. It was the well known revolt of the sixties with the coming of the flower
children and the hippie revolution whose vibrations still continue to echo in
the footsteps of our children today. It was the revolt of the human heart, its
cry for a soul lost in the crowd of politics and industry and science. It was a
cry from the bosom of man that has revolted against the idea of state machinery
and government machinery and scientific machinery and all machinery that had
only led to an increasing mechanization of life under the nice and neat name of
organisation and order. Yet this was a closed
organization with no room for freedom and error, the two trap doors through
which truth often enters disguised into our life. The revolt was therefore as
if God ordained, it was the saving grace of life which sought to free itself
from too tight a machinery that Science and Politics
had created entrapped the human soul in it. What is worse, his Science had
enthroned man’s ego as the lord of nature and survival of his solitary
self. And this we taught and continued
to teach in our schools. The first results are already coming! We have
manufactured children as products who have either become perfect machines
disconnected with their souls, whose sole motive is to succeed and stand first
in the rat race of life. Or else they have revolted against all this and gone
over board to the other side, to another extreme of freedom, to drugs and to
licentiousness, to a life given only to recklessness and fun. It is sometimes
difficult to say which one is better. They are rather two sides of the same
coin.
Today as we enter
into the present century, we stand at the cross roads where our children do not
know whether to choose between a life given only to a blind rat race where you
bear the labels of marks percentage and degree and post as badges and seals
along with your name much as market products bear the various specifications
and quantity of each ingredient in them. Or else to choose to
be a vagabond and out of the mainstream of collective existence. It is
truly hard on them when we as teachers and parents and guides ourselves a
product of the past labouring under the night of the
previous century are ourselves not clear about who we are and why are we here
upon earth, with what goal or purpose, if any? Whither goes the journeying
wheel of life? To what unknown port of hope sails our life’s ship? And who is
its compass and pilot and guide? This is the real challenge before us in this
present century. The challenge is to know man himself, to discover the true and
real man, to find the lotus soul blooming within this mass of mud and water.
After we have explored our outer spaces what is left and is of much more
fundamental importance is to explore our inner spaces. After we have measured
time what is left is to discover That which is
Timeless and cannot be measured. After we have learned all the laws and
organized truth into bits of formulas it is perhaps time to discover that which
is free, beyond laws, beyond organization. We have learnt about the small but
not yet of the vast. We have learnt about our surfaces but not yet of our
depths. We have learnt about our bodies but remain ignorant of our souls. After
we have known all about all the objects building this universe the greatest
challenge before us today is to know about man himself!
What happens to us
as a race depends upon the answer we give to this most fundamental question
“Who am I?” If the answer is that we are just a body, a conglomeration of cells
dependent upon chemistry as the source of life and biology for thought and
action, then it is idle to teach value education and any such higher things.
For then we give to the child a contradictory message. On the one side we tell
him that you are an animal, even if a social animal whose sole aim is survival,
an ephemeral creature of mud and water who is ever
chased and ultimately caught by death in its unseen claws. On the other side we
expect this ephemeral creature of mud and water to beat celestial wings in some
ethereal space and dream of nobility and virtue and truth and good. On the one
side we stress so much on the ego-individuality, on the temporary identities
formed of the circumstances of birth and family and custom. On the other hand
we expect a child to grow up into a selfless being who thinks of the whole
world as one large family. Such inherent contradictions plague a child’s mind
and generate conflict between what he has been taught and has learnt from
significant others and what he dreams and instinctively feels. For it is a fact
that children if unpolluted by the conditioning imposed by the elders have
generally a natural trust in life and are instinct with a sense of the larger
picture. That is why they can dream the impossible and fantasize and imagine
the unthinkable. They have a sense of careless freedom which we find often too
disconcerting to our stress-laden life. We almost find it strange that they can
be so carefree and laugh in the face of destiny. Perhaps behind this carefree
outlook is a trust in life and destiny, a trust we have hence lost chasing the
shadow of life through the pursuit of desire. The paradox is that we feel happy
when the child has also got into the rut and begun to chase the shadow rather
than the light. And we are happy when we see him/her sitting before bagful of books and
doing his/her homework diligently as if
that is the
This is not to say
that studies are not important or that children don’t do worse things when they
have time, such as being caged by the TV and the PC. They do and these are genuine problems that
each parent and teacher has to face as an additional challenge today. But that
apart the point is the excess importance given to school performance and career
that would fetch a handsome salary or help the child settle in some wealthy
country is the real spoiler. Even when parents complain about the child being
glued to the television it is not so much because they are concerned about the
child’s inner good as much as the concern is about the dropping performance due
to the TV mania. It means that if a child does well in exams then he can do
whatever he/she feels
like. The rest is of importance only in relation to his/her performance. And
somewhere in all this the child begins to loose contact with his/her soul and he/she no more has trust in life and begins to doubt
himself/herself and his/her destiny. Then he/she resorts to one of the two things.
Either he/she studies very hard to get
good marks so as to secure a good future or else unable to cope up he/she opts out of the struggle of life and takes to
the life of a vagabond of a recluse, as if he/she were simply life’s leftover, an unwanted
byproduct of the factory called school.
If only we could
inspire a child to discover his/her own true self-worth, his/her own true image which is independent of all
the rest. If only we could inspire him/her to believe in himself/herself and his/her destiny, to help him/her develop trust in life and trust in God and
trust in himself /herself and his/her
uniqueness. If only we could help him/her understand that we are each given something
unique, a role in the grand drama of life that we alone can fulfill, a place
that we alone can occupy and it is our task to find that place and to fulfill
that role. If we do what we are meant to do, then we fulfill life’s demand in
us, however small that place may be in the eyes of men/women. But if we fail to
find that place meant for us, then we loose life’s mission and our purpose even
if we are in the most fortunate of circumstances. Better to be a competent
shoe-maker than to be an incompetent king! That is the true meaning of
discovering one’s own self-worth which has to be guided by the child’s swadharma, Nature’s unique mode of working, the
existential angst. One indication of this swadharma
is to find that which is a natural source of satisfaction ,
life-line of joy and accomplishmentin a child.
Another indication is
special abilities and capacities that Nature has gifted to each one for the work
that is intended. The child has to be led to discover that and it is here is the need for some help and guidance and not in doing projects and home-works. Through this, the
child would discover its
true individuality, soul’s
need, the cry of life, the very purpose of
birth. And once that is discovered then the rest is easy. Otherwise he
or she has to be contented to lead a borrowed life, someone else’s life and
that is never a happy situation even if it be outwardly a comfortable one. But
how can we help the child discover that unless we stop laying this excess,
almost exclusive stress upon material success. This is the canker in the fruit
of our education that has crept into our efforts at child-building and nation
building and whatever else that we seek to build through our children. A better
world!! But how can we build a better world with children who have been taught
over and over again to strive for material success alone as if that was the one
and only thing desired in them. Because if that be so then it is only natural they
would become increasingly selfish and money-centered and power hungry and then
nature in them will take a deviant and distorted course in life rather than a
straight and natural one. What we need therefore is a re-orientation of the
central value. What we need therefore is not a change of policies and systems
but first and foremost a change of the very aim of education. What we need
therefore is not job quotas and job centered education but rather a child
oriented and soul centered education. If we can change the very purpose of
education from man manufacturing to man making, from career building to soul
building, from finding a job to discovering himself/herself, then all the rest
will flow and follow from this. But if we cannot do so and our education continues
to cater simply to job and careers as the primary aim then it does not matter
what systems or syllabi we use, we will end up manufacturing the same average
product, that of a wealthy and powerful man but one without a soul. This will
be the challenge before the coming century, the path that we take on this high
curve of destiny where either with one giant leap we can reach the rare summits
to which we secretly aspire for or with one wrong step we loose all and drown
into an abyss. For it is education alone that can prepare us for the right
decision when the call of destiny comes knocking at our doorsteps. We shall
make the right answers if we have grown conscious of our soul and seek to
fulfill its urge in us. But if we continue to remain careless of its voice and
answer to its intimations with a deaf ear, then we have to only remember a
message to us at the turn of the
previous century: ‘Men, Countries, Continents,The
choice is imperative-Truth or the Abyss.’