Sikandarpur... And Your Children... And You

New Delhi: May 16, 2008
If you ever go down the Mehrauli-Guragon road, stop awhile at Sikandarpur, the first ancient ‘town’ just across the border, where Haryana begins.

Just as the Mehrauli-Guragon road – and all ‘development’ – has bypassed the ancient town of Mehrauli, so too with Sikandarpur.

Actually, the rest of Gurgaon, with all its high-rises, came up recently.

Sikandarpur was always there, even when Garden Estate was built way back when – just short of it.

Today, the road has by-passed Sikandarpur. You cannot enter the town market. The shopkeepers have put up signs saying the market is open, but no one can go there, and no one will.

That is because, yesterday, Sikandarpur was off the ‘development’ radar of the government.

Here, you can see the ‘rural-urban divide’ as a government creation, designed to keep people poor.

If the heads of our central planners were not full of ‘rural development’ as a panchayati-raj village vision of farmers and labourers, things might have been different.

To me, it seems perfectly apparent that when villages develop, they become towns – and they should be encouraged to do so.

Sikandarpur would have ‘developed’ if it had been noticed way back then that it was faced with a huge urban opportunity.

Whichever Indian city you visit, take a drive out on any ‘notional highway’ and you will come across countless towns like Sikandarpur.

Thus, their ‘theories’ are all wrong.

And they want to teach.

And all the tiachus of this land have agreed that they should teach, and have even coughed up an education tax for the purpose.

These tiachu citizens belive that just as their education made them into tiachus, the same fate should befall their children.

In the meantime, all this business of Arjun Singh, the minister for education, loudly proclaiming his ‘loyalty’ to The Family should be a pointer to the ugly truth that all this education is merely propaganda.

Indeed, IITs and IIMs are institutes for ‘training’ – not education. They have been there since the 60s – and India remained low-tech. There were only PSUs to ‘manage’: IIM Bangalore specialized in training managers for PSUs way back in the 70s.

Read my previous post on “The Intellectual Bodyguards of the House of Nehru-Gandhi”.

Wake up!

Reject this education!

And pull your kids out of school before they become tiachus like you.

The kids are our only hope – the future, which must be Liberty! And if so, they must study the liberal humanities – at home. That is real ‘education’ – which produces educated people who make leading citizens in all walks of life, whatever 'training' they get.