For Students... On Saraswati Puja

The best read of this morning for me was Ashok Malik in the ToI, an article titled “A Place Time Forgot,” on Calcutta and West Bengal in the times of Jyoti Basu. This is a highly critical look at the legacy of this man – and I enjoyed it to the hilt. Do read the article – and circulate. This paragraph holds the key:

West Bengal is not a location of contemporary relevance; it is the place time forgot. Kolkata is a museum piece; somebody cruel once called it "the world's largest old people's home". You go there if you're a heritage tourist, a nostalgia junkie or have a particularly beloved patriarch to visit one final time. As Basu's health deteriorated, this harsh verity made itself apparent. In his twilight hours, he began to resemble his terrifying legacy.

Malik also speaks of Basu’s meddling with “education”:

In the 1970s and 1980s, the world gradually began to turn. The Asian tigers began to embrace technology and trade and move out of misery. They gave a slumbering continent a new economic model. This was precisely the time Basu chose to finally bury the Bengal renaissance. Business was hounded out, computers were resisted. English was abolished in government primary schools, depriving young Bengalis of a massive comparative advantage.

Thus, we learn an important lesson – The State should have nothing to do with education. Basu, an English educated elite, whose favourite book was George Mikes’ How to be an Alien, deliberately denied the English language to the Bengali people. Politicians do not want the people educated. They want them miseducated.

This bitter truth is reinforced by the scandal over Nobel laureate RK Pachauri's lies over Himalayan glaciers and their apparent "melting" - the subject of today's editorial in the ToI, which also refers to the WHO's lies over the dangers of "swine flu." The lesson is therefore reinforced: the sovereign people must never trust the pronouncements of their governments, far less look upon The State as the "universal teacher."

Thus, the Central State’s education ministry threatening to close down over 40 private universities should be seen as something macabre, as anti-people, as anti-student. In my book it is this ministry that should be closed down. And all government universities should be privatized.

I have consistently been advising all my best students to drop out of the government education system, and many have done so – and benefited. If you seek knowledge, you will not find it in a government sponsored institution, anywhere in the world.

Think about that, dear student.

And today is Saraswati Puja, when we Hindoos, particularly Bengalis, worship the goddess of learning (and music). Either we worship her or Kapil Sibal who, like Basu, studied Law in England (or was it the Punjab?). I have made my choice. You make yours.