Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, written in the mid 80’s has a section which very evocatively brings out the quiet desperation of a newly emerging middle class to not slip back into destitution. I read it over 20 years back and it still resonates. It talks of the writer as a young school boy who is visiting his not-so-well off relatives in a poorer part of Calcutta and from their balcony he looks out at the shanties and ramshackle landscape around him:
It’s true of course that I could not see that landscape or anything like it from my own window, but its presence was palpable everywhere in our house; I had grown up with it. It was that landscape that lent the note of hysteria to my mother’s voice when she drilled me for my examinations; it was to those slopes she pointed out when she told me that if I didn’t study hard I would end up over there, that the only weapon people like us had was our brains and if we didn’t use them like claws to cling to what we’d got, that was where we’d end up, marooned in that landscape: I knew perfectly well that all it would take was a couple of failed examinations to put me where our relative was, in permanent proximity to that blackness: that landscape was the quicksand that seethed beneath the polished floors of our house; it was that sludge which gave our genteel decorum its fine edge of frenzy.
And this context is what probably led a generation of the more fortunate urban, middle class kids to slog their backsides off in schools and colleges all over the country. And that in turn helped them do well enough to buy their homes on mortgage, marry, have children and make those poor kids go through a similar rigmarole so that they in turn don’t fall into that ‘sludge’. While the thoughtless scramble to conform and make the kids mug their way through school is not very edifying, it’s important to understand the background against which this happens. And while we all decry this method of education by rote – which has been given a strong collective voice by 3 Idiots – we must also remember that it’s the same education system that has at least given us the perspective to understand this issue and hopefully address it. I dare say, it has also helped us to become better engineers, managers and contributed in no small measure to a new, more enviable Hindu rate of growth.
