How to Survive Result Season

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

In a few days, as we finally say goodbye to angsty April and waddle into marshy May, we will be reminded why May is one of the most important months in the children’s calendar. While for most of them it is the beginning of the summer vacation - a lovely time which they make forced memories of happy times with their families by heading out to overcrowded vacation spots full of other families wanting to make forced memories - for some it is the month of nervousness and anticipation.

That’s because in May the board exam results are announced. For some students it’s a culmination of years of hard work. A moment in time, which if goes their way, would vindicate all the sacrifices they’ve had to make since they were nothing but a mere twinkle in their parent’s eyes. For others, it’s an indication that getting a decent result by pulling an all-nighter is a metaphor for the rest of your life. A life which you will spend ignoring that pesky voice in your head which fruitlessly keeps asking you to stop procrastinating. Now, since we once skimmed through a book in which a minor character was a child psychologist, we feel that we are qualified enough to offer our counsel to all our young friends out there to help them cope with the aftermath of such a game-changing life event. (We call them ‘friends’ because that makes it easier to speak to them in a condescending tone. You see, that’s how we old people talk. We also answer every question about our age by saying I am __ years young in a faux-inspirational voice.  We even use the plural ‘we’ to refer to ourselves. Why do we do that, you ask? Simple! Because we’re a terrible person! As you kids say, Like duh.) Also, since we don’t know how to communicate with teenagers because the present lot of them seem to suffer from some sort of a mystery ailment that makes them talk and write without using any vowels, we’re hoping that one of our kind readers would translate this article into teenager-friendly things like a “facebook status update” or a “sext.”

Now, kids, the most important thing to remember is that your board exams do not define you. They do not decide the trajectory of your life. One of the objective of a well rounded education is to make you try a lot of things to find out what you really want to do in life. “LOL j/k.” Kidding! Your board exams results are the most important thing that will happen in your life. They are the only thing that will determine how successful you will be in the future. They are so important, that years from now when you’re old and haggard, and your half human/half-Pandorian grandchild asks you why you and the rest of your family are not allowed to enter the ‘gangnam galaxy,’ you will have to tell him that it happened because you weren’t successful enough and that this downward spiral started when you only scored a measly 95% in your board exams. His innocence shattered, he will look at you with disgust as you hang your head in shame and drown yourself in a puddle of sadness and humiliation.

The best course of action is to just follow the path your parents want you to walk on. This way, you don’t have to take any personal responsibility for your own actions and can spend the rest of your life being resentful towards them. Also, by pretending to be the sort of person who “obeys” his parents, you’re automatically set for the road to sainthood. In this country, the sort of children who cannot think for themselves and blindly do everything their elders tell them to are every parent’s dream accessory. Other parents will cite you as an example for their children to emulate. People will assume that you’re an honest and trustworthy person, for some reason. And once your parents decide that you’re old enough to make a lifelong commitment to a random stranger of their choice, your stock in the ‘arranged marriage’ market will be higher than Microsoft in the 1990’s. 

If you get good grades then you’re in for a lifetime of success! All you have to do is continue the same routine you had before. Just spend all your time working. You can sleep when you’re dead! And keep fooling yourself into believing that this is only temporary and that you will finally be able to really start living once you reach your goal because you will keep shifting the goalposts. And then, in a blink of an eye, ten years will have passed and one lonely Saturday night when you’ve finished work early and have had too much to drink, you’ll let your mind travel to that dark place where you finally ask yourself whether it was worth it. But nothing will come out of it because even though you know the answer to that question, you’re too much of a coward to actually do something about it and on Monday morning everything will go back to normal.

Hope that helps!

Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

India’s largest collective of ‘never nudes’ and principal opposition party, the BJP, has been on an important mission this week. After years of infighting, backstabbing, double crossing, embarrassing displays of public disagreements, they finally found a unifying issue. From the party President to the party worker; from MP to MLA. Even the different ‘camps’ within the party decided to temporarily suspend all hostilities to participate in the fight against the huge plague that has usurped large parts of the country and threatens to shake its very foundation, leaving in its wake nothing but awfulness and depravity. At last, someone in this country dares to take on the evil scrooge of pre-marital sex. Wipe your tears, unchain your kids and come out of your bunkers, everyone. Help is on its way.

While discussing the anti-sexual assault law, the BJP and other opposition parties insisted that the age of consent for sexual intercourse be raised from 16 to 18. Because if there is one thing teenagers are good at, it’s following rules imposed on them by unlikeable authority figures.

Apparently, our lawmakers confused ‘passing legislation against sexual violence’ with ‘passing legislation against sex.’ And the whole conversation turned towards the morality of pre-marital sex and how people who are doing it without first telling their parents and a thousand of their closest friends & relatives are the worst people in the world. The campaign against sex would have been more effective if - instead of having him appear on teevee all day embarrassing himself and his party - they’d distributed free packets of condoms with Venkaiah Naidu’s face printed on the cover.

We need to have a conversation about sex in this country because it seems like even the adults don’t seem to know much about it. The BJP thinks children are born nine months after a married couple visits a temple and a yellow rose falls onto their lap. The BSP believes that erections are only for statues. And the SP imagines that the best way to bring new life into this world is to have one of their ministers ‘confiscate’ it from anyone who dares to cross them. The central government didn’t have anything to contribute to this discussion except a couple of bored head nods. Who cares if the law contains provisions which exacerbate the problem? They want to be seen doing ‘something’ because it provides them with enough cover from public criticism. Principles are for people without ‘coalition compulsions.’

We need to have a conversation about sex in this country because trying to stop teenagers from having sex is like trying to stop Ram Gopal Varma from making terrible movies. No matter how much you ask them to cease and desist, their resolve is only going get stronger. So, instead of turning a simple bodily function into a forbidden fruit that they should feel guilty about partaking in, we should be providing them with the proper information so that they can practice it safely. Instead of making them feel like a criminal for wanting it, let them realize that sex is just another activity-like playing scrabble or throwing darts-that two (or more!) people can enjoy doing together. And if they actually do face a problem, they might even turn to you for help because they would remember you not being a judgemental asshole before.

We need to have a conversation about sex in this country because for a majority of our populace, the concept of people having a right over their own bodies is something that is quite hard to grasp. It’s a slippery slope. One day you’re letting people decide which orifices of their bodies they can put things in and the next day you’re living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, searching for a source of water which hasn’t yet been poisoned by radiation.

People waste too much time being tense about what ‘nefarious activities’ they imagine other people are participating in. 

If only there was some way to release all that tension.

Hatch Your Own Chickens: How to be a Management Guru

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

A lot of the problems in our country are rooted in the fact that there is a distinct lack of people who consider it their duty to give other people any advice. Specifically, there is a dearth of self-proclaimed experts spouting vague principles of management. Since exam season is upon us and soon many students will be embarking upon a career their parents chose for them the day they were born, we thought we’d do some ‘career counselling’ and educate our young readers on some lucrative opportunities.  

Now, before we begin, ask yourself the following questions: Do you enjoy talking about nothing in particular for long periods of time? Do you pretend to hear what someone else is saying but don’t listen? Do you generally conflate ‘being an asshole’ with ‘being an excellent leader’? Do you think you’re always right about everything?  Do you think that someone should pay you just for existing as a life form? 

If your answer to all of the above questions is a resounding “YES!”, then congratulations, you’re ready to be a management guru!

You must be wondering why the use of the word ‘guru.’ Well, that’s because both religion and management have the same goal: Fooling the maximum amount of people into believing in the existence of a benevolent higher power by making them follow an arbitrary set of rules so as to use their subservience for your own benefit.

The first thing you need to do before you even begin to look for clients, is to fix your appearance. You must appear to be successful, even if you haven’t achieved any success yet. ‘Corporate honchos’ will only take you seriously if they feel like you don’t need the job. The first rule of management is that anybody who actually needs a job is probably not good at it. You must also appear to have no time to take on new projects. For example, hire an assistant who will keep calling you to connect you to a ‘client’ in Tokyo. It’s important to have fake clients in Tokyo because people imagine that if someone in Japan would hire you, then you must be really good. And it should only be Tokyo because people will be suspicious if your fake client exists in a city they haven’t heard of.

The second step is to get a shtick. You don’t want to just talk about the principles of management. That’s boring and quite commonplace.  You’re a guru. You need something more memorable. The best way to do that is to connect management principles to something from the past. It can be a holy book, a political treatise, a novel or even a person. It doesn’t matter! Though you must ensure that whatever you’re going to “re-interpret” should be old enough so that neither is its original author around to counter any of your claims nor do many people living in the present know anything about it. It should require more than a cursory google search to counter whatever you’re saying. Most people will accept your version of the truth anyway because they would consider you to be an expert in such subjects. People will treat you like a genius if you tell them the real reason behind a historical event. Do you remember when Gandhi led the salt march because the regulatory policies of the British were stifling the margins of the Indian salt industry, turning their EBITDA negative and sinking the value of their stock? Hey, if it sounds real, it’s probably true, right?

It’s also quite advantageous to usurp something from the past and use it as your ‘theme’ because people love to - in any way possible - be part of what they imagine must have been a glorious time to exist in. And, anything really, can be re-interpreted in any way you want. What the Mahabharatha teaches us about management: (1) Always keep your eye on the battle (2) Half-truths don’t hurt anyone as long as they help you achieve the organizational goals and (3) Different departments can share a single resource. Having a theme for your work will also help you transition to becoming someone who is ‘internationally renowned.’ It should be weird enough for you to get an invitation to speak at a TED conference and marketable enough for your eventual book deal.

Another important step is to make sure the management techniques you plan to evangelize subvert previously established jargon. With great responsibility, comes great power. Don’t just think outside the box, invert it! However, each management guru must be careful not to repudiate any theories that other management gurus have proposed. We’re all in this together. Even if you hate someone, find at least one good thing to say about them. For example, every few months, some foreign newspaper or magazine does an article on how Mein Kampf is a permanent fixture on India’s best-seller lists. If they call you for a response, don’t say that this is outrageous and is the equivalent of Winston Churchill's Honey I Shrunk the Population of Bengal being a bestseller in Germany. Instead, mention that the book is a great manual of management techniques and except for the horrible genocide, Adolf Hitler doesn’t sound that bad.

Remember, it’s a Rich Dad eat Poor Dad world.

We just live in it.

Hundred Percent or Bust!

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Usually in July, the monsoons help colleges all over the country piss on the hopes and dreams of recent high school graduates. This year, since the monsoons are delayed thanks to a letter written by Subramanian Swamy asking the Himalayan Mountains to block any clouds of foreign origin, the colleges had to perform this task alone. And, as always, the colleges performed the task with enough cruelty to pass this test with flying colours, unlike the students whose applications they rejected.

Every year as we hear about cut-off percentages hovering between the 99 to 100 percentile zones, we try to have a trite national debate over the state of education in the country. Even though we’ve all contributed to the boiling down of the essence of a thirteen year education into a double digit percentage, we somehow seem to be surprised to see our handiwork in action. Look what people who’re not us have done! How did this happen? All we did was pressurize our children to compete with others like an element in a Darwinian equation fighting for survival. What do you mean asking them to get a hundred percent or die trying is not good parenting?  

We teach children that their life’s mission should be to lead a zombie-like existence wherein the only thing they should dedicate their energy to is to getting a perfect score in their exams. Don’t try to be creative! Don’t ask too many questions. Don’t look for things outside the syllabus. Don’t read chapters your teachers aren’t comfortable teaching you. You don’t have to understand it; you just have to learn it!

We make our children define their self-worth by their marks. People who get near perfect or perfect scores are treated like royalty by parents and teachers. If you get good marks life will be so good that even the air you breathe will not have been sullied by the inferior nostrils of someone who has never even been in any honour roll! No need to talk to your friends, they only want to distract you from your goal!

People are obsessed with getting perfect or near-perfect scores because these are important for students to get into a ‘prestigious college.’ Even though the most important lessons in college are learnt outside the classroom, which college you go to does have an impact on your future. For example, it helps determine the level of douchiness you will exhibit for the rest of your life.

While our prestigious institutions are busy churning out alumni who spend the rest of their lives producing large number of badly written campus novels, there is a whole industry built around trying to exploit the people who want to get into them. From the neighbourhood tuition centres who charge an exorbitant amount of money to ‘guarantee’ admission into one of these institutions; to touts who promise to get you in if you reward them with a cut of the ‘donation’ you plan to give to your favourite educational institution.

We need good colleges for everyone. Even for those whose don’t get ‘good’ marks in high school. We cannot leave their education to pontytail-ed conmen – whose only purpose of existence is to raise their own profile while they fleece large swaths of students who join their diploma shop – to fill the gap.  Or to fake foreign universities with prestigious sounding names which only exist on websites filled with stock photos. (I’m looking at you, Belford 'University.)

There should be more actual options for people who want to pursue things that interest them (like literature or alcohol). Like me in college, they might just scrape by the passing mark by pulling an all-nighter, but, hey, all’s well that ends well! 

Come to think of it, maybe I should open my own college and let people study whatever they want.

Will you sign up if I offer free laptops and a diploma from a fancy college in England?

Shobha Narayan wants you to give bigotry a chance

Devil incarnate and minister in the UPA government Kapil SIbal owes Mint columnist and the-good-life connoisseur Shobha Narayan an apology. He has made her lose a lot of sleep over the worst law in the history of the world, the Right to Education bill.

Before you begin your judging and call her names and everything, you need to realize that Ms. Narayan is a big supporter of education.

Educators may pore over curriculum; combat staff attrition; mull over real estate and infrastructure; but they dream of catalysing change, inspiring young minds and changing the future. For people deep in the trenches of teaching and learning, this fundamental right of every child to a decent education ought to seem self-evident. Knowledge—to paraphrase Rabindranath Tagore—should be free. Yet, most educators I know are against the Right to Education (RTE) Act—for reasons philosophical and practical.

I am not an educator. I have taught classes, but I approach this debate from the point of view of a parent and citizen.

I don’t know Ms. Narayan, but I have read one of her articles. So I feel I am qualified enough to comment on the mental process that led her to the conclusions outlined in her article. Now, how many of you can dare to paraphrase Rabindranath Tagore in support of your argument, without using your fancy internet search engine? I thought so. For your kind information, Ms. Narayan has committed Rabindra Dada’s whole oeuvre to her memory. She can quote Tagore like you can quote your favorite teevee character.

Now that we have established that Ms. Narayan is a great supporter of education of all peoples, let her educate us about the realities of real life:

The human face of the RTE Act and one that stares parents in the face is the 25% quota. Affluent urban Indians—and certainly the readership of this newspaper—send their children to elite private schools. The new reality is that these schools will have to mandatorily admit a 25% quota of underprivileged children—whether it is a Sanskriti, Bombay Scottish or Vidyashilp. This mingling of social classes is certain to cause discomfort even if few parents will vocalize it. “In principle, I have no problem with this,” we will say, and may even believe it. We will call forth our childhood hardships and tell each other, “I believe that my children ought to socialize with, and learn from, all types of children.” We will feel the halo shining around our heads.

Yes! We have all been well trained by the liberal media to be politically correct and try to say the terrible thoughts that come into our head using non-terrible words. But, right now, at this moment, this great visionary is going to break out of these shackles and hit us with a truth bomb.

Of course, class has nothing to do with character. Intelligence is marginally correlated with wealth, if that. In many cases, the plumbers, drivers and dairy farmers who work for the urban elite are just as honest, if not more, than their employers. Children do learn from their less-privileged peers. But usually, such learning happens in an organic, semi-structured way—over summer holidays at grandparents’ homes when the driver’s son teaches your son how to play pithoo.

Of course. All non-elite people are honest. They never lie, cheat or steal. They are so honest that if you leave a billion rupees on the street near a whole swath of them and come back in ten years, not only will you find the billion rupees where you left them but you will also get the interest amount that you would have gotten if you would have invested the money in a high-yielding bond. Such is the magic of poverty! No, we’re not overcompensating at all. What makes you say that?

Now, don’t get Ms. Narayan wrong. She is not a racist. Some of her best employees are government school teachers!

The lady who helps clean my home, Rosie, is an erstwhile government schoolteacher, who discovered that she makes more money cleaning homes than teaching. She lives in Yelahanka, in the vicinity of a number of Bangalore’s top private schools. In theory, Rosie’s daughter, Jenny, could and should be my daughter’s classmate. Jenny is a tall, bright girl with limpid eyes and a quick wit. She smiles often and asks questions. She is polite and curious. She is of the same age as my younger daughter; and they could learn from each other. In theory.

Yes, in theory, if this were a perfect world, or if we had realized Karl Marx’s Utopia, or if all of us always did the right thing, or if wishes were horses, we wouldn’t even be having this debate! But real life does not work that way. Theory is good, but you have to be practical after all. Look, Jenny, don’t take this personally, but you’d know all this if you’d had the opportunity to have a decent education. But we can’t have everything, now, can we? Love the things your mama gave you, like your limpid eyes, your smile and a society which won’t ever let you forget where you really belong.

However, if you think you’re going to blame Ms. Narayan for enumerating all these practical problems, then think again. She is not to blame. In her hearts of hearts, she has the best intentions. She wants people like Jenny to have a good education. But the real culprit is someone else. A person so ruthless that her mere presence sends shivers down the spines of anyone unfortunate enough to cross her path. Who is this person? I’m afraid I dare not even speak her name. The only person who can even talk about her is someone who is immune to all her devilry:

Children are cliquish. I don’t like this fact, but cannot escape it. I can invite any number of outsiders—from hovels or gated communities—to my daughter’s birthday party, command her to “be nice”, and after the initial “hello”, she will return to giggling with her school friends. Lectures about egalitarianism carry as much weight as all those lectures about “starving children while you waste food” and “I studied under the street lights while you forget to switch off the lights”.

Yes. Ms. Narayan’s daughter is the real culprit. Behind that (probably!) cute face, lies the mind of a sheepish villain. This child prodigy, a ruthless doyen of child society does not play fair. She will chew and spit out children like Jenny the minute they step into her circle of influence. This is why you can’t have nice things, Jenny. Ms. Narayan’s daughter might say mean things about you.

There, there, Jenny. Don’t cry. You probably cannot afford to lose all that salt from your body anyway. Listen, don’t worry. Ms. Narayan has got you covered. Due to the fact that she is a great egalitarian, she is going to solve your problem like America solves global terrorism: by throwing money at it:

I would be willing to pay an RTE fee in addition to what my children’s schools charge me, particularly if I know that it will help a child get an education. Educating underprivileged children is a pet cause among affluent parents—and I say this without rancour.

Yes. She wants all the poor, underprivileged children to be educated. It is her favorite cause, after all. Just not with her child. She is even ready to pay up so that you can open equal but separate schools for underprivileged children. This way everyone is happy!

The RTE Act, as it stands now, seems to me to be a massive government cop-out. [. . . ] As a parent, I laud the intent. I am willing to help make it work. But as a student of psychology, I don’t think plonking underprivileged children in elite schools is the solution.

Ms. Shobha Narayan’s solution, as it stands now, is a massive cop-out. As a connoisseur of unintentional hilarity, I applaud her effort. But as someone who learned everything he needs to know about psychology from Fraiser re-runs, I think she might be suffering from a case of wanting all the poors to get off her lawn.

That is all.

[Mint Lounge]