IITD/JEE

While studying in 12th standard, I applied to appear in IIT Joint Entrance.  The application form came to me in a brown envelope, with the acronym IITD/JEE/xyz written in one corner.  I remember the fondness with which I noticed the seven characters: IITD/JEE.  It seemed like a distant, cherished, perhaps unattainable dream.

I did not know about IITs when I graduated from class 10.  One day I noticed an advert in the paper for a correspondence course to help students prepare for IIT joint entrance.  The company advertising was called Brilliant Tutorials based in Madras.

I, and my family, thought it was well worth it to prepare for and to take the entrance exam.  I studied mostly at leisure.  I never woke up at an unearthly hour, or stayed awake beyond bedtime.  My normal 11th and 12th standard college regimen was a breeze.  I never took any in-person coaching.

Once a distant relative visited us, and he sternly chided me on my leisurely studying, and told me that unless I woke up at 4 every morning, or unless I studied till midnight or beyond, I had no hope in hell of succeeding.

My hometown was not known to produce IIT graduates, and when the fact of my preparing for JEE became known in my locality, I was the laughing stock of many youngsters, one of whom said that he would change his name if I didn't crash and burn at the entrance exam.  The teachers at my 11th and 12th standard college were dismissive and insulting of their students, and took pride in their haughty condescension.

Our home was near a university, and both my parents were teachers in that university.  I therefore had ready access to the university library, and read many a text meant for undergraduate and postgraduate science degrees.  Sometimes I could only understand one or two chapters, and at other times it was instructive to read books designed and written with far greater care and quality than the Indian textbooks I normally had for my college syllabus.

Due to those university books, my interest was not just in solving problems but in educating myself.  Those days of being a self-paced learner, an autodidact, someone who studied for pleasure, was one of the happiest periods of my life.

In the end, I got the JEE All India Rank 19, and was ranked third in the North zone, with two students from Delhi ahead of me.

...

I loved computers, but had no access to computer at school, at my college, or at home.  I chose to study Computer Science at IIT Delhi, and from the very early days, it was a nightmare and a debacle.  Ugly hostels, bad food, a terrible discouragement to do anything but study the prescribed syllabus, a woeful library that had nothing but textbooks, a crammed curriculum, subjects which were taught without passion, some sadistic teachers, attendance requirements, and hardly any time to think and reflect.  This was in stark contrast to a life of leisurely intellection and study in my hometown.

The one positive was ready access to computing machinery, and instead of spending my time trying to get good grades, I spent almost all my free time tinkering with personal computers, mainframes, and multi-user Unix systems.

Except for courses in Logic and Philosophy and the Humanities, which I genuinely enjoyed, I did not have good grades.  I trudged through the four years at IIT Delhi, and got thoroughly disenchanted with studying for grades.  I copied assignments, cheated in some quizzes, and became generally alienated from the official curriculum, while gaining tremendous felicity with systems administration.  A few courses did hold my interest, but those were very unpleasant four years.  I wished to be rid of being in that cage, and not being able to physically leave IIT, I instead became interested in transcendental philosophy, social activism and alternative ways of living.

...

I had become almost the best in a country by having space and freedom for two years.  But I became a recluse and a shell of a person by going through four years of IIT.  Many of my IIT friends lost their balance from that trauma, and have still not regained it, and struggle with feelings of inadequacy and maladjustment.  

For me, preparing to get into IIT was a great joy.  But the actual reward, the actual being at IIT, was a disaster.  The acronym that had enchanted me, IITD/JEE, proved to be a conjunction of hell and heaven.

During my fourth year at IIT Delhi, I appeared for the GATE exam for entrance to post-graduate courses at IISc or at the IITs, and I think I got a rank that was in the top 40.  But I chose not to study further, and decided pretty much to drop out of society.  

Many of my fellow classmates went to do their Masters in Computer Science, but I know they had no passion for the subject, and even less the courage to live an authentic life.  Even today, I find them disinterested in a new advance in computing or science or philosophy, with their energies focused on their careers and the careers of their children.

I imagine that these days even that heaven of preparing for JEE has become hellish for many, with students choosing rather to die than go through the endless coaching.  And I have no reason to think that the actual experience at the IITs has gotten any better.

My moderate professional success has no doubt been partly due to my IIT pedigree, but that is no commendation of its killing the soul of so many students.  IITs get the very best of brains in India, and then choose to trample over them.  Many of its students eventually do great things after they leave, but that is a tribute to the innate intellectual ability of the students than to any nourishing of that ability by the IITs.

On India

"God created men, Colt made them equal."

For the state to confiscate and restrict arms is an injustice intolerable to a free man, but one could be excused if one finds it acceptable in a nation-state where there is an easy and efficient recourse against violence, especially for the weaker sections who do not have money or power.  In most places, this recourse is The Police.

In India, guns are de facto legal and affordable only for the rich and connected.  To add injury to this insult, the police usually side with the rich and connected and shoo away or beat up anyone who dares to think otherwise.

And since the police is worthless to a common man, one might think that after all the courts will be fair.  That assumption too is badly trampled as soon as one tries to litigate against the state or against the powerful.  In the rare case that there is a just verdict, the powerful keep appealing, finality is elusive, and as they say, the process is the punishment.

For a common man or woman in India, a region replete with injustice, illegality and corruption, not only is there no recourse to arms, but there is no recourse to law enforcement, and there is no recourse to the courts.

People might say the United States is corrupt too, and the powerful have their advantages, but it is head and shoulders above a third-world hellhole like India when it comes to the right to bear arms, the right to approach the police, and the right to a fair trial.

People might want to leave India for many reasons, but I left India to escape this tangible sense of being helpless in the face of aggravations.  I do not wish to approach a well-connected bureaucrat, and to stand before him, and to lower my dignity and beg for his favors to do something that should be done as a matter of course.

For those who cannot leave India, my advice is to lay low politically, and not be brutalized by the state.  You cannot do much as an individual, and you should try this perilous path of being a lone-wolf reformer only if you have no other ambition in life, especially that of living a free, peaceful and intellectual life.

If you wish to consider joining a mainstream or alternative political party, remember that the political parties are a reflection of India at large: corrupt, brutal, nepotistic, opportunistic.  You will have to kiss the feet of men like Rahul Gandhi or Narendra Modi or Amit Shah or Arvind Kejriwal, or Mr Vijay.  That may not be abhorrent to you, but it is to me.

I find it increasingly true to say that though I love many things that have happened in India (especially as it relates to some forms of music and literature and philosophy), I hate what it has become.  It is an ugly, dysfunctional and despotic region, and I feel fortunate that I am no longer trapped in it.

The Infinitesimal and the Infinite

 A friend shared a poem with me today:

Vast Emptiness

Emotion less
Thought less
Good less
Bad less
Joy less
Sorrow lessDevoid of it all
Is this vast emptinessA few fireballs littered around as stars
A few pebbles thrown around as planets
A few specks of dust moving around as life
As plants as trees
As insects as worms
As fish as reptiles
As birds as animals
As men as women
And the non-gender ones tooWinds swirling
Rains lashing
Thunders thundering
Dust storms brewingOf what significance
But an eternal play
Of time in the lap of timelessAll of the above
But words in my head
Without words
There is but
Vast Emptiness

I used to have similar thoughts, and I'm sure many a reflective man or woman have had the same.

But here is a counterpoint to this wondrous feeling and cognition of being a mere speck in the vast space-time. And that is the wondrous feeling and cognition that in this infinite vastness, infinite duration, but at present, here and now, I am. I exist, I am aware, I see, I wonder.

The insignificance is as marvelous as the infinitely improbable existence of us. Both are marvelous, both are wondrous, both are worthy of one stopping in one's tracks and be awed.

One existence, that of space-time, is infinite (notwithstanding the Big Bang model of a finite universe), the other ephemeral: I was not aware before I was born, and I shall be not aware after I die. But in a certain sense, I am eternal too, because I am part of this universe. And I shall never cease to exist, but shall go on to appear in different forms.

And what a wonder of wonders that matter arranges itself so as to be self-aware. It is perhaps the greatest wonder of all.

On the Grand Design

Suffering is always tragic, often random and mostly senseless.

It is a worldly endeavor to lessen suffering, while the other-worldly pursuit is to "transcend" suffering since suffering is a "noble truth" from which there is no escape, only transcendence.

A friend of mine, with a network of well-heeled people in his network, writes on LinkedIn:

Seemingly adverse things appearing in abundance and without warning could be arising for one of two reasons. First, it may simply be that dealing with them is a necessary step in our development and without them our life journey will be a superficial success. Relatedly and importantly, these circumstances appear because prior volitional activity or accumulated karma making them the birth child of thoughts or actions we have taken in the past, whether we can directly recall or correlate to the present incidents.

Whatever the specific reason, I take great comfort in the fact that there is zero randomness in how my life’s events unroll and I look ahead with optimism and enthusiasm, knowing that the temporal map of these occurrences is accurately following the karmic load that I carry and strive to purify.

I quote an incident from an earlier article of mine:

Abandoned in Life and Death
Parents leave baby boy undergoing treatment at PGI

In a blatant display of extreme callousness, parents of a seriously injured baby abandoned the child midway through treatment in the PGI Intensive Care Unit.

Faced with absence of support in a critical condition, the infant breathed his last on January 7 and no one has even come forward to claim the body, which is kept in the mortuary of the hospital.

...

Although he started stabilising in the ICU, his parents suddenly vanished. After unsuccessful attempts at locating the parents, doctors informed the police.

...

Ruby passed away on January 7. 

...

The religiously-inclined might say that the child must have come to this world with his karma and that divine justice is infallible. And thus we avert our eyes from what must have compelled the parents of this poor child to desert him, and what must be improved in the hospitals, and in the mind-sets of doctors of this country for these events never to happen again. God forbid.

Truth is not comforting, it just is.  The truth is that this baby, Ruby, died of injuries and from lack of care, not of Karma.

Tragedy is not confined to the suffering of children, though it is perhaps easier to see that they did not deserve it.

I imagine the suffering of Ruby's mother as she abandoned him.  I imagine her compulsion, or perhaps her desensitized debasement.

I imagine the suffering of a father and a mother as their child is kidnapped and never found, as they imagine him or her to be amputated and made into a beggar or be raped by those who do not deserve to be called human beings.

I imagine the suffering of a noble warrior like Jaswant Singh Khalra, who, for protesting against others' killings, was himself tortured and killed by Punjab Police.

I swear, to my last drop of blood, and to my last breath, ... I swear on the still smoldering, in my heart, funeral pyre of Ruby who I never met, ... I swear on the courage of Jaswant Singh Khalra, that I will never forget your suffering, or justify it as part of a grand plan, or rationalize it as what you deserved because of your karma, but that I will hold your injuries as mine, that I will fight against what killed you, and that I will reject the abject nonsense of the eastern "wisdom" that claims that the world is perfect as it is, only if we would see it that way.

 

Though Lovers Be Lost, ...

There is no love like the love of a mother for her child, and the child assumes that love, and abides in it, and lives in its shelter and warmth.

The child leaves the mother first, to go forth in this world.  The mother holds her tears, but lets the child go.  For that is in the nature of things.  She wishes happiness and fulfillment for the child more than the child wishes for itself.

And one day, the mother, old and frail, bids her final goodbye to this world.  And only then it dawns on the child what a fragrant presence the mother was in its own heart.  When it is no more possible for the child to reach out to its mother outwardly, then the child reaches in, within, and finds the love whose intensity was so far hidden to it.

And that explosion of love and grief creates an intensity about an absence that the presence perhaps never could.  The world of the child is now absent the mother, but strangely its heart is full once again with her presence.

From being inside the mother before its birth, the child now nurtures the mother inside itself.

Though lovers be lost,
Love shall not.

And Death shall have no dominion.