Becoming Whole

Education is an extremely messy business. We often find educationists, politicians, social thinkers, and, indeed, almost all parents getting involved in intense debates over issues such as who shall get to educate whom, who needs to be educated, the contents of this education, how education is to be extended to different kinds of people, what types of education are to be devised for different categories of human beings, and the rewards, punishments, encouragements, and reformations that shall go with this whole process. One reason why such issues give rise to never-ending discussions is because it is quite difficult to get people to agree on how we shall go about achieving one of the expressed purposes of 'education', which is to 'make people whole'.

There is, of course, no shortage of 'extremist' views in this matter, and the following suggestion is my own. Children should be taken to graveyards or cemeteries, possibly on a Saturday/Sunday evening, and left there for half an hour to wander around and ponder on what lies beneath the grass. I do not say this for deliberate shock-effect, for I really do believe, perhaps reductionistically, that this is one the readiest ways to solve many of our human problems. Many of such problems arise, I think, from our inability to recognise, accept, grasp and 'internalise' this simple fact : I, the writer of this blog, and you, its reader, may be dead in the next two minutes. It is, in fact, so simple that one can be excused for feeling overwhelmed by the variety of means that we resort to in order to ignore or disguise it, run away from it or cover it up. I myself have plenty of them at my disposal : the attempts at getting a Ph.D., a developed habit of reading through a potentially infinite list of books, a certain taste for music, and an acquired training in asking all sorts of questions. And there are thousands of other such things which are up for grabs, starting from astrological speculations to investment banking to internet surfing to kayaking to motor racing to sumo wrestling to yatch building. Consequently, we begin to see so much of ourselves in what we have acquired that we almost begin to hope for a kind of vicarious immortality in and through them; we shall die, but we like to hope that at least our children, our cars, our Ph.D. theses, and our yatches will endure beyond our deaths, so that the more of the latter that we can acquire, the higher are our chances at attaining a life after the grave.

Regular trips to cemeteries can have a potent educative value in eradicating from children any latent desires that they might be harbouring for such immortality. But, then, of course this is hardly a proposal any ('optimistic') parent will listen to, and even as I write these words I can already hear the objection coming up, 'How utterly morbid and pessimistic that is! How can you send our lovely koochie-kooo children to dark, damp, and bleak graveyards when they should instead be playing around with dogs, cats, butterflies, dahlias, and lilies under a sunny sky?'

Yes, indeed, I would not recommend a daily visit to the graveyard to anybody, irrespective of that person's age. However, a cultivated habit of spending half an hour --- which is not asking much, if you remember that a week has 168 hours --- can make people feel 'liberated' from this world in a manner that those who think that graveyards are 'only for the dead' probably know nothing of. The next time you are in a graveyard (or have had the ill-luck on stumbling upon one at a carefully sanitised corner of your City) go through some of the epitaphs, and you might come across one of a man who died in 1745. And then slowly think : 'Not only this man himself, but also those who grieved when he had died, have been dead for over two centuries now.'

And when you see the setting sun, let it all sink into you : your cars, your shoes, your softwares, your essays, your books, your academic prowess, your music, your pastels, your fame, your glory, your novels, your blogs, your poetry, your prestige, your photographs, and whatever else you might have labelled 'yours', are as insubstantial as the shimmering mist over a dawn lake. This realisation, trust me on this, will not set you sliding down a slope of despair. Rather, once you have really 'internalised' the future possibility of your non-existence, you shall become truly whole, and neither life nor death will then have any power over you. Is this a 'pessimistic view of life'? As for the medicine prescribed, it is sure a bitter pill to swallow, and especially for those who may even refuse to believe that there is a malaise within themselves. But as for the remedy promised, what else could be more optimistic?