Dreams of childhood

Every time I pass by a school, I shudder. I feel schools are institutions meant to destroy childhood. I remember my years as a child in a small town called Jamshedpur. It was a snooty, well-heeled company town but it allowed for innocence and dreamtime.

I remember only little things. Walking home in the rain collecting red rain bugs, stroking their velvet coats. When you touched them, the insects withdrew their feet like red mimosas.
Childhood was dream time and it allowed for hours of boredom where you did nothing and yet something creative happened to you.
The teacher was law and you felt your first sense of tyranny and injustice as one wrote “I will not talk in class” 500 times. It is strange how all those years of penal writing did not improve quality of penmanship. I was lousy at sport and average at studies. All I did was to climb trees, eat guavas and search for raw mangoes. All one needed was a dog, a younger sister and a story book and life felt gloriously open and happily complete.
One was a glutton about books and a fiend of Dell Comics. Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse were characters, like Hamlet and Macbeth. The beauty was one could discuss them in the same breath. Summers meant mangoes and salt with a gorgeous touch of chilly powder and winter summoned guavas, deeply and lusciously pink in inside.
The only art form I mastered was street cricket played with a tennis ball. I keep wondering where all the geniuses of the game disappeared — many of my heroes were the riff-raff of the class, the poets of anarchy.
I sense the sadness of growing up. I remember I met one of them years later. He was working in a bank, hiding in shadows, hoping I would not see him. There is a poignancy and emptiness in meeting a school friend years later with nothing to say. Memories look like castaways from a different world. So little of childhood survives into the future.
The Indian reality begins too early and competition destroys the sense of play. Exams and failure in exams becomes the first catastrophe. If agriculture in India was a gamble with the rains, education is a wager on exams.
I think childhood is a sensorium, a gift of smells, sounds, memories, touch, fables and all this gets lost in the search for information. I think information destroys knowledge. You lose the sense of craft and the freedom and curiosity to be foolish. An exam becomes an act of tyranny and years are lost in simulated preparation, in coaching schools which corrupt knowledge. There was no celebration of a text. Education never allowed for play or fantasy. That was exiled to the world of films. Think of a place like Kota, a town created to train one for exams and you realise what a tragedy our IITs are as heart-break houses. I still hear scholars confess sadly that they missed IIT by three marks.
I sometimes see students, outstanding engineers who claim that they have not read a story book in years. There was one who said he could not even read newspapers. It all seemed purposeless in a world where you Xerox ideas and download information. I realise many of them download pornography as matter of information. What gets lost is the world of the body. The sense of the erotic which is so much a part of knowledge, the high of learning.
I sometimes wonder whether India would benefit by declaring a ban on IITs and the like and allow students to enjoy education in the same way we enjoyed plays, good food , music and friendship. I think our addas and our tea shops teach us more about culture than our formal schools.
I am a teacher and I think what made me a teacher was the joy of childhood, the need to share the way I learnt. I sense this missing now. When I hear about knowledge commissions and education reports, I wonder what new idiocy they are piling on us.
I think our rituals of transition from childhood to adulthood are not evocative enough. Boys do not really grow up. The exams cannot be the rite of passage to a man’s world. Our men are adolescents at 40 with many of the teenage repressions. There is a claim to masculinity but little sense of manhood. Our education with its linear ode to professionalism destroys diversity. Firstly, many of them are forced into careers they do not want. Secondly, the straitjacket model of careers destroys the imagination, curbing a sense of choice. The burn out rate is high and little attention is paid to it. Few recognise the agony of a life of regret at 30. Oddly, by the 40s, men look like clones of each other and more and more, it is the women who are interesting, in the sense of their body, their idea of autonomy, their feeling about companionship.
I know I might sound irrelevant in this age of seriousness. However I must stick my neck out and say the destruction of childhood, of the worlds of boredom and dream time are serious charges against any society.
We talk of our demographic dividend, our youthful society as if it is a plus point in a Darwinian world, where knowledge replaces tooth and claw as the new fangs of a society. This idea is philistine. We need to ask what we have done to our youth and ask them to dream beyond consumerism and competition. India needs to explore this rather than worry about competitive advantage in an increasingly arid world.

The writer is a social science nomad