Death of a city

CITIES and Thrones and Powers

Stand in Time's eye,

Almost as long as flowers,

Which daily die:

Rudyard Kipling

Cities die, and cities die rather soon. They stand in Time’s eye only as long flowers, or so the poet thinks. But when does a city die, and how? Does it have to suffer a catastrophic disaster to die? Does it have to mysteriously fall out of the map of human civilization like Harappa or Mohenjodaro, does it have to be inundated by volcanic lava like Pompeii, or does it have to be devastated by atomic bombs like Hiroshima or Nagasaki? Does it really have to be physically destroyed for it to die? Can we say a city has died when it loses its soul, when the human values that it embodied are lost from its public life though it may grow physically by gobbling up more or the countryside around it, by constructing more of swanky malls and apartment complexes?

The city I want to subject to these questions is Calcutta, or Kolkata as we always knew it in Bangla. In our childhood it was a city inhabited by compassionate human beings. In public transport, at stations, on the roads, in shops and markets, anywhere you had a problem, needed any help, ten people would gather around you and pleasantly confuse you with at least five different solutions. Helping hands would particularly be extended towards women traveling alone or with small children. `aaste ladies’ (slow down, there are lady passengers) was an oft heard phrase that the bus conductors shouted to the drivers. A couple of times I encountered a particularly sophisticated one when I was around ten. He would shout in chaste Bangla ‘mohila’ (lady) or ‘shishu-saho mohila’ (lady with a child). On such occasions the driver would spend an extra minute or two at the stop to ensure that the lady or ladies in question, invariably in their sarees, have boarded or alighted safely. And this generated no impatience in the other passengers in the bus. 

An unwritten rule was to give up one’s seat for an elderly or otherwise needy passenger. I recall an incident when we were teenagers. A group of us were traveling by bus when one of us gave up a seat for an elderly gentleman. Suddenly, a much younger person, acting rather smart, tried to squeeze his way through the crowd to that seat. I still remember the dressing down he got from us. 

Another incident that I still fondly remember is when we kept a tram waiting for a good five minutes and made the passengers search for a comforter (what we lovingly call a muffler)! I must have been around five or six around that time. I went out with my aunt. After a good day’s outing we were going back to her place. By that time the offices had gotten over, and the buses and trams were crowded. We had to change trams at Dharmatala or Esplanade. After we got down from the first tram, and it was about to continue its journey, I realized that I had dropped my comforter inside. I mentioned this to my aunt rather sheepishly, not quite knowing what her reactions would be. Instead of showing even an iota of displeasure with me, she promptly asked the conductor to stop the tram, and it did stop. She then told the passengers standing near the gate that her nephew had dropped his comforter inside the tram and that they should find it for him. I did not expect this at all. As the passengers got busy looking for my comforter, I got busy convincing my aunt that I have another one, and that it is not so important to find it out from inside the tram. I also had a vested interest in not finding the comforter. For, as I said, I had two of them. The one, inside the tram, was woolen, and coarse, and warm, and always gave me an itch on my neck. The other, that I had at home, was silken, and was soft and was kinder to my skin. Therefore, I wanted the tram to leave, now that I had managed to drop the woolen comforter inside it, so that I never had to endure the torment again. But my aunt did not know that secret, and would not let the tram leave without its passengers finding it for me. Did they find it? Yes, they did, to my utter disappointment. 

When I look back at the incident today, I get amazed by the compassion, the empathy, the patience people had for each other. And today? I think the following experience I had a few years ago would suffice. My wife and I boarded a bus and took a double seat. All the seats marked for ladies were occupied when a middle aged woman boarded the bus. She approached a couple of young girls in their twenties sitting in the ‘ladies’ seats and requested them to give her one seat since she had had an operation and found it difficult to stand for too long. To our utter disbelief, the girls refused. The woman was practically pleading with them, but nothing had any effect. Finally we vacated our seats for her.

I am not even getting into the recent events of rape and molestation and all that goes on in Kolkata on a daily basis. I am not talking about the criminal elements in the society who are having a field day in the prevailing atmosphere of political and administrative inaction if not encouragement. I am talking of ordinary middle class people. They have lost their empathy, compassion, patience for fellow travelers and fellow citizens. Kolkata has lost its soul. If that is not the death of a city, what is?

Thoughts on vocational education

Einstein once said, 

It is not enough to teach a man a specialty. Through it he may become a kind of useful machine but not a harmoniously developed personality. It is essential that the student acquire an understanding of and a lively feeling for values. He must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and of the morally good. Otherwise he—with his specialized knowledge—more closely resembles a well-trained dog than a harmoniously developed person.

It is this ability to produce human beings, who are something more than beasts through their understanding of values, their sense of beauty and moral good, for which education should be valued. However, in this late stage of global industrial civilization we have successfully reduced every aspect of human life into commodities that can be sold and bought at the market place. Values and moral good are passé in this age of pragmatism bordering on opportunism. Even our deep personal emotions can be sold at a premium on reality TV or displayed on Facebook. We have silently accepted it as a norm that price of anything and everything will be determined by the logic of demand and supply in the marketplace. Finally, we are placing education in the same basket by reducing its meaning to a mere accumulation of degrees and skills to earn a livelihood. 

This predicament is inherent in the dominant values prevalent in our times. Man is not viewed as an agent capable of critical thought, capable of bringing about social change, capable of making history and capable of building new institutions. Rather man is reduced to the ignominy of a consuming animal. Greater the level of consumption, greater is one’s value in the society. In this competition of vulgar consumerism, along with the consumers, also needed is an army of laborers, who make themselves up the broad base of the pyramid of consumers, to produce consumable goods. An education system overemphasizing vocational training caters to the need of the marketplace to produce this army of laborers. 

It is undeniable that we all need to learn skills that are socially useful and that help us make a living. Precisely for this reason it is easy to be convinced that vocational training will make our students more `employable’. But it is important to emphasize that an education system putting undue emphasis on vocational training does not build a healthy society. After all, healthy societies are built on things that are to a large extent intangible and not on the logic of marketplace. 

I quote journalist Chris Hedges on what he had to say about the American education system and society in 2009 [1]:

``We have trashed our universities, turning them into vocational factories (emphasis mine) that produce corporate drones and chase after ... grants and funding. The humanities, the discipline that forces us to stand back and ask the broad moral questions of meaning and purpose, that challenges the validity of structures, that trains us to be self-reflective and critical of all cultural assumptions, have withered. Our press ... confuses bread and circus with news and refuses to give a voice to critics ... We kneel before a self elaborately constructed by the architects of our consumer society, which dismisses compassion, sacrifice for the less fortunate, and honesty. ... Success, always defined in terms of money and power, is its own justification.’’

It is time to stand back and ask the broad questions about what should be an  education policy in our concrete social context that produces harmoniously developed human beings who are also socially productive rather than corporate drones.

Reference:

[1] Chris Hedges, ``America is in Need of a Moral Bailout,’’ truthdig.com, March 23, 2009.