Do you realise that our schoolchildren are exposed to a lot of trash they should be kept safe from? It is a no-brainer, really.
The education department of our nation seems to revel in petty changes that do more damage than good. Right now, the focus is on a small 4,500-year-old Dancing Girl statue from the Indus Valley Civilisation, a pre-Vedic people of exceptional quality. What is the problem? Well, a near-abstract dancing girl from that time has breasts, which could corrupt our kids, who seem to suck at history anyway.
All of us, growing up, saw this dancing girl in our history books and, almost naturally, never really noticed her. However, the current crop of sanskaari babus, thinkers, and historians in the education department have decided to airbrush her body. They seem to forget that by pixelating ancient history, they are doing damage to the country they claim to love. The simple reason is this: your pixelation brush has to be very wide because it will now have to brush over many centuries, epic stories from the Ramayana and Mahabharata, and, obviously, ancient temples dating back to a time when people seemed to celebrate the voluptuousness of the Indian body.
So, here I have enumerated a few things from our own time that should be pixelated instead, as they are actually vulgar. Leave the Dancing Girl from the Indus Valley alone and fix these first:
Caste system:
Almost every other day, it is not unusual to read a story in the news about ordinary humans, whom some old-time sage (let’s call him Manu) decided were not human enough, getting whipped by the “higher” humans in all possible ways. They do not even want these “lower” humans to sit on a horse during their wedding while marrying their own kind.
However, the blood bank is anonymous. Everybody’s blood is good in times of need. A high-caste Hindu is okay with a low-caste heart or kidney in the event of organ failure.
Human sewage cleaners:
Even today, you have people who are poor and marginalised enough to be plied with cheap alcohol so they can clean clogged drains that carry human refuse from all castes.
Rape culture:
One of the most vulgar occurrences in our society is rape. Anybody with a little whiff of power and ignorance thinks it is okay to abuse and murder women because, well, they are the weaker sex, aren’t they?
Dowry:
A marriage in India is still judged by the quality and quantity of stuff that a bride brings, besides her womb, which is duty-bound to produce (male) children.
Explicit materialism:
Children are made to believe that what they can procure materially is the sum of their moral rectitude. While we populate temples to the point of stampedes, Indian spiritual culture is often reduced to hogwash. A person is respected for being spiritual only after he has paid off his home loan. Children learn this early.
There are countless examples of explicit materialism. For example, kids from rich families are allowed to mow down pavement dwellers and get away with it after writing essays, poems, and other such literary exercises.
Garbage galore:
India is a garbage dump consisting of 1.4 billion-plus people. Whatever you do not need, you can chuck on the road or anywhere you feel like, as long as it is not your own home. Just answer this question: where have you not seen an empty packet of Lays or an empty bottle of cola?
Children travelling to pristine places have to encounter Lays packets in the greenest and cleanest of destinations. Here is an example:
Goa, which takes pride in cleanliness, is extremely promiscuous with its garbage problem. And yes, locals drop beer bottles wherever there should be birds, bees, and beaches.
All Indian localities give children a ringside view of how garbage can be casually thrown away. Children see and learn.
Rote learning:
In most schools in India, children are forced to regurgitate lessons. Thinking is not allowed. Poor teachers stay poor and keep the poor education system thriving. Children are systematically abused by this system of learning, which does not value creativity and independent thinking.
Corruption:
Almost all children in high school know that it is good to have a godfather. They know that bribes are welcome in our culture. And these children eventually use graft to grow their own green trees.
Dead aesthetics:
Most Indian families are okay with art and creativity only as hobbies. The general lack of taste is endemic to our contemporary culture. Want to see bad design? Just look at our cities. These bad designs are reinforced by egotistical businesspeople, politicians, and bureaucrats who think they know design simply because they have power.
Our kids are forced to grow up in a wasteland of aesthetics.
The less we speak about art, the better. Almost one hundred per cent of the time, educationists and teachers have zero idea about art. If you hear the words Van Gogh and Picasso in a school, you are lucky. For a child in school, art is something you undertake if you are not good at mathematics or something “valuable” like that. So we have an army of kids brought up on an education that pays no attention to its finest arts.
Bollywood:
The less said, the better. Everything testosterone-driven and loud comes from this chaos of cultural degeneration. A child grows up being seduced by the semi-pornographic and resoundingly profane epidemic of bad taste that this industry forces on people through its giant tentacles. Kids are the easiest prey.
Crass corporate mediocrity:
This one is easy to understand but very hard to let go of. Everyone knows that a half-pathetic degree in management lands you a job in a big money machine that eats quality and shits out mediocrity, as William.S. Burroughs famously said.
If you really think about it, this list could become never-ending. However, considering that we have education ministers like Dharmendra Pradhan and prime ministers like Modi, who loathe the learned, I think we could simply call it a day by saying that, yes, the Mughals were a part of India. They had a profoundly beautiful history, and they became us. Anybody with half a brain knows Akbar and his Nine Gems. I am not saying that the Mughals did not come with their own set of problems, but they definitely had an indelible influence on India’s culture. Even if you wipe them out of school history books because they were not Hindus, they will still matter because the prime minister has to go to the Red Fort to deliver a speech from time to time.
Hence, trying to airbrush a naked girl who lived in the Indus Valley in 3500 BCE is not something you should worry our children will see. They are seeing things now that they cannot unsee. First of all, she is quite abstract. Also, she is a “beti” of our great culture. Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao.
Fake Gurus:
Gurus like Ram Rahim are out on parole more often than they are in prison. His alkeged crimes: castrating men against their wish. If you want to get out on a rape charge and be celebrated for it, you better be a guru. These are those spiritual folks your kids should be really far away from.
A government that chaperones the education system into hiding our truth is not only ignorant; it is downright evil. The breasts of the Dancing Girl of the Indus Valley are not pornographic by any measure. We have all seen the figure as kids and thought nothing of it, for we grew up seeing naked goddesses in different places. We only marvelled at how old the Dancing Girl of the Indus Valley was.
While the government might think the mediocrity it wallows in also plagues the school system, it would be surprised to know that even the worst students were stupefied by the civilisations that thrived in Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. To reduce this entire experience to a petty idea like nudity only shows the government’s desire to seek out pornography where there is none.
I wonder if they ever considered the fact that, besides the Dancing Girl, everyone else—including the bull—is naked. I also wonder if the government, which talks about nationalism and Bharatiya flavour, is ashamed of the impossibly sexual imagery of the Konark Sun Temple and Khajuraho.
When will they understand that we Indians love sex, and that it was simply too hot to wear fur and leather boots in India?
So, the big question now is, who will ban the Kama Sutra?
Former Editor at Abir Pothi
