In the realm of Hindu Hell, I find myself lamenting the loss of my earthly life and the sisyphean onus on the young and unhappy scholars of WWA Cossipore English School, in Calcutta. The motivation of the English missionaries and the East India Company, who once established a standard of education, now seems futile. The system they created was designed to produce submissive clerks, not foster creative and analytical thinking. Now, obedient and clueless automation that can't dig their grave if their lives depended on it isn't what we want humans to be anymore. We are creating robots for that. We need thinking heads and doing citizens.
The shadow of the intentions of an obsolete system can still be seen in the bureaucracy of our education system, which values conformity over creativity. The bell curve remains in the center, producing a majority of average students, while the outliers make headlines but not the bread, or, like me, are ostracised as heretic spirits and aren't even paid for their intellectual and sophisticated haunting. The complacency in this outdated educational system has resulted in a loss of curiosity among the living. This generation doesn't know and doesn't want to know. With their heads buried in the sand, they keep bumping into things, a pathology of a janky product.
We have come a long way from serving a retributive supremacist skin with less melanin to a diverse and corrupt hegemony of rampant collusion in skin with more. If we do not act now, we risk becoming mere puppets in the hands of Industry 4.0's artificial superintelligence, or their puppeteers. Our roads will not be driven by humans, our schools will not have human teachers, and even our policymakers will be more artificial than organic. The devil is in the code that's not being written.
And as I play with my pet from hell, an earworm, singing that irritating song, I realise that insisting on the inclusion of the song "We Shall Overcome," originally a gospel and protest song for African American civil rights, in Indian schools fills me with frustration. Its lack of historical significance in India is an exemplar of an anachronism, and its pernicious influence on this and future generations should not be ignored. It is my belief that the song, along with prayers to the invisible, should be banned for the benefit of future generations. Let us not be caught unawares, for tomorrow's roads will not have human drivers, and tomorrow's schools will not have human teachers. I think we should get out of the business of overcoming problems we don't have with steps that are not remedial by opening our eyes.
