Everyman-s

Is education a one-way traffic? The teacher will gorge out something from his memory or from his notebook and the students will listen to him like some dumb dudes? If this is education practiced in one-way-traffic module, what is destined to happen is happening all over the world and most predictably the so-called educated people have been turned into dumb dudes. They have fallen a victim to ‘culture of silence’. This ‘culture of silence’ is the way of life that the powers-that-be have intelligently instilled into the mindset of the common denominators and that is what they want.

Paul Freire in his seminal book Pedagogy of The Oppressed says that it is not education. Conventional education is mechanical and parroting to the point of being corrupted to the core in so far as it tends to exert pressure on the common people to eat the humble pie of existence. It cannot enlighten the students with new visions and thoughts. According to his opinion, proper education should be dialogical and interactive between the teacher and the students. Only that way education can become pro-active in the sense that proactivity with the existing standard of life would interact with the way we should live.

So, education’s sole objective should be to educate the mass of people how to change this world. To change the world, people have to know the actual reality of the world in due perspective and thereby to transcend that reality. If they know it, they will automatically want to change the undesirable societal condition of the world. On that condition, the teacher cannot parrot some methodological ideas which are barren and inefficacious. From the teacher a student will learn something and then he should be prompted to ask questions one after another to get plausible answers themselves with the aiding and abetting with the proper help and guidance from the attending teacher.

That is a two-way traffic and two-way-traffic education is truly dialogical and interactive. And interactive and dialogical education is the only proper way to educate the mass of people who are burning within themselves to change the unjust world. To reiterate it again, first and foremost they should know and be of the firm conviction that the world they live in is utterly an unjust one. Gaining this conviction is not just gaining in knowledge but remold one’s mindset with a vision, a vision that shows the new light at the end of the tunnel at the crossroad of life’s one and only true mission.

Freire is a Brazilian educator who conducted many educational workshops among the poor and illiterate peasants and factory workers of Latin American countries to lend a hand to their political education so that they could know the world better. And he returned with immense and enthusiastic responses from them. He says in his book, “In the midst of the argument a man who previously had been a factory worker for many years spoke out : ‘Perhaps I am the only one here of working class origin. I can’t say that I’ve understood everything you’ve said, but I can say one thing - when I begin this course I was naive, and when I found how naive I was, I started to get critical…’ “

And getting critical is the bottomline of Freire’s pedagogy as far as the liberating education is concerned. It generates critical consciousness and that “conscientization” then cries for freedom from all shackles of oppression prevalent in the society. Freire says : “Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsively. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for the human completion.”

Now let us briefly point to the “culture of silence” which shackles the mindset of the wretched of the earth. The oppressors of the world do not like the idea that the wretched people never raise their voice against injustice and cry for their legitimate demand of freedom. It is rather that they remain “dumb dudes” meekly surrendering themselves to their existential fatalism. They should not get critical of their essences of existence reverberating in their political consciousness. And here lies the crux. As long as the oppressed people eschew the “culture of violence”, their juggernaut of economic appropriation and political shenanigans will roll on undisturbed and uninterrupted.

So, let them sing the songs of silence!

Darkness meanders
Around the recoiling dusk
I see the colours
Of your staggering soul
And hear the music of darkness
Of slyly spinning silence
In cloak of shuffling dagger
Striking you and me
At the strange kind of heart in sadness

The tongue fumbles
As we try to catch each other’s cold
At each other’s mumbling eyes
Never knowing the need
Of revelation so badly ordained
Never knowing how to break
The fascia of darkness
In a very truly facial understanding

It remains to be seen as it were
In eternity of being to exist
As we are never to know each other facially
Radiant in a blizzard of of uneven darkness.

(What is art as such? This is a perennial question that dogs me all the while as and when I embark on defining it per se but cannot reach the decisive moment to leave the paradox unscathed all for a reasonable compromise. And I become all the adamant to cal l it quit while I rise up to say that nobody should dare to define art in a cloak of straight jacket as I think that defining art is nothing but putting the shackles on its body and binding its hands and feet so that it cannot move itself and cannot move the human psyche more in a committed feelings and imaginations. With that views in my mind and at my disposal, I view all sorts of art from story telling down to painting canvases. Whenever anybody convicts me to the offence of breaking the game of art in its rule of the game, I decide to play truant by taking refuge to the concept of art for art’s sake as a self-defence and I am really adamant about my posture. I say that enjoy art to suffer from non-communication which is a way to communicative alienation of art…)

Nothing pleases me more
If and when the darkness steals my light
Even at the nightwatchman’s whistle
Virtual eyes win the game of art at an easy space
If and when is the time to last
To kill the shadows of eternity in an obliging continuity

I fall before the straight night
Bending me over the top of the surfing waves
While the marmaids of the blue river
Quenching the long syntax of the game of art
As and when I portray the sketches of the little heart
The wooden brush just fumbles in blush

Every time I slide down the rough ride
My heart aches at the demise of the greatest work of art
The morbid pleasure sweeps me away
At the right turn of the end of the worst vehicle
That tends to turn topsy-turvy all the while
As and when the rule of the game seems to be all the same

The blue plaza spreads all over walking canvas
And the game of art tends to be tearing all and everything apart.

Namaste!
I say Namaskar to you all a la Indian Hindu style a hearty welcome from me.
When you say Hello!, I bow to you with folded hands just face to face with you saying Namaskar or Nameste to greet and welcome you.
You have all said welcome to me and it is my turn to return you the same.
Saying ‘Namaskar’ is an ageold traditional way of greeting someone in India irrespective of who he or she is.  Sometimes the younger ones touch the feet of elders when meeting them as a gesture of showing respects. Earlier people of lower birth (caste) used to kowtow before the the respected persons and even they kissed their feet or took the dust off their feet to take it on their head. But that tradition has almost gone for good.
Some traditions die some timely death. That is very welcome as because some traditions are really heart-rending and very much poised to be done away with in courses of time.
And they are buried into oblivion. They are dead as dodo and they were destined to be.
But only some are. Many are still there as a beacon of evolution human civilization. Anthropologically they have become cultural idioms. They have been around here, there and everywhere from time immemorial. Human values are ingrained in them. We all are carrying these cultural traits as ever. Nobody has pushed them into us, nobody has thrust them on us. Still we are toeing the lines of traditions all by ourselves and all for ourselves. That is why C. G. Jung has called these traits as ‘collective unconscious’.
And almost unconsciously we are inherited to these social properties and we will leave behind them for our survivors as if these properties are of ancestral genres. We will die someday, but they will remain as die-hards - they are such a strong force to reckon with. We cannot cast aside them by choice as if under some social compulsion we have to get along with them. And we have to, anyway.
Time changes, we too get changed. But cannot change in our traditional guises even if they become well old and worn-out. We still take a long stride in every walk of our life with the same guises on. They have never become a spent force. But why so? Because they do really provide us with some room to breathe, a great deal of succour to exchange amongst us and they do paint us with human faces. Otherwise, what are we in this hi-tech world where there is no human essence to cherish or dream in life? At least, some in-built space of traditions are inherited to us from generations to generations to celebrate life in all its colours and hues and in all its fanfares.
Celebrating life is what life is actually is, isn’t it?
So, celebrate life in all its gaiety. Traditions will reign supreme despite all those catastrophic changes that have been brought over the ages.
Again, Namaste.

Whatever way we do it, it is all the same in spirits and gestures.

(Once it was reported that American agency CIA had tried 634 times to physically oust Fidel Castro of Cuba. I have versified my feelings of CIA’s plot against Cuba in general and against peace loving people in particular.)

How far is the hell
Where eagles dare to fly in the face of fire
How deep is the water beneath the frozen heaven
Where shining knives cry foul in humming giggles
The killing field is ready for the deluge
Violence resembling violence in sizzling soliloquy
Nobody knows where to hide in blackouts
As if the whole sky of Havana smoking in burning cigars
The butts of harlots swaying in black guises
To entice the lust of the soulless flickers of the grasshoppers
To hide the shrouded faces of brokers of democracy

Any time daggers will be piercing the petals of eternal roses
At the drop of hats of the high priests in a high voltage choir
Any time it will be smoking in cloudless catastrophe
And there will be cataclysm of joy and horror in lesser worlds near by
That is why the sugarcane islands sounding breathless psalms of shame
Crestfallen as ever they would be in no-man’s land
As if for ever to live and for ever to die unheard and unsung
Trampled under the iron boots of the laws of conscience

Still the old haggard raises his index finger
At the mortal laws of inevitability to defy death and fear
Still he begs for universal freedom of bread and butter through the ages
Puffing high brand of cigars one after another in a visible corner of the world
Not knowing the end of his journey, not caring for the unsound order of democracy
Yet all the beggars have gathered gracefully on the porticoes of power
With their humble bowls of peace and freedom
Demanding foods for ancient wisdom to sustain all along the corn fields
As they cannot wait any longer for the doom’s day to wash away their nights
So that the hangman’s noose never crosses fingers to the gallows
So that the vulgarisation of power of democracy be left in the hanging garden
And they let the bastards be writhing in serpentine labyrinth
And that is what happens to be the jackal’s day at the darkness of noon

Six hundred thirtyfour times of double standards have crossfired
Booming babies born into a roar of laughter
To say blessings to the barefooted millions of the wretched world
Where are the parents of the free world
Who have already dug up a hole in their panties to hide the bones and skulls
To bamboozle their whims of creating a paradise of evils
Always they smell rot, they perish momentarily
And are reborn again and again with their satanic skullduggery
Their chickbones are as feeble as a timid should be
They play the rule of the game.