Creating a jazz has become the
need of the hour these days. Every service you take needs an enormous amount of
it! The argument is that without jazz people will not know and appreciate and feel
the sense of growth of the industry. Might be - but are the people associated
with creating this jazz really thinking about the so called side-effects of it?
Tried revolving my head around a few of the sectors where it has become evident.
Travel being my prime interest,
the images of the recent Kedarnath floods stuck me with despair. The holy place
for the Hindu community is now a disaster-hit spot with more than 250 people
dead around Kedarnath alone. Let us go more than 100 years back. Were there no
cloud bursts then? There might have been - a few which might not have been recorded
as well. The main reason for building a temple around the lingam was to protect
it and the reason for keeping the pilgrimage so far off and out of access is to
make the pious people realize the fact that it is not easy to be where they are
and hence they will appreciate the act of being present around Kedarnath and
such regions.
By doing this, the general health
& the determination of the person visiting such places increase and it is
natural for this to happen. With all the modern amenities and the thought
process of ‘making the travel conducive
and accessible’, the beauty of it is gone! There are associated services of
lodges; restaurants etc around to ensure that the travelers are taken care. I
am not refuting the requirement of the hour for travel and hence the income to the
nation is improving and all that. But then, there probably could have been
better ways to implement it rather than losing the beauty of the place and
spoiling the natural habitat.
The other area of interest
imbibed from my mom being education, I have been a constant observer of the
recent trends that are taking place in the sector in India. Technology off late
is playing a vital role in pulling in the crowd (to be read as parents). ELearning
with digital classrooms are becoming a reality these days. My mom was attending
a seminar which spoke about implementation of cloud computing in the schools
and colleges to help share the information across without caveats or
scalability. This of course brings in the pricing model of pay as much you use.
So, a win-win situation is created according to the marketers there.
I have my own doubts about this.
The other day, I was seeing a video of one of the greatest innovators in
education - Sugata Mishra. He, with his efforts of proving the working of child
self-learning has communicated a research idea of self-learning which works
everywhere. Unfortunately the mediocre educationists have just taken the ‘self-leaning’ bit of it into
consideration thus killing the whole essence of Indian education of giving it a
motherly touch. There are only grades now and the kids don’t really need to
know stuff to get through with higher grades especially with a proposition of increasing
the percentage of multiple choice questions. There are other sets of people who
argue the reason for knowing the basics when they are readily available and
thus the concentration can be on what is not existing and thus contributing
eventually to the innovative community.
That may be one view of seeing it.
But without knowing the basics, without going through an arduous effort, the
amount of appreciation the kid will have towards learning probably will not be
so much and they will tend to make a lot of basic mistakes without a 100%
understanding. Technology is no doubt a great enabler for innovation, but I
feel that it has to be implemented in a proper sense. There are things which
cannot at any point of time replace technology and we cannot create silos out
of kids. They will eventually not know what bonding is all about. Educating
kids is not all about getting them to the next level. A lot of moral, ethical
and social feelings are associated along with the basic sciences; and these
cannot be replaced by technology (however advanced it may get).
Innovation, increased level of
service and technology are indeed great terminologies - but only till the time they are used constructively. Else, they turn out to be beasts. I can correlate
it to the famous saying about processes - ‘A
process is supposed to ease the living of the individual going through it;
else, screw it!’
