The problem with Discipline

 

Schools were established in the 1800s in Chicago with the intention to produce factory workers. That is why there is a line in the morning, the uniform, the belt, the tiffin box, the bell, bow down, and at all cost- do what you are asked to do system. The goal was to produce obedient people who would do what is asked without questioning their authority. Fast forward 200 years and very little has changed.

We as a generation have failed to define "discipline". We confuse authorities with leaders and we have massively diluted the definition of respect. We are asked to respect others- juniors should respect seniors, students should respect teachers: bow your head, do what is asked, do not question them. And sure, the students have been doing it. But that is not respect. That is acting as if they respect them. There is a massive difference between respecting someone and acting like you respect someone just like there is a massive difference between loving someone and pretending as if you love someone. Respect can only and only be given voluntarily. So, commanding someone to respect you is as dumb as commanding someone to love you. It cannot function and it has to be given voluntarily.

 

Its no wonder that our kids are not able to analyze, rationalize, comprehend, question.. in order words: THINK. The scary thing is that it is not a manifestation of a pathologic system but rather a result of a system that has been functioning at its best. Schools don’t have the leg to stand on morality nor on intellectuality to claim to be doing the right thing for these little human beings.

It does not take a genius to realize that it is a recipe for producing “YES sir” saying parrots who are designed to act like robots with unquestioning authority. This is a tragic misfortune that the very institutes which was designed to help kids think is the one that is holding the kids hostage in their intellectual development.

The fog of discipline is drawn dangerously close and has been made synonymous with slavery. The trick like any pandemic is to make yourself safe before it engulfs you. 

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Why you should get off social media?

I had been out of social media for 3 years and I thought I would share my experiences and perhaps convince you on why you should leave and why it is urgent.

Social media has deeply handicapped the new generation. More affected are girls than boys. While boys may use smartphones for games and porn, they are by nature less subjected to the constant comparison of looks (albeit not the hierarchical status.) The rate of depression which has been stable since the 80s has increased from 11% to 20% in teenage girls in the last 9 years. (ONE OUT OF EVERY 5 TEENAGE GIRL IS DEPRESSED). In college kids, it has increased from about 5% to 16%. The graph has risen sharply after 2011 when social media became standards and smartphones were regarded as a basic item. The rate of self-harm for teen girls has increased by 62% since 2009. The rate of self-harm for PRE-TEEN girls has increased by 189%. So, NO, it is not because cases are more diagnosed. This thing is alarming.

We need to have awareness and humility to recognize that we are not sharing our photos to let others know what is going on. We are sharing it because we look great in it and we want the world to admire us and feel good about ourselves. While there is nothing wrong with wanting to feel good about ourselves, this shortcut we have chosen is self-destructing. It is a self-defeating game. We are gambling our self worth to take a bubble bath in dopamine, to attain the approval of strangers who we don't care about. 

It has made us heavily dependent on the audience to enjoy our victories. You should want it because YOU want it, not because you want to be clapped. The minute you need an audience to enjoy your victories, you are giving too much power to people who don't care about you. You after feeling happy about someone commenting something nice invariably opens the channel to feel sad when they don't. And if you have been paying close attention, it does not take more than one snarky comment to negate all the complements. 

We are not going to protect us, nor our girls with a mob on the internet that burns those who fat shame others or by repeatedly saying, “You are beautiful the way you are.” We are all status-seeking monkeys and till the moment we don’t know who we are, we are invariably letting our worth be determined by likes and views. After all, we are the ones who are displeased with ourselves for not being able to spend on vacation like Dude X, or having car-like dude Y or looks like girl Z. Our anger at the world is merely an excuse.

We are not going to help ourselves or the kids by changing the word “mankind” with “peoplekind”. We can save them by helping them get off this app. Until they can build a solid sense of who they are and they have self-worth built strong enough which they can into fallback to on bad days, being on this app is suicidal. It is vitriolic to be on this app not because society tells you who to look like this or any of that popular notions, but because it is deeply ingrained in our consciousness to look for our status, to see where we fall on. And till we don’t know to our core about who we are and where we fall, social media is bound to take us down in its bottomless pit.

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The War of Ideas

We are reaching a point where the minute we start talking about important topics like feminism, transgender issues, religion, political beliefs, environmental issues, if our viewpoints are different than others, then a mob on the internet comes to shut us down. But society means people with DIFFERENT opinions living together. That is the very backbone of society.

Shielding the opposite viewpoints does not make us stronger, it makes us weaker and more dangerous. We need to learn to let our ideas battle, fight so that our ideas can die instead of us. The alternate is we ourselves fighting and bleeding. We will have to learn to be offended because the pursuit of truth is a bigger virtue than pleasing others or not offending people. Freedom of speech is an all-time low. You cannot put anything you don’t like under “hate speech”. Our ideas will have to learn to take insults and hits because they are young as we are. Blatantly disregarding opposing viewpoints makes us live in an echo chamber and that does not do anyone any good. That is not progress. That is regress. It is regressing back to tribalism where anyone who is in our tribe is our friend and anyone who is not is our enemy.

Our ideas and egos will have to learn to be injured, bleed, die and be reborn with something better.

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Failing Love

I have fallen in love many times in my life and that means I have fallen out of it just as many times. But that is the thing about falling in love, that it is easy.

It happens naturally, when paths come together, something that is simply handed to you because you just happened to be there. But staying in love, that is another story entirely. Your emotional erection wears off and your consciousness kicks in.

And folks, I don’t mean falling with people only. I also mean with ideas. Like how excited you were when you decided to join gym or learn guitar or whatever that is, fill in the blanks please. But the point is, that it just hit you, you did not have to sweat for it, make any commitments. There was no one nagging and complaining. All you had to do was dream.

But when reality struck its claws a little deeper, then, just like staying in love with people, staying in love with ideas became harder too. Loneliness seemed lot less demanding mistress and couch seemed more soothing than the sweaty gyms. “Love is not tested at coffee table”, I had read that somewhere, “It is tested when the distance increases and moments are hard” and our love was too fragile to sustain the harsh blow of reality..

And so we watched, we watched people we  loved slip away, we watched what we could become slip away slowly, simply and finally till we were left with nothing but us and we are not sure if we love us enough to save us from ourselves.

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Behind The Mirage

The morning alarm is beginning to sound like the ticking of a time bomb. When air itself acts like a poison, I am realizing that my lungs are no more craving fame or likes in facebook or stacks of gold coins under my pillow. In his book, “Barking at the wrong tree”, Eric Barker says, “Warren Buffet is 89 yrs old billionaire with net worth of around 80 billion dollars. There is not a single thing he is not able to buy. Would you swap your life with him?... and if not, why not?” Regardless of what the world has been shouting us, our soul, deep down  can never be convinced that fame and all the riches of the world are more valuable than time. It is therefore imperative to know what the essence of the game is and more importantly what isn’t.

Everything that had shined so brightly now is beginning to feel like a terrible bait of the world. What mattered in the end was never the phones we carried, the tablets we possessed or the watches we showed like trophies. It was easy to get deluded and get things mixed up because days somehow always keeps coming- one after another without any interruptions like the next meal, like the next breath and we forget that one day they may not. It was therefore a fundamental error in our part not to be grateful for this precious, fragile gift we have been given. Our ungratefulness and stubbornness to make it tangled and twisted in every single way puts a shame when met with the fact of the fragility and preciousness of life.

We have after all too lightly signed off our freedom to things that don’t matter and by the same equation let the real theme starve. We are desperately clinging to the wrong stuffs here as if the greatest words possible to come out of throat in our grave are going to be, “See, I won, I ignored your text messages” while wearing Gucci shoes.

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The Paparazzi Behind The Screen

Lately I have begun to develop a keen sense of distaste towards people. “Is it the man that wears the beast or is it the beast that wears the man?” I had read that a while back. Are we inherently good people who happen to be bad at times or are we inherently bad ones who just don’t have the courage to appear bad. But that blog post is for another day, it can wait. So can everything, but nevertheless let me rant about something that has been bothering me too much lately .

We as a generation seem to have been hypnotized in the things that don’t matter. The generation which is so obsessed with posting, “I don’t care what you think” in social media is the one who is obsessing over the likes. Ironically, the entire generation can’t wait to share the pics of that expensive restaurant they went to or that click they scored in just “the right light”. It needs to be shared, it needs to be looked at, it needs to be appreciated. Every victory needs to be applauded by others. People don’t want to go on vacation because it is fun, they want to go on vacation because they want to be seen going to vacation. They don't want to win, they want to be seen winning. They don't want to achieve, they want to be seen achieving. 

So, what’s the problem then? Haven’t we always wanted to flaunt the victories over the top of our lungs? Haven’t we always wished our friends to notice our expensive shoes? Or shout about how great our mark was in that particular subject?

The problem goes a bit deeper here. We have become obsessed with other watching us. In other words, we have become dependent on the audience. We need audience to feel good. We need audience to clap. We need audience to tell us we look great. In simpler words, the grand generation that has been audacious to say, “I don’t care about what you think”, has lost the ability to exist on his own. The crutch of audience has become essential to it’s very existence. The pathetic need to be validated through likes (Oh shut up, you count it over and over again, really ask yourself, what for?), through comments is acting as a major suicidal step in the growth of anyone into an independent being. Your winning has got to be of more importance to you than someone else applauding it. But we as a generation have leaned onto it so much, that now it is hard to stand without it. 

We have surrendered our vulnerability, our precious moments, our win, our freedom to the verdict of strangers. What if they don’t care? And it does not take a genius to know that, well THEY DON’T CARE. Nobody does. It is a circus, just in case you haven’t got the memo yet. 

Maybe social media is fine, once in a while to cheat solitude, maybe it is okay to let the bruises in heart bleed once in a while through the posts. But maybe you should not need them to make you, YOU. Maybe you should not be so eager for the world to clap at your victories, or like your pretty dress. Maybe once in a while you can yourself clap your own victories and it won’t be that bad because the person that would be cheering you, you can count on that person till your last breath.

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Conspiracy Against Soul

"Is it possible to miss someone you did not want to be with? Was the loneliness too big to rise in protest through your soul? Was it I you missed or was it loneliness that was too terrible? When you have never been treated with indifference, can you even know what love is?"

The jurisdiction was against me. I was not enough. A 160 characters in the text would call it a day, the sentence for my insufficiencies, my failure to be a creature without a scratch.

On the day you decided I was not enough, I swung back to my pits. Past, present and future collided simultaneously, simply and dreadfully. But hope is a crazy thing. You would think at one point, people lose it, like everything else we lose, like losing people, like losing love, like losing friendship, like losing innocence, like losing dreams, like losing glory. But it is not easy to lose hope. It sticks like a stupid unwanted chewing-gum which you just can’t get off you. Prisoners to be hanged go through this. Just as they are about to be hanged in the rope, they develop a delusion- “Maybe, I will be the exception, maybe I will be left free” – the delusion of reprieve.  I think evolution wise it has its significance. Afterall what if the creature told the nature, “Why bother”, who would reproduce then?

So, I stuck with my deluded hope for that one tring, that one “hi”, that one nod. Imagine where delusion is your only chance of survival against harsh reality, would you still cure it then? A broken heart waiting to heal on lies, how pathetic!

Last night I got a text from you saying how you had missed me. Is it possible to miss someone you did not want to be with? Was the loneliness too big to rise in protest through your soul? Was it I you missed or was it loneliness that was too terrible? When you have never been treated with indifference, can you even know what love is?

So, I would pick it up, your calling, your protest of loneliness. And you would pick it up, my desperate need of getting validation. My pathetic attempt to find a company would resonate with your screeching loneliness and we would call it, “love”, whatever the hell that means.

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Dr. Govinda Kc- a prophet in a wrong land

Dr. KC shows what an ideal human being looks like and why you should not be one of them.

If you have been following the news lately, it does not really take a genius to say who is right and who is wrong. Having nothing more than integrity has his only banner, Dr. Kc leads from the front on what a human is capable of, what an ideal human being looks like and why one should not aim for that.

A man can stand suffering. I would claim that he has strength to stand tall than any suffering presented to him. But it is indignation that he cannot stand, not the suffering. How can one ask anyone to be virtuous when it is precisely what is being punished. You are not being taken down for your vices, you are not dying for your wrong doing, but your honesty being your weak point, your integrity being your liability.

As you read this, little kids in the country right now are being taught on why "Honesty is the best policy", "Why you should refuse to settle for lies", "Why integrity is the highest form of badge a human should aim at" and god forbid if that kid actually listens and grows up, he is probably going to die, be called an insane person, even worse mistagged, blamed for everything by those who have nothing to offer to anyone, by those whose soul does not even have a faint taint of truth to spot on. That is what we are preparing our kids to be.

One of the most frequent talks over the dining table, over the coffee shops is about we wondering why we don’t get heroes in our country. I can tell you why, because the heroes don’t win, even worse anyone who dares not even for heroism but just for justice- even the ones asking the rapist to be given punishment, someone asking a taxi driver to pay by the reading on the cab, anyone and I mean anyone who dares for justice, who dares to carry truth as his only god is the one pay the price for being right.

As of now, well this is the example we are being set. This is the movie we are being forced to watch, where a good guy is taken apart into pieces by the bad guys who are powerful and the others are just watching him being torn apart; except it is not a movie, it is real and the country is losing.

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The Mirage

The loneliness often stabs from the back, at the least expected moment. The tunes in the song when you are wired in, a quick glance at your own shadow- the trigger is sent and a meltdown is coming.

And as my brain recollects the aura of a meltdown, I make my guards ready- the wisdom, the long breaths to distract myself, few quotes here and there, desperately cling on to the vision of dreams hoping they can drag me through the day.

A battle is inevitable.

I fragment. Each of my cells in the body aligns with one team or the other- one in the protest, one in the support. Each of them holding their flags for or against my vision, for or against the horizon and for or against my own leadership for me.  

Each of the philosophy I hold is tested. The tug of war begins. I drown, I rise, I shrink, I resist. The battle goes on.

And no matter who wins, I end up winning and losing at the same time. A part of me wins, a part of me loses. And there I sit at the consensus table with the winner, the loser, and me- staring at the shadow, hoping it lengthens and the day ends.

Some days it's about winning, some days it is about going through. Some days you triumph your vulnerabilities, some days you are not so lucky. Some days you float and some days you drown. And as much of a cliché, it is - Some days, you are Van Gogh's starry night, some days you are his suicide letter.

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The impersonator

My voice cracks with the crushing weight of the question, "Are you okay?" as my younger self asks me the question from the mirror. I try hard to hear him- the screaming of the unfulfilled promises, the carcass of the broken dreams and the echoes of failure are louder than the soft words.

"Have you done the things you wanted to do?", he asks me. My heart beats the same but sounds louder in the silence. My vacant eyes, my dry throat, and my dying soul muster up the courage in every corner of my being to just barely stand.

I tell him that fate dealt a heavy blow, that I had lost at something infinite, something big, that somewhere I did not measure up, that the battle was fought and the battle was lost, that my wings have torn and I cannot fly like I used to, that the dreams have remained unfulfilled and long forgotten.

"Are you still the person you were", he asks again.

I wish I could wrap pretty words around and tell him that beneath the flesh beats the same heart, that it was battle that was lost and not the compass, that life is sometimes a battle against gods and gods can be a little stubborn. But I don't. I tell him that I have lost the colours, that my armors are down and the wounds are on display.

I look him and question myself if he is real or I am, if he is the impersonator or I am.

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