Food.
Music.
Dance.
Alcohol perhaps.
Relationships.
Conversations.
Expressions.
Entertainment.
Moments.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
I'm progressing beyond the regular water/air/nutrient genre and thinking of what are our potential life savers. Any other ideas?
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Monday, May 10, 2010
An epiphanic thought and a theory connected.
I just had an epiphanic moment and am going to channelize it into the following post.
Now. We human beings have undoubtedly been brought up to face the (so to speak) throes that competition can actually throw at us at various points in our life. And as our society would have it, life without competition is a life not lived at all. A little push and a little shove; ok, make that a sizeable push and a sizeable shove, and boy are we on our way to approach where to we set out to be. Whose leg, hand, limbs altogether, integrity, respect, honour, space and mind we stamp is something we just stamp, forget about and move on with.
And as the calendar pages have shuffled by, we've grown to review competition as something we're too civil and grown up to engage in and have somewhere down the line, coined the term "healhty competition", which we are now not afraid to possess and be "politically correct" about.
Every culture has had its own style of upbringing with its own dose of "how to live a competitive life. wait. make that a healthy competitive life". And in our collective culture which I shall take the liberty of calling "Indian" (not to be mistaken as the identification of our nationality), one very prominent feature of stealthily building those competitive soul in our being is in the form of academics. Society has made it a point (even today) to have the world revolve around doctors, engineers and the new brand of academic species I'd like to call the MBA graduate. How students training to be any or none of the above doesn't matter, as long as its done.
Similarly, what does matter above and beyond everything else is how well we score in our academic life. Who came first in class, who topped school, who topped who-which-what-where-and-how is all that matters. With all this rubbish are born those whom I'd love to call the "marks sharks". These species are the ones who just cannot suffice by trying to top the class and make do with knowing just their own marks. And it is with this concept that my epiphanic thought began.
Elizabeth Kubler Ross gave the world of psychological thought her very popular and well used concept of the 5 stages of grief. To get a glimpse into this concept, click here. These stages were given to help understand the phase of grief human beings go through in order to deal with the grief and the griever most efficiently. These stages are as follows (just to jog your memory, those who know and have forgotten)...
1) Denial
2) Anger
3) Bargaining
4) Depression
5) Acceptance
I've come to believe that when a student gets his/her marks, they also undergo these 5 stages, and sometimes quite prominently at that.
1) Denial - "shucks, I couldn't have got such marks!!"
2) Anger - "those stupid examiners, it's all their fault!"
3) Bragaining - "ok, so I promise I'll work hard next time but can you please give me that 000.0005 mark that's missing from my paper!!!"
4) Depression - "how am I going to face my life from now on?"
5) Acceptance - "yeah so I got those marks, let's wait and watch for the next. I'm sure I'm going to top."
And that's how we live in this viscious cycle of marks, grief and this farce of a thing I call academic competition. Ooops, I mean "healthy competition."
I wonder whatever happened to learning (n.) in this process.
Now. We human beings have undoubtedly been brought up to face the (so to speak) throes that competition can actually throw at us at various points in our life. And as our society would have it, life without competition is a life not lived at all. A little push and a little shove; ok, make that a sizeable push and a sizeable shove, and boy are we on our way to approach where to we set out to be. Whose leg, hand, limbs altogether, integrity, respect, honour, space and mind we stamp is something we just stamp, forget about and move on with.
And as the calendar pages have shuffled by, we've grown to review competition as something we're too civil and grown up to engage in and have somewhere down the line, coined the term "healhty competition", which we are now not afraid to possess and be "politically correct" about.
Every culture has had its own style of upbringing with its own dose of "how to live a competitive life. wait. make that a healthy competitive life". And in our collective culture which I shall take the liberty of calling "Indian" (not to be mistaken as the identification of our nationality), one very prominent feature of stealthily building those competitive soul in our being is in the form of academics. Society has made it a point (even today) to have the world revolve around doctors, engineers and the new brand of academic species I'd like to call the MBA graduate. How students training to be any or none of the above doesn't matter, as long as its done.
Similarly, what does matter above and beyond everything else is how well we score in our academic life. Who came first in class, who topped school, who topped who-which-what-where-and-how is all that matters. With all this rubbish are born those whom I'd love to call the "marks sharks". These species are the ones who just cannot suffice by trying to top the class and make do with knowing just their own marks. And it is with this concept that my epiphanic thought began.
Elizabeth Kubler Ross gave the world of psychological thought her very popular and well used concept of the 5 stages of grief. To get a glimpse into this concept, click here. These stages were given to help understand the phase of grief human beings go through in order to deal with the grief and the griever most efficiently. These stages are as follows (just to jog your memory, those who know and have forgotten)...
1) Denial
2) Anger
3) Bargaining
4) Depression
5) Acceptance
I've come to believe that when a student gets his/her marks, they also undergo these 5 stages, and sometimes quite prominently at that.
1) Denial - "shucks, I couldn't have got such marks!!"
2) Anger - "those stupid examiners, it's all their fault!"
3) Bragaining - "ok, so I promise I'll work hard next time but can you please give me that 000.0005 mark that's missing from my paper!!!"
4) Depression - "how am I going to face my life from now on?"
5) Acceptance - "yeah so I got those marks, let's wait and watch for the next. I'm sure I'm going to top."
And that's how we live in this viscious cycle of marks, grief and this farce of a thing I call academic competition. Ooops, I mean "healthy competition."
I wonder whatever happened to learning (n.) in this process.
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