By Toki Blah
The first problem that pops up- Meghalaya has a total of 3,39,217 hectares of cultivable area capable of producing annually only 98,37,293 kgs (9837 MT) food grains. The state needs an
extra import of 81,500 MT from outside (through Central assistance) to feed its 32,11,474 population. Where will this shortfall in food grains for an independent Meghalaya come from? From China? The West?
I’m 74 years old and a genius once said “Count your age by the friends you have not by the number of years” . Cool, so I tried to compare between the friends I had 60 years ago and the number I have now. By this comparison I now have thousands while 60 years ago I had a few. Yesterday all my friends had homes and places where they resided and if I ever had the urge to meet them I either I went to their place or they came to mine. We met at the cinema, the theatre, at school or behind the school loo just to share a fag or two. We played together on the football field or simply sat down to talk about everything under the sky. There were just a handful of us but what the Hell, I was happy with the few friends I then had. Today I have more than a thousand. I can talk to them any time of night or day . They can call or write to me any time of the day. They can intrude into my privacy any time they wanted to and I can do the same. Yet I’m still lost ; friendless and perhaps on the verge of depression. I have my Face Book friends; My Whatsapp friends; my email and twitter friends. I can literally put all the friends I have in my one pocket, yet I still feel lonely. I console myself with the knowledge that technology has advanced far beyond my understanding yet why does my heart tell me you’re a bloody loser; you laugh but still cry when you think no one is watching. Just a passing thought!
Sixty years ago, no let’s make it forty, I would rise up with the dawn, put on my jogging shoes, whistle to my dog and together we would run the course from Motphran, via Garrison to Wards Lake and back. It was called exercising one’s constitution. Today if I tried the same people would call me loony. Its dangerous today to do what we did yesteryears ago. There is pollution and you can wreck your lungs simply by walking the roads of Shillong. There is the speeding vehicle on the wrong side with a driver who either got his licence because his parents were VIPs or he simply bought his driving licence. Yes today everything is up for sale, and you can even buy an expensive I Phone with the latest GPS to assist your sense of direction. Yet why do I and every one of the indigenous community I belong to feel so completely lost; leaderless; confused and perplexed?
I tried, I sincerely tried to find the moral sense of direction; the guiding principles; the ethics my forefathers held on to and never lost sight of. Today these values are nowhere to be found. They have simply disappeared; taken leave and vanished. Look I am not trying to sound self-righteous, sanctimonious or holier than thou. Truth is, I am as lost and confused as the next man. I turn to teachers who used to be lighthouses for my generation. Get lost they told me, can’t you see we have no time for you. I turn to parents, the bedrock of all society, to only discover that they had relegated their parental responsibilities to ‘snowed under’ teachers! Children now learn from a soulless uncaring net. I turn to my church for guidance. Sorry My Son, you have come to the wrong place. We provide consultation Sundays only. Rest of the week you’re on your own. Clear off, vamoose! Go search for understanding elsewhere. Again just passing thoughts!
I remember passing my IAS in 1972 and being allocated the UP cadre. I was desperate to come back home. In 1977 I was in Delhi looking for a home transfer and by chance came upon Capt WA Sangma, Bah BB Lyngdoh, Bah Stanley Nichols Roy and Bah GG Swell, all four of them in one place at the same time, sitting together that day in Meghalaya House. It was too good a chance to miss so I approached them. I based my plea on my love for Meghalaya and the need to come back and serve my home state etc. was politely but diplomatically advised that the young state can wait for my return but Meghalaya’s practical need then was for time tested bureaucrats. I didn’t agree but 45 years down the line I now concur with the sagacious wisdom of those wise elders. Today I find similar absurd irrational sentiments being peddled around our city streets. Youngsters scream from the roof tops about an imagined glorified past. They then follow up on their proclaimed love for the Land with a call for independence from India and surprisingly older people who should know better add to this chorus. That needs to be questioned.
The first problem that pops up – Meghalaya has a total of 3,39,217 hectares of cultivable area capable of producing annually only 98,37,293 kgs (9837 MT) food grains. The state needs an extra import of 81,500 MT from outside (through Central assistance) to feed its 32,11,474 population. Where will this shortfall in food grains for an independent Meghalaya come from? From China? The West? Now why should they? And that’s the stark reality. The ugly truth is we don’t know what to do with our Present, so we resent it. We idolise the Past which is dead and gone. Then we ignore the Future that we really have to worry about.
So what do we do now? Here I have a confession to make. The following comments are not the product of a mere passing idle thought. It’s what I believe to be the outcome from some serious thinking, emerging perhaps from long hours of reading, questioning, discussing and finally coming to some bitter home truths. Fact is we are so engrossed with history, with an imagined glorious past, that we have completely erased the needs of the “future”. To be fair to everyone, we first need to define “future”. It is the tomorrow of my grandchildren, the era of our future generations! What do these future generations want from us? HOPE I guess. How do we do this? By providing the best quality education they will need to sustain, support and assist themselves in a Globalised World that is rapidly shrinking ! And here my friends is where we have miserably failed to provide value based, sustainable educational practices to our children. Instead our present education system simply emphasises on the mass production of certified literates. Cramming and parrot like repetition are officially acknowledged as education. Reading, understanding and comprehending what has been read actually suppressed and discouraged. This produced in our education system an industry called “Private tuition” which teachers found more lucrative than the meagre salary they are paid to impart knowledge via the classroom. Parents happily welcomed it; teachers encouraged it while the Education Department just turned a blind eye. The educated zombies living in our midst today are its products. No passing thought this. Its stark brutal reality.
The reading habit in our tribal culture is simply not encouraged. Because parents don’t read books, the young too weren’t nurtured in that environment except perhaps on books that help an “exam-heavy education system”. The most that people invest on non-educational reading material, is a newspaper and that too simply to read the latest sensations. With the onset of TV, social media and the mobile phone such investments will further shrink as the social need to gossip is better served through this medium. Yet technologically advanced nations like Israel, smaller in size that Meghalaya, still give extreme importance to reading. On the Sabbath, when everything comes to a halt, the only shops allowed to remain open in the Jewish state are book shops. Books there are pursued for the knowledge they give, for with knowledge comes power. Power brings dignity, self confidence and social elegance. Most of our politicians have tons of money but no social elegance just because they lack depth of knowledge. So we have a self conscious political system, aware of its own educational shortcomings and scared to death of the people ever attaining knowledge. It will mean an end to the political bullshit we have been fed on! So what’s to be done? Simple – keep the people from ever achieving power through knowledge. Keep them as illiterate as possible. Killing quality education then becomes a political agenda. No mere passing thought, just the unacceptable truth! Books don’t just affect an individual; it affects society as a whole. A great scholar once said: “The history of a person’s thought development is his reading history. A race without reading is a race without hope”. Damn he must be talking about us !