Notes to the Reader
- There is darkness on this page.
- Former cult members often speak out against inside atrocities after they have been disillusioned with the leader many years later. That is the kind of atmosphere here.
- I had written an article with a similar theme last year, about some things that were bothering me. This is the second part of that.
- This time, there are footnotes. Easier to look up meanings, contexts, and references.
- I am speaking in a sans-serif font and You-Know-Who in a serif font.
1960: The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was founded.
1973: The oil crisis caused the prices to rise and remain high for years, making the oil producers wealthy¹. This attracted a lot of migrant labour.
1989: Fall of the Berlin Wall
1991: Integration into the global economy. Development of bicultural identity, combining the local identity with an identity linked to global culture². Tim Berners-Lee created the first web page and the Soviet Union was dissolved.
1998: Google was founded. The Third Industrial Revolution, also known as the Digital Revolution was in progress.
2001: The attacks of 9/11. The US invaded Afghanistan.
2003: Invasion of Iraq
2004: Orkut, Facebook, and Gmail launched.
I have recently graduated and need a job. I am not familiar with the job market beyond Employment Exchanges and PSC exams. I have no clue what is happening in big cities. I have been teaching in tuition centres but that is not a steady source of income. My family doesn’t own much property, feudal or otherwise. The Middle East is out of the question because I have no contacts that can refer me to a job there. I really don’t want to go back to manual labour.
I have a worldview that was heavily distorted by popular dogmas³ I picked up from my immediate surroundings as I was growing up. I haven’t travelled much, nor have I read an awful lot of books. My taste in literature is not as sophisticated as it should be. Information technology baffles me. I myself wasn’t very good at studying. To tell you the truth, I have absolutely no idea how language and the human mind work.⁴
I hear a lot about these new machines called “computers''. Those contraptions are from hell and I will never go near such devilry. Not because I fear that it would explode if I press the wrong buttons, but it corrupts the soul and takes away jobs. I know this because I read it in a pamphlet. What on earth is this thing called “internet”? Must be a Trojan horse planted by the Americans before they come to invade us in the middle of the night with the rest of their military. Everybody stay away from that thing! We are at war here!! I also don’t eat okra because the mucus is actually a form of fat and fat is bad.⁵
I belong to the first generation to attend college or to choose teaching as a profession. My skills are rudimentary because I haven’t had enough practice with what I learned in college. If I attract more students, I can practise my skills upon them and gain some experience. Just like a carpenter who practices his craft on spare wood during early stages of his career. I shouldn't really teach them to use the language properly. That is too dangerous. Also there is a minor issue: I don’t know how to do that.
If I can cunningly devise a scheme in which the speaker forms the idea in their first language and then translates it into English, the possibilities are endless. I will make them practise the process of translation really hard and if anyone questions the effectiveness of the programme, I can always tell them that they didn’t practise enough.
I know that there is no proof that it works and it is mostly a product of my own fantasies. That won’t matter because I will offer the programme for free. Besides, how many linguists can you find in a sleepy rural town of barely literate parents who are too busy earning the daily bread to think about the quality of education their children are getting? Zero. I can teach them whatever I want as long as everything looks orderly. To fish in troubled waters, that’s the plan.
“For you fancy that shepherds and rulers never think of their own interest, but only of their sheep or subjects, whereas the truth is that they fatten them for their use, sheep and subjects alike.” -Plato, The Republic⁶
I am the only one standing between people and chaos. If I don’t step out of my house today, the streets will burn tomorrow. Anarchy will spread. People are inherently violent in nature and they always need someone like me to protect them from their own demons. These kids have no one else to look after them. I believe that a single school is as effective as ten prisons, although that could mean that each child is born a convicted felon and should be treated that way.I will have my fingers on the pulse of many batches of students and I’ll make sure none of them gets out of the vicious circle of poverty however hard they try. Especially the tall poppies⁷. Do I look like a saint to you? If I can get a few of them on my side, that will help immensely with publicity. Those are the best billboards to advertise my skills. But I should be careful with them because they can find how dubious my methods are, more easily than the rest. Some of them already know it. That is why they are keeping their distance from me. Ignore them.
Image 1: “Ooh look at all these pliable teenage brains handed over to me by their innocent parents for free and with full consent, buzzing and sparkling with neuronal activity that I can rewire to my will and lead to the paradise that I’m creating, turning them into replicas of my own mind.”⁸
I just need to keep up the show for a few years. After that no one will bother to look back and find out how horrendous my scheme is. Besides, I will have climbed up so many rungs of power, decorated by so many low-hanging degrees and certificates, that no one can touch me after that. In short, I can get away with it. So it doesn’t matter if my methods are basically schizophrenic. I should also let you know that I use the phrase “social engineering” in a positive way⁹. Like it is a good thing to do.
I am thoroughly aware that my scheme is the medical equivalent of administering truckloads of unapproved drugs, that has never been tested before, to many batches of unsuspecting kids, taken in by my clever marketing of it as a magic pill for upliftment, over the course of many years. Anything is possible¹⁰.
The programme started in the summer vacation of 2003. We were in eighth grade. Every year, the sessions would start in summer and continue throughout the year, finding time after school and even during lunch breaks. The school authorities freely allowed the classrooms to be used to conduct these sessions.
He would bring in people of power from outside to demonstrate how efficient his system of control is. How tight his grip over his students was. It bore close resemblance to a puppet show, but with invisible strings. There were many physical and vocal exercises that he made the students practise. He would snap his fingers in many ways and the students would do the action they were taught. These exercises got more creative as years passed and tyranny continued its free reign.
Image 2: Part of a printed advertisement for a batch that started in April 2006. The programme was marketed as a revolution in English education, a unique product of research and innovation.
Once the programme was conducted in a private building. I was in eleventh grade (2006) and would help him with some clerical tasks. In return, he would buy me lunch and fried fish everyday for two months. I was an active part of the programme for three years. Setting up a makeshift library that students can use in their free time and occasional visits by native speakers were the silver linings on that dark cloud.
Image 3: A sample of study material from the programme, which was treated as an intellectual property and kept confidential. Note the strong emphasis on the process of translation. Practice was meant to speed up this process.
I was touted as a successful product of the programme. Poster boy. Combined with my academic performance and achievements in arts, I was one of the best megaphones he could use to shout out his message and win people over. It was unthinkable to say no to him.
Like any other typical school teacher, he had a constant need to feel respected. If you even attempt to question his worth, the consequences would be dire and the scars he can inflict on you would last a lifetime. I had a first-hand experience of this, while I was in ninth grade. He thought that I was being “arrogant” after winning a cartoon competition outside the school and would keep me out of his sessions for days. At the end I had to cry for mercy to stop this emotional bullying. Next day, he would allow me to enter the classroom―but only after making me confess the false accusation in front of everybody and telling them in detail how I had begged before him the previous evening.
Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors. This is their model of humanity.” ― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed¹¹
I have seen him unleash his wrath upon other students as well. Once a few of them enrolled their names but didn’t appear for the sessions. This enraged him deeply. They would be branded as “others” for as long as they stayed in the school. Othering was a strong tactic he used against anyone who would defy his authority or competence. There were clearly defined categories of “us” and “them”. I knew I couldn't escape anytime soon because I had seen how painful he can make me feel about it emotionally. He didn’t shy away from using physical force either.
A partial list of “others” that he kept a perpetual grudge against:
- Everyone who could but didn’t sign up for his programme and particularly the ones who abandoned it midway
- Students who didn’t practise daily using his handouts
- Schools with English as medium of instruction and parents who sent their kids there, including many of his colleagues
He gave more emphasis to“finding thy place” than “finding thyself”. You are not supposed to pursue what you like. You should do what we ask you to do. Because you owe us every fibre of your being. He would fight tooth and nail to convince you otherwise if you told him that you wanted to pursue a creative career. This is what happened in my case.
He wanted me to pursue medicine after twelfth so that I can prescribe low-cost medicines to rural patients, similar to what he was doing. He knew that I could draw but wouldn’t let me take a creative profession. To his dismay, I chose engineering (which was, surprise, surprise, the only other option available to me). He didn’t like that very much. When I started earning after graduation, he wasn’t impressed by my salary. He was critical of me and would try to make me regret my decisions. It was humiliating. Do you see how far his hands extended in time and space? Six years after I had left his programme. Hundreds of kilometres away. Still he had me by my throat.
In his sessions, all attempts of upward class mobility were discouraged and termed as fundamentally wrong and inspired by greed. Catch them young and nip in the bud all aspirations towards it. He made the students acutely aware of their economic backgrounds. Where they came from. There was an initiation ritual designed specially for this very purpose. Bank loans were bad in his opinion because it led to more borrowing. He seemed to have a vision of utopia in him which he wanted to see realised through his students.
Proper English education is a path to liberation, a way out of poverty. He understood it better than any of us. That is exactly why he felt the need to subvert it. It is hard to believe that he was unaware how damaging his scheme could be to the students. Severe anxiety followed you everywhere like a shadow. That shadow spoke to you. It called you worthless. You will never be free of this ceaseless commentary and criticism because it is coming from within you.
I can safely say that he was not driven by altruistic¹² motives as he would want everyone to believe. The whole circus was part of his desperate attempt to secure and maintain a government job. There are no questions of morality here as that has already been forfeited to his ideology.
When, lo, as they reached the mountain's side,
A wondrous portal opened wide,
As if a cavern was suddenly hollowed;
And the Piper advanced and the children follow'd,
And when all were in to the very last,
The door in the mountain side shut fast.
-The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Robert Browning¹³
We intuitively knew at some level that he reminded us of the Pied Piper (see image 1). Once he literally made all of us walk around the village promoting the ideas he believed in, holding signs and yelling slogans which were handed down to us. This was part of his crusade against schools that had English as medium of instruction. He somehow felt threatened by those schools. Why go to a better school when I can make you fluent in English in this school, that too for free? That was the argument.
After all of this, after I got out of school, and got into college, I came face to face with the very people I have been rallying against—students from “other” schools, who were now my classmates. Good thing that they didn’t know anything about my phase when I regarded them as my sworn enemies. I can imagine how I would have felt if they showed me the same kind of hostility. They were welcoming and undiscriminating, regardless of my background.
Some arguments against learning English properly¹⁴ are listed below. Let's not discuss the reality of any of them.
- It is the coloniser’s language. If you learn to use it, that makes you an ally of the British.
- With language comes culture. Our culture is under attack from outsiders and we must protect it at any cost.
- Fear of extinction of the first language. We should try to reverse the slow withering of language-based division of democratic states.
- Thinking in first language leads to innovation. Many countries outside of the Commonwealth are cited as examples for its success.
It was the students who paid the real cost of this pseudoscientific experiment because they have to live the rest of their lives with a restless voice coming from the back of their heads that anxiously tries to translate every piece of linguistic information that is entering through the senses, all the time, whether they want it or not. After long exposures to the verbal activities of a single individual, your mind talks to you in his voice. It thinks like he thinks. You can no longer remember who you were before you joined the programme. You’ve been robbed of your own mind.
***
What did I learn from the programme and subsequent years of facing a harsh world for which I was not prepared enough? Here are some key takeaways:
- Poverty can drive men desperate and make them sell their souls to ideology.
- Men who forsake morality are dangerous.
- There ain't no such thing as a free lunch, especially if it comes with fried fish.
- You can’t cheat the economics of education.
- There is no magic pill for upliftment. Do not trust its salesmen.
- Be careful where you invest your time.
- Quality of education is a reality.
- Guard your children.
Notes
[1] "Middle East Oil: History & Production." Study.com, 20 June 2019, study.com/academy/lesson/middle-east-oil-history-production.html
[2] Eytan, A. (2004). Globalisation and biculturalism. British Journal of Psychiatry, 184(4), 362-363. doi:10.1192/bjp.184.4.362-a, https://bit.ly/3yHs4zp
[3] dogma: an authoritative principle, belief or statement of opinion, especially one considered to be absolutely true and indisputable, regardless of evidence or without evidence to support it.
[4] But neither does Gafoor know where Dubai is. That doesn’t stop him from earning a decent living, does it?
Gafoor is a character in a film who would promise to take you to Dubai for a meagre sum. But only after landing would you realise that it was actually to Madras that he was taking you.
[5] Okra, sometimes called lady’s finger, has no fat in it. https://www.webmd.com/diet/health-benefits-okra
[6] Full text of The Republic: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1497/1497-h/1497-h.htm
[7] tall poppy syndrome: a tendency to begrudge or resent people of talent
[8] Source of illustration: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pied_Piper_with_Children.jpg
[9] “Social engineering is a manipulation technique that exploits human error to gain private information, access, or valuables.” https://www.kaspersky.co.in/resource-center/definitions/what-is-social-engineering
[10] The quote “Nothing is impossible, Everything is possible'' (sic) was one frequently used in the programme. Another one, “practice makes perfect”, was also a regular.
[11] Full English translation of Pedagogy of the Oppressed: https://envs.ucsc.edu/internships/internship-readings/freire-pedagogy-of-the-oppressed.pdf
[12] altruistic: showing a selfless concern for the well-being of others; unselfish
[13] The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Robert Browning: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45818/the-pied-piper-of-hamelin
[14] Well, the US and its allies had invaded two countries already and we are not in chummy terms with them either. Who knows if we are not next on their list?