Wounded Alma Mater.

The massacre at Virginia Tech has blown the hallowed institution of university to smithereens. It is like bombing the mosque, temple, synagogue, or church. No, I am wrong the university is more sacred than the religious centers because here the learned and the learners together are in the pursuit of knowledge the only activity truly epitomizing the essence of being human.

The killer wounded his alma mater and killed her children who were not strangers but his own siblings. Who would now feel safe in the lap of alma mater? The students and teachers will doubt each other; the home of learning has been shattered. I feel the pain of the teachers of Virginia Tech who grope to find the answer to the biggest question of their life why did they fail to pacify the brewing anger of a young guy who had shown enough signs of alienation. Something somewhere must have altered the role of university, teachers and education so subtly that resulting absence of support system for any estranged student turned an ordinary student into the perpetrator of the deadliest massacre in US history.

I do not claim to know America and its culture and how it would feel to be a part of an American university so I am not in a position to comment upon the pressures an immigrant student might have felt that led him to commit mass murder of his own varsity fellows. However as a teacher I think the lacking may lie in not reaching out to the family of the student especially his parents at a time when first signs of diabolical thoughts were detected in his writings. Taking the family into confidence and tracing the causes of his problems might have given the university authorities better clues to know true state of the mind of the embittered student. I feel sorry for the VT faculty and staff who no doubt would have done more had they known what catastrophe a lone student would bring to their institution.

“Give respect to each other, help the weak students to grow, never make fun of any student, never ridicule anyone and always stretch your hand for mutual growth “, this is my message to all the students of the world.

Existentialism. (My 100th Post)

When I got the novel Plague by Albert Camus I had no idea who the author was and what kind of the novel Plague would turn out to be. Later I came to know that Camus was associated with existentialism though he himself preferred not be associated with any school of thought. Camus was once a close friend of Sartre who is regarded as the leading philosopher of existentialism of the 20th century. The meaning of existentialism in philosophy was not clear to me and after searching on net and reading from my introductory book on philosophy I found that existentialist philosophers believe that human beings although have no power to choose the environment of their birth but they do have the power to form their world through exercising the will power. I know that there must be more to the subject than what I have understood but the essence that I got from reading about it is liberating. One can make a difference for better in the presence of overwhelming problems and challenges through resoluteness and will. Plague is such a story where the indomitable spirit of the human beings fought a battle against the plague. Plague struck the people out of the blue and altered their destiny but failed to subdue the will of the people to defeat the dreaded disease. Eventually the people of the town saw the retreat of the plague and began living their ordinary lives again.

My mood is ethereal

The night has fallen and the humming of the fan enhances the silence all around. I am sitting in my study room with a new book around. "...And Another Woman Shall Bear Me" is the collection of articles by Khadijah Gauhar an Afro-Asian writer. I have already finished a couple of articles and surprisingly the first article was finished even before I reached home after purchasing the book. My bike was standing idle for almost a month and I decided to take a ride on it. I went straight to the bookshop to get the book and on my return trip I found my self stuck in a traffic jam. The blockade was so massive that I switched off my bike and opened the first pages of the book to read. I created an island of serenity in the midst of mayhem and started reading the book. As I engrossed myself in the thoughts and ideas of the author I forgot that I was stranded in the traffic jam and the feeling of being in control gave me satisfaction at a time when most of the people seemed frustrated. I read about the author's apathy towards restrictive form of education she got in a school of a Muslim neighborhood of Cape Town in 1930s. As I finished the first article with these words " I believed that the general aim of sound education is to help individuals to grow to fuller maturity; to help them to live well with his or her own world or society", I looked around and found no improvement in the traffic jam. I waited for few more minutes and then turned the bike back to reach home via long route. I am reading the other articles now but I will never forget the start of the book as it was made in very unusal environment for reading. My mood is ethereal.

Curse of a woman

Leave me forever if you so desire but you will long for love and it will never embrace you. Every step forward and every passing moment will lead you to a life where each day ends in the lap of loneliness, ennui will rule your life and tall buildings surrounding your abode will obstruct fresh air and sunshine to enter, the loosening of the tie will not ease your breathing and you will feel your body turning into a concrete. You will watch thousand faces popping out from the dead walls of your forlorn room mocking your highbrow living and you will die all alone in the midst of dark night faraway in time as well in distance from the one who is urging you right now not to leave.