Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Please let this end...
This video shows how savagely, barbarously cows are slaughtered by the hundred in India.
Its making me hystrical!
I feel so angry that I feel sick....numb!!!
I HATE being a human being.
I hope they'd slaughter me like that too and put an end to this devastating....compunction .....for my own kind......It makes me want to become a terrorist!
People, please do watch it....even though its a little too long for limited download users,
and please do spread it bloody all over the web!!!
Please, please, you owe it to humanity!!!
Friday, September 5, 2008
Concerning Technology, Materialism, WBUT......and Transcendentalism...
.
WBUT astounded me.
I mean...really!
It happened twice...once during the 1st semester exam, and then when the results got out....
After after four months of phony play acting, The West Bengal University of Technology finally seemed to be doing serious work:
Papers leaked with impossible regularity, and promptitude, days before the exam, and nobody protested. Lecturers and Professors didn't, for even a fleeting second, lose their cool about it, and lived on as though nothing out-of-the-way ever happened, as though that's the way things should have been. The whole tragedy seemed predetermined. And what shook me even harder was that this was the way things went on! Not once, not twice, but year after year after year!
That was the only serious work they did! Ensuring you didn't have to understand a word of Technology to get awarded with a B.Tech degree any more!!
And the consequences?
The simplicity with which students cheated(and succeeded) and the nonchalance with which the authorities pretermitted it...and the way everyone accepted it as natural....just left me careening!
I first decided not to let the whole thing get a hang on my thoughts, and tried to free myself simply by calling them the bleakest idiots....except that I couldn’t dislodge my feelings.
It all just seemed so...well, unethical!
The whole thing was built in the first place to make way for Technology, and by means of pursuing that goal, WBUT had somehow ended up with a practice that if anything, threatened its own cause! How could this be possible?
How could the art of teaching, by means of pursuing itself, end up relegating its own Quality?
Well…..I had all but logjammed my head pondering all this, when I stumbled into this piece of writing from Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and with this patched up with WBUT, one of those light bulbs went up over my head, and everything seemed to fall greatly, fabulously into place:
Well, that explains it quite well, doesn’t it?
I’ll say, the material WBUT, with its material Professors, material authorities, material means, material logic, is actually up to all but demolishing the Real WBUT. So that’s how it can happen! Not one, but two different schools of two completely different values, clashing...each one to destroy the other! WOW!
But why all this hypocrisy?
Why be so nihilistic as to restrict the whole of teaching and learning to just phony, unauthentic babble?
The stimulation seems inevitably to come from Technology itself.
The human mind is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative and intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. It does not proceed by reason or by laws. It proceeds by feeling, intuition and aesthetic conscience.
Technology lacks all that, doesn't it?
Technology is ugly, dull, and thoroughly hierarchical.
And so, the more they try to indulge in all that technical talk, drawing, equations, and logic, the more their minds struggle to run away from it.
Its just all of Technology they can’t stomach.
Then a question turns up, then why are they pursuing it? .....Why waste time and energy over something you exhaustively deplore?
Materialism...I think!
Students want the degree for glamour and wealth it affirms, but hate the knowledge which that degree is supposed to symbolize.They don't want all the high-flown theory, they only want to be called Engineers, due to the term's promising connotation in India's proliferating economy.
Most teachers too, have ventured into teaching in Engineering colleges for purely acquisitive reasons, and thereby want nothing more than the salary their occupation brings them, when they too, detested technology when they themselves were Engineering students, and haven’t much varied their feelings ever since.
So, when the students don’t go to WBUT colleges to learn, and the teachers don’t go to WBUT colleges to teach,is WBUT a university at all?
Does WBUT have anything that partakes, even vaguely, somewhat of Pirsig's real university?
I don’t think so.
WBUT doesn't really impart any learning.
WBUT is just a building, a corpse, an empty throne .....
.....and perhaps that’s what Technology leads people to, in the end.
Just vain material possessions at the cost of values.......
Just pompous, ignoble Aristotelian Aristocracy at the cost of mental sanity.....
Maybe Chris Rea was right, you know what he said:
And all the roads jam up with credit
And there's nothing you can do
It's all just pieces of paper flying away from you
You must learn this lesson fast and learn it well
This ain't no upwardly mobile freeway
This is the road to hell
…………………………………………………..
This ain't no technological breakdown
Oh no, this is the road to hell!
And maybe.....
well.....
I really don’t know what more to say.....!
.
WBUT astounded me.
I mean...really!
It happened twice...once during the 1st semester exam, and then when the results got out....
After after four months of phony play acting, The West Bengal University of Technology finally seemed to be doing serious work:
Papers leaked with impossible regularity, and promptitude, days before the exam, and nobody protested. Lecturers and Professors didn't, for even a fleeting second, lose their cool about it, and lived on as though nothing out-of-the-way ever happened, as though that's the way things should have been. The whole tragedy seemed predetermined. And what shook me even harder was that this was the way things went on! Not once, not twice, but year after year after year!
That was the only serious work they did! Ensuring you didn't have to understand a word of Technology to get awarded with a B.Tech degree any more!!
And the consequences?
The simplicity with which students cheated(and succeeded) and the nonchalance with which the authorities pretermitted it...and the way everyone accepted it as natural....just left me careening!
I first decided not to let the whole thing get a hang on my thoughts, and tried to free myself simply by calling them the bleakest idiots....except that I couldn’t dislodge my feelings.
It all just seemed so...well, unethical!
The whole thing was built in the first place to make way for Technology, and by means of pursuing that goal, WBUT had somehow ended up with a practice that if anything, threatened its own cause! How could this be possible?
How could the art of teaching, by means of pursuing itself, end up relegating its own Quality?
Well…..I had all but logjammed my head pondering all this, when I stumbled into this piece of writing from Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and with this patched up with WBUT, one of those light bulbs went up over my head, and everything seemed to fall greatly, fabulously into place:
The real University is not a material object. The real University .... has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues.
The real University is a state of mind.
It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location. It’s a state of mind which is regenerated throughout the centuries by a body of people who traditionally carry the title of professor, but even that title is not part of the real University. The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself.
The second university, the legal corporation, cannot teach, does not generate new knowledge or evaluate ideas. It is not the real
University at all. It is just a building, the setting, the location at which conditions have been made favorable for the real University
to exist.
Well, that explains it quite well, doesn’t it?
I’ll say, the material WBUT, with its material Professors, material authorities, material means, material logic, is actually up to all but demolishing the Real WBUT. So that’s how it can happen! Not one, but two different schools of two completely different values, clashing...each one to destroy the other! WOW!
But why all this hypocrisy?
Why be so nihilistic as to restrict the whole of teaching and learning to just phony, unauthentic babble?
The stimulation seems inevitably to come from Technology itself.
The human mind is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative and intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. It does not proceed by reason or by laws. It proceeds by feeling, intuition and aesthetic conscience.
Technology lacks all that, doesn't it?
Technology is ugly, dull, and thoroughly hierarchical.
And so, the more they try to indulge in all that technical talk, drawing, equations, and logic, the more their minds struggle to run away from it.
Its just all of Technology they can’t stomach.
Then a question turns up, then why are they pursuing it? .....Why waste time and energy over something you exhaustively deplore?
Materialism...I think!
Students want the degree for glamour and wealth it affirms, but hate the knowledge which that degree is supposed to symbolize.They don't want all the high-flown theory, they only want to be called Engineers, due to the term's promising connotation in India's proliferating economy.
Most teachers too, have ventured into teaching in Engineering colleges for purely acquisitive reasons, and thereby want nothing more than the salary their occupation brings them, when they too, detested technology when they themselves were Engineering students, and haven’t much varied their feelings ever since.
So, when the students don’t go to WBUT colleges to learn, and the teachers don’t go to WBUT colleges to teach,is WBUT a university at all?
Does WBUT have anything that partakes, even vaguely, somewhat of Pirsig's real university?
I don’t think so.
WBUT doesn't really impart any learning.
WBUT is just a building, a corpse, an empty throne .....
.....and perhaps that’s what Technology leads people to, in the end.
Just vain material possessions at the cost of values.......
Just pompous, ignoble Aristotelian Aristocracy at the cost of mental sanity.....
Maybe Chris Rea was right, you know what he said:
And all the roads jam up with credit
And there's nothing you can do
It's all just pieces of paper flying away from you
You must learn this lesson fast and learn it well
This ain't no upwardly mobile freeway
This is the road to hell
…………………………………………………..
This ain't no technological breakdown
Oh no, this is the road to hell!
And maybe.....
well.....
I really don’t know what more to say.....!
.
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