Brave new world

This is kind of a response to a friends post in his own blog (see here). I guess another blog post on the same thing is not going to mean much as far as the general creative content of the web is concerned. But if some day blog posts were to count as votes, I would want this voice to be loud enough for the rest of the world (or at least the rest of the country) to sit up and listen.

The world is full of people who work for money, fame, power, or more generally for the carrot or the stick. IIT is especially bloated with such people. It is frustrating, stifling and depressing. I am more comfortable if no one worked at all. If no one studied, and all the IITs and every engineering college in the country ran empty. I am more comfortable with a half-wit who is enraptured by science than by a super-intelligent genius who has his eyes set on the 20-something lakh package at the end of his student life. Frankly, the latter kind of people scare me. Yes, I agree everyone has a reason for wanting fame, money, or whatever, but by that measure Pakistan wants Kashmir, US wants oil and Osama wants the whole world. I don't think I am exactly comfortable with the idea.

I hope you get what I am driving at. A genius working for money is more dangerous than the entire Taliban put together. He might work on a nuclear bomb and sell it off to the highest bidder. Okay, that was scary. On a smaller scale he will simply apply his brains where the money is, working for a corporate giant while the vast damned world waits for someone intelligent enough to solve its problems. Or perhaps he will churn out papers at an alarming rate on how to make epsilon differences to little-known algorithms that matter not except to settle arm-chair disputes over expensive luncheons.

Money, power, fame, papers, accolades. It is all the same. Work not for the motive, the Bhagvad Gita tells us. Work for work's sake, work for the joy inherent in the work itself. Learn for the joy of knowledge. Study for the sake of the joy inherent in discovery. Anything else you do is a sin. A crime. It is murder, of the subject of your study, and of yourself. Getting an A on the course does not mean you learnt something in the course. The grades count for nothing. Zero. Zilch. Anything you do, any work you do, must be done for the task's own sake. Nothing more, nothing less. Otherwise it counts for nothing. Otherwise you could be replaced by a computer churning numbers.

The thing that I want to raise my voise against is not just that. It is something deeper, although I hate to call it this: the system. The system, meaning all of you, me, the professors, everybody, we encourage this attitude. You get projects based on your CGPA. Why? Take it from me, I have gotten A's in courses I never learnt anything from. Why must a low CGPA mean a lack of passion? You get into IIT based on an entrance exam. Why? What does the entrance exam measure? Does it measure passion, a desire to know more? Will it reveal an interest in science? How? When did a pen and paper test ever measure interest and passion?

The professors look at CGPAs when they judge students. The students look at CGPA when they take up courses. In this shithole, someone who is genuinely interested is kicked out of the picture. To do anything he wants to do he has to put forward his gradesheet, and to make his gradesheet look good he has to take up courses he has no interest in. Slowly he lets go of science and looks at the little numbers that add up, like the speedometer in a car race. So many kilometers left, so many covered. Slowly he becomes one of them, one of those who work for the grades. He will pick up a job that will pay him well, bide his life like a fucking machine working for peanuts, even as the child within him, once open-mouthed in awe at the world around him, is stifled, smothered and killed.
Great world, this, the one we live in.