BLINDNESS
Normally, students don’t bother with social issues until they’re well into college and discovering activist politics for the first time. But the subtle psychological indoctrination and counter-motivation start long before students realize the import of what they are told.
It starts off with small, harmless things. Like the other day, when our English teacher in school told us how to write a report, a “factual description of an event”. This is included in the CBSE class 11 English curriculum across the country. Everywhere, teachers teach it the same way. Something noteworthy happens. Regardless of the nature of the event involved, students are told to keep the report brief, simple, to the point. Just set out the important facts, very concisely. Don’t tell stories about the people involved. Keep it as clinically detached as possible, and never, ever get dramatic or sentimental or manifest any emotion that proves you are only human, because that’s how you lose marks.
Then our teacher gives us this example of a report, where we have to write about a traffic accident. She gives us pointers on the relevance on headings, which should be related to the number of mortalities. And then she does something that triggers off a dozen insistent alarm-bells in my head. She tells us to never write something that reads like the beginning of a storybook. She says that what a man was doing before he left his house the morning he was killed has no relation with his death
I agree with you, ma’am. What that man did and said and felt before he got run over has nothing to do how he died. But it has everything to do with how he lived.
There’s a message in this. It tells us that no matter who got killed, where, when, or how is not the issue. The issue is who wants to know. Newspapers know this, from the editor down to the copyboy. That is why despite the efforts of the reporters and journalists who are at present fighting for column space to publicize the horrific state of traffic (un)safety in this city, 90% of the reading public is still going to skim over those parts and turn to the entertainment section.
Because if you write the average report like a story, the trouble is that people might find it interesting. It would follow no format and get no marks, but the reader might pay attention to what happened. And what happened is not just that a man (35) succumbed to his injuries and was declared “dead when brought” at the nearest state-run hospital. What actually happened is that Mr. S.G. Ghosh said goodbye to his family in the morning on his way to work and then got hit by yet another racing bus on a congested street. He died in the ambulance that turned up thirty minutes too late, and his family is now in mourning for him.
The tragedy is not only that he died. The tragedy is that to the people who don’t know him, he will become just another statistic. Because God forbid that we tell his story like
a story. God forbid that we evoke emotions or lament his loss. It’s a factual report, children, not a longwinded speech about ethics. You are not required to say that “ Once upon a time there was a man who left home in the morning” etc., etc., “and then he died”.
Because if you write that, that means the reader has to think about a man (35) who succumbed to his injuries this morning, like that man is a real person with a job and a family and a life and hopes and dreams. And heaven forbid that the public’s attention be distracted from the lurid gossip on page 3 to dwell on an insignificant nonentity of a man whose only claim to fame is that he died a gruesome death when he least expected it. Because the danger of that is that it forces people to stop and think, and maybe deep down even begin to care a little. And because if people start thinking too much, somebody somewhere is going to think “That could have been me”. And no-one wants to live with death hanging over their heads, so they pretend they don’t know it’s there. At least, most adults do, and from the point of view of teenagers, obviously, that makes it the grown-up thing to do. Nothing proclaims adulthood more than an inclination to hypocrisy and the silencing of truth. Except maybe a conscience that blinds itself better than a thousand moral blinkers could.
