Parade of Cheats

 

Parade of Cheats

In this post, I would limit myself to maybe four or five cheat floats in a parade, each in its own sphere of influence: education, health, spiritual, religion, governance...

In the US, every civil (as opposed to a military) parade gives a special place to supposedly a person of eminence (even a county designates one) and is called the, “Grand Marshal”. For this post, I designate “education”, in whose name much is going wrong, as the Grand Marshal”.

Students learn anything at all only with an eye of earning power in the near future that is in the first two or three years after graduation. Quick returns on investment. Education is financified, the desire of the oligarchs. Some five decades ago, we did learn computer programming and used computers as tools that enabled us to finish our engineering–truly engineering–tasks faster, and mostly as accurately as we wanted (this required a little bit of mathematics), and error–free. That ain’t enough now.

As the science of computing developed, it may as well have crossed the threshold, and into naming the original masters of computing redundant, Artificial Intelligence (AI). The real master now is AI that has a voracious appetite. Anything other than specialization in AI is treated with contempt by computer scientists themselves. Anecdotally, I can cite one instance, and claim that ChatGPT led a faculty member along the primrose path, leading to a wrong answer. That should have chimed an alarm bell. It did not.

The next float is health.  Homoeopathy is its lead float, which was developed in the very late 18^th century. It follows the dictum, “Use a thorn to remove a thorn.” Apparently, this is not OK as the process may exacerbate the situation. I was not aware of this, and as the dutiful son of recently widowed mother who was also a cancer (duodenal) patient, I did as bade, and my mother’s internal organs were probably eaten away. She must have weighed less than 15 kg at death.

The above is the leading float under health. The next is cancer, to which there have been many false starts; in fact, so many that we are suspicious of any new start! In the very early years of combating cancer, many cures were promoted and none was successful. I do not wish to Google how many died on this score, but it must have been many as knowledge dissipated very slowly.

The third float is tagged, “Spiritual.” I did this very reluctantly. Other than that spirituality is nothing material (Madonna’s Material Girl flitted before my mind’s eyes), what it is–a positive definition–no one has been able to put up a cogent description. That is as well, because spirituality is associated with the mind of an individual; no, we cannot bring in the Cosmic or the Universal Mind, and even if we did, it has to be reckoned only by the marked individuals (the spiritual guru). Oh, I forgot. There are now more spiritual gurus on the earth than there are stars in the Cosmos! And, these gurus are parading before us, at least some of them naked, and some more near naked (Witness? In the Maha Kumbh crowd).

Then comes religion. Some of you may wonder that I am merely padding up this post by mentioning spirituality and religion separately. You couldn’t be more wrong. Religion is the material effluence of spirituality. As I mentioned earlier, spiritual is non-material; there can be no bridge between them.

If spirituality outnumbers the stars in the universe at one instant (as per a specified observer at a specified instant, as Einstein told us), religion outnumbers all the stars that have been, that are and that will be, everywhere. Religion can never be extirpated.

One has to merely see the profusion of the so-called spiritual channels, each is, metaphorically speaking, a float in the parade. In truth, these are religious channels that carry religious programmes, each religion controlled by a guru, not of the spiritual but of the religious.

In Christianity, we have the Pope for the Roman Catholics,   the Archbishop of Canterbury for the Anglicans. We have the Shia and Sunny groups for Islam, the Iyengars and Iyers as the Hindu sub-sects and on and on. The length of the religious floats in the religion almost match the length of the parade, which merely keeps getting longer, never shorter.

Governance. Serves as the co-bookend of the parade, education at the front and governance at the rear. It. is like the rear guard van in Indian Railways trains, the unlit caboose, as in goods trains. The whip master. Even in a democracy, it is not adequately lit. The Washington Post has this about democracy: Democracy Dies in Darkness, oh, so alliterative. That is why, under its current owner Jeff Bezos, democracy died and the paper did not endorse Kamala Harris for POTUS. Perhaps The Guardian of UK is a counter example, few and far between.

In India, it is exactly the opposite. Legacy media is the collective noun. Papers stay as a fiefdom of a family or a set group of people, media houses, under the thumb of a strong personality. Ownership does not change hands often, like it does in the US. Here, whether one likes it or not, toeing-the-line ensures survival. Check that. It is more in the negative: if you don’t, you do not survive.

Whose line do you toe? That of the party in power. So, how do you get to hold the power of governance? Multiple pathways, one of them is shown in the James Bond movie Spectre (Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, Extortion), the second in the list, in South Africa. One should be able to spot real-life instances.

So, education and governance control the narrative of the parade. The tweens merely fall in line.

Each is a certifiable cheat, and the floats roll down the main street to the beat of the drummer, the political and capital oligarchs, in the US.

Raghuram Ekambaram