Death Of Conscience

I read about the elephant last night and ever since there is an unsettling eerie feeling within me. I am pained, saddened, ashamed and disturbed in equal measures by what the locals in Kerala’s Malappuram did to that poor pregnant elephant who was scrounging for food. Who on earth, in his right mind and with even an iota of conscience could do a vile thing as to feed it pineapple laced with crackers. The crackers burst into her mouth and she died standing in water. The attempts to rescue her went futile probably she was too heartbroken to ever trust humans again. 

This incident is not the only one and not will be the last one but it is another noose that has tightened its grip on our collective humanity and conscience. I am way too depressed even as tears fill my eyes as I write this, I demand harshest punishment for those monsters and a radical change in animal protection laws in India. Sadly, the priorities of Indian government are can make this seem like a very distant dream. We are currently obsessed with changing the name of everything- cities, stadiums, roads, or even the country- from India to Bharat after the great king Bharat, a step closer Hinduism. In the whole drama that plays on the national stage along with many other pointless ones, we have forgotten that it is collective ethics and morals along with a robust justice system that make a country great, and not just assuming the name of a king once called great in some mythology books. Real life needs attention and care and more respect than mythology.

It was a gruesome murder not only of an animal but of humanity too. Human stupidity and cruelty is boundless. It is a shame. Sadly, TV channels, instead of raking up this ghastly issue to shake the people’s conscience, thought it more important to please, we all know whom.

Read@ https://bit.ly/36UyWKC 

MBA -- Mentally Blocked Aadmi !!

The elephant trainers, they say, tie baby elephant to a pole with a chain. The animal is kept tied till it becomes adult and then the chain is removed. But the elephant still does not go away because mentally it always feels itself tied to that pole. Somewhat same thing happens in the B schools too.

There are millions of students dying to get into B-schools to get an MBA degree and B schools too charge exorbitant fees to teach students various fundas and tricks of business. I have studied in a good B school myself and know it inside out. Simple things are expressed in mind boggling, impressive jargon and there are activities like corporate lectures to impress industry people. But what I have always noticed and felt is our esteemed faculties mould the young and inquisitive minds into a slave mentality.

To any act of indiscipline on the part of students, the usual and the first reaction of the faculty is ‘this is not expected of you, how you will survive in a job?’ Or ‘such acts will not make any company recruit you people’ … I have been through all this, and I still wonder why don’t faculty takes it in a slightly different light and say ‘this is not expected of you, how will you manage your own venture this way?’.

The years in a B-school put a cage around the free creative mind of a young soul, teaching students to be good employees and to keep their bosses happy, to work like a machine, never to say no to any work, to defend their job with their life, etc but hardly if ever to be good entrepreneurs and to recruit and keep ‘their’ employees happy and satisfied. They teach us to generate new ideas to get early promotions but not to start a new venture of our own. Even the biggest B-school carries this mentality though, it’s now changing fast. B-schools, agreed, teach us business but also make us perceive a job as a most precious thing.

Where are all the ethics gone? The B-Grads learn to excel in jobs with chutzpah and to be competitive even with friends, and carry razor sharp professionalism in their attitude, a typical trait they have learnt in B-schools and are quite proud of, but what the MBA has not taught them is where to and with whom to apply this professionalism of theirs. That’s why half of them end up making rounds of mental counselors. None of the faculties (except that of the subject ‘entrepreneurship development’ that too is an elective one carrying minor weight) ever encourages entrepreneurship.

Are we churning out manager- robots from our high profile B-schools, who are going to carry this mental attitude with a pride all their life? Just like the poor elephant that spends its entire life tied to a pole absolutely unaware of its strength, thanks to the mental block it has been put into.