Article originally written in August 2009 in 3rd year of Engineering at IIT-BHU

Every morning, like thousands of fellow students, of a whole wide range of age group, she has to get up, get ready, get moving and get her ass to her classroom. A few in this big multitude of students are lucky enough to be blessed with good teachers, actually rather let’s use the word ‘real teachers’, teachers who actually are capable of teaching, teachers who deserve to teach their students, teachers who come under the real definition of ‘teacher’ and are not a minute part of the eternal widespread charade of teaching and learning.

Although one must mention, that the whole charade, the fake respect, the incentivized motives, the naïve fear, the ultimate role-play is so widespread around us, that like other absolutely unacceptable and abominable practices around us, this one too is just a part and parcel of our society.

‘Why not do something about it?’, ‘Why not improvise?’, and other blah blahs are some questions like ‘Who is John Galt?’ and are kept to oneself and not said out loud just like the name of ‘one who cannot be named’

Nevertheless, every morning, like a pre-programmed robot, she gathers herself and changes her location from a warm bed to a hard chair in front of a whiteboard inside a closed four-walled prison cell. Every morning, a person supposedly called a ‘teacher’, a person who is assigned a duty to come and blabber for endless hours visits her in her prison cell along with many others. 

Every word out of the teacher’s mouth feels like sharp bullets hitting every inch of her body and every thought that the teacher tries to convey is like a toxic chemical that dissolves her and her brain. The teacher plays, tosses, tampers, breaks, cracks, adulterates, and pollutes her mind and its capacity, her soul and its integrity; and there is no escape. It happens not just to her, not just here, but to everyone, in this cell and the cell next to it and numerous lined next to them. 

It is like a ritual in our civilization, maybe even essential for life, like eating, breathing, shitting, and fucking. Otherwise, one might wonder why this species regarded as most brainy in the entire animal kingdom would go about this cycle of learning and teaching, mugging and vomiting, getting tortured, and then torturing. Maybe, it is essential for the survival of the race, the process of passing of bullshit from one generation to another by the shittiest of people in the shittiest of possible ways.  

A few minutes into the lecture hall and she started to feel as if her whole body was melting down, soon she was feeling as if her framework had been completely dissolved, and instead of a solid independent standing structure, she was now a gooey semi-liquid viscous ugly stinking mass. Her whole body had started to decay; the color of her skin was changing from the shade of wheatish brown to a shade of grey; and with the passing time, the color of gooey indefinite mass that she was went on to become a nearly transparent indiscernible lighter shade of grey. This imagery was coming repeatedly in her mind; in all her classes, lectures, and ‘teaching’ sessions. Her life was running in a spiral, everything was repeating itself, just with a bit higher magnitude. 

On some days, she would get a sort of different imagery in her mind, a tiny bit different feeling. Maybe her mental apparatus got bored of the same old repeating dream and took enough pain to fill her head with another more horrible one. In this one, she felt that particle by particle, every single particle of her body was escaping and she was slowly disintegrating, It was not that all those particles had acquired certain threshold potential and decided to cross the realm of her body and go party in the big wide universe. On the contrary, it was a rescue attempt, the last effort to survive by leaving their beloved home behind. 

When a country faces famine or some epidemic or similar drastic event, the citizen tries to cope up, try to gather and correct the order of the things. They show a strong will and determination, and go fight the biggest of troubles with a ‘come what may’ attitude. But when the last hope is crushed, throughout the centuries, despite the love for the homeland, everyone flees or rather everyone has to flee. This is common for humans as well as animals. It is survival that gets priority over everything. But with what she was subjected to in every ‘teaching’ session each individual particle of her body got weaker. They all understood what was going, and they became aware of the fact that life was dead here. They must leave their warm home, the place where they were born, where they grew, made friends and communities. It was time for them to look out for themselves. 

The feeling of whole-body melting down or of every particle flying away is way more horrifying than death. Even when one dies and one is dead cold meat, he exists, he is an entity (dead or alive is just triviality). But what she felt every day, what may be countless other students sitting in the same position felt, while the teacher went about their teaching was ‘ceasing of their existence’. As if she was never born, never died, the mind that was playing all those tricks never existed, the eye that was filled with invisible tear never opened for the first time and never closed for the last time and the throat that was screaming without making any noise never uttered its first word and never let out the last. 

Any day would she exchange the dreams of the painful deaths or brutal murders with her dreams; only if some such simple exchange was possible. Maybe someday, someone, some bright soul will make a technology of exchanging dreams. How heavily in demand will that technology be. Oh! But then the teachers will also go on teaching about it to the students in the worst possible manner one could.