Constitution of India has stood test of times. I’m sure overwhelming majority of Indians shall agree with me when I say that framers of our constitution were very wise men. Not only our constitution and democracy have stayed rock solid, but in entire south Asia India is the only country to have this unique gift.

 

Of the innumerable things given by those wise men and women, one of the biggest was universal adult franchise. There were many debates then and even now, that the right to vote or stand in elections should be restricted only to those who have some minimum educational qualification.  But our wise men stood the ground and decided that all men and women, irrespective of caste, creed, education, religion etc. have the wisdom to elect their representatives. In retrospect, we know that this philosophy has been proven right. Governments after governments have been thrown out by people of India, many of whom may not have passed the muster of minimum educational standards. Not only that, we have seen many of our well educated leaders who were disaster for the country and many relatively uneducated  who have done the country proud.

 

Reason I gave the above example was to show the difference in education and wisdom. In the years that followed our independence our literacy levels, educational standards, standard of life, life span, prosperity etc. have seen enormous progress. But can we say the same about wisdom? Has higher level of education brought higher level of wisdom? Has this education added to our ‘age old wisdom’ to make it even stronger? Why has wisdom remained ‘age old’? Why has there been no visible addition to that? I am not a social scientist nor do I have any data to substantiate what I’m writing here. But as I observe the world around me I feel even the simple, non-controversial wise things that we have known all along are getting forgotten.

 

Last week I was speaking to a septuagenarian who had obviously seen many summers in his life. Topic veered around to anger management. Very innocently he asked me ‘what should I do if my driver doesn’t listen to me? I have no choice but to get angry at him’.  I was taken aback by this statement.  Normally one would expect elders to educate youngsters that anger is the man’s own worst enemy and one should learn to manage situations without getting angry. Not only by age, even by educational standards this gentleman was highly educated, had highly educated children and grandchildren. It is these simple and fundamental truths of life that are slowly being forgotten by all of us.

 

Our education levels continue to go up. As it should be, generally every successive generation is more educated and more prosperous than the previous generation. Education has also given us an ability to question many things and our age old beliefs. So now we rarely find a person going back when a cat crosses his path. We also don’t blink when someone sneezes just when we are getting out of our homes. Imagine the situation about a quarter of century ago. Many people would have turned their backs if anything like this happened. Quite obviously, we have progressed as a society in most aspects.

 

But our ability to question all norms of society has sometimes made us discard many things without understanding their true import. Things that were our strengths and rightfully so, are also getting consigned to dustbin in the process.  I shall try to share my perspective on some of the things to make put across my thoughts on this issue, even if I risk opprobrium of some.

 

Indian values and family system have always been a source of envy for many, including President Barack Obama of the US. Our families traditionally have been very strong where elders were respected, their views were important, parents ensured that their children were taken care of in the best possible way and old parents were attended at the time of need. If the system worked, which happened in most cases, it helped everyone. But if it didn’t then of course it meant a disturbed life for many.  So what should we expect an educated generation to do? If we try to delink our own emotions from this issue and think dispassionately we would say that we should try to improve the system, where the negatives are removed and positives are leveraged. What have we done instead? This educated lot has effectively destroyed the concept of family as it existed. In the quest for westernization and individual freedom, father has now become ‘my old man’ who looks better in old age homes. There is no way he can exert any influence on his children or the grandchildren. If the previous value system had worked well everybody was a gainer. Kids would have received love and affection of elders and had got benefited by their wisdom and elders would have never felt unloved or lonely. Every member of the family would have had some support, financial, physical and emotional. Previously all this was achieved by simple societal norms. In one generation earlier also every morning people used to wish their elders and parents and touched their feet. Also, it was a norm to touch the feet of elders to take their blessings. Sometime we see those glimpses even today. Issue was never about touching feet, but of showing respect and receiving blessings. But then we became educated. Ones who touched the feet of elders’ rebelled saying that it demeaned them and the ones whose feet were touched often felt how we can allow someone to touch our feet. We are all equal after all. We tried not calling elders by first name and every relation had a unique name. It gave that relation adequate proximity or distance. But today all this is gone and people are generally on first name terms. The moment it happened, mutual respect went away. Since the parents had also lost their pre-eminent position in the family, their role as an arbiter in case of disputes went away. So what do we do if we have difference of opinion or interest? Either more distance is created in relations or we end up in the courts. This one factor of dilution in the family values has had far reaching impact on the social fabric and the country. Educated lot, with additional knowledge, instead of improving upon a system decided to dismantle it completely. So now we see people losing support systems, emotional bonds and our traditional strengths.  Western model of education meant not only the destruction of societal value system, but also created many more problems. So if you have dispute or disagreement, instead of talking it out with elders you go to the courts. If you can’t manage stress, instead of getting elderly advice you go to counsellors. Somewhere, in the quest to question everything we ended up throwing the baby out with the bath water.

 

Today we have educated women. They do far more than what they have done earlier in our society. We have very large number of women professionals in many fields like medicine, law, civil services, politics, teaching etc. We must be justifiably proud of their achievements. But somewhere this quest has seeped in for ‘equality’ with men. A wise man may say that both men and women are ‘equally important’. Not only that, Indian ethos says that neither of them is complete without each other. They both actually complete each other because they both have their own and different strengths and weaknesses. I wonder how does it help the society, nation or even the women, if some of them flew fighter aircraft, except satisfying some egos that we are not inferior, which you never were in any case. For the educated it has become an issue of rivalry rather than complementing each other. Wise, in my view, would have steered clear of this debate and instead focussed on how to be stronger together, how to strengthen the bonds, how to remove some infirmities that made some women believe that they have been treated unfairly. Instead of correcting an infirmity, the debate and discussion has taken us towards rivalry which has had far reaching impact on the social fabric. Not only has the institution of marriage suffered immensely, it is creating a generation of people who have had insecure childhoods.

 

I shall once again refer to the wisdom of the framers of our constitution. They had been very clear that every citizen of our country shall be free to profess his religious faith freely and the state itself shall have no religion. That never meant irreligiosity. Mahatma Gandhi, Father of the Nation, himself was a deeply religious man. But he never believed in denying the right of people to profess the faith of their choice. In fact India has always been deeply religious. Indians have always derived strength from their faith. A wise man would have allowed this strength to develop more. If there were certain areas that needed change due to changing times, wise would have allowed debate and discussion to resolve the matter. But what has the modern education done? It has used even religion to divide us. Something that should have been strength has once again become a weakness for us. In the quest to look modern and educated many people started feeling that being religious meant looking backward. Age old wisdom would say that religion should unite and be a source of peace, tranquillity and goodness. I’m still searching for new wisdom in this respect which comes with education.

 

Recently I met a person who was working with British Airways as a flight attendant. Prior to that he was working with the Jet Airways in India. I asked him the difference in the working environment of the two carriers. His response was prompt. He said that while in the Indian company he had a bonding with the organization, in the new environment you just did a job and got paid for it. Matter ends. There was no belongingness to the organization. Now India has always been a country with high relationship quotient. People here are high on emotion and would like to bond with each other well. This is what the family system has taught us. A wise man, who has had modern education would build on strengths of the people, of the country they live in, improve upon it, learn from the western managerial concepts and create a winning combination which is unique to us. In fact this is what the modern ‘management’ also teaches us – leveraging the strengths. But we still find many who, in the quest of globalization, would like to run organizations on the western concepts. Invariably, all of them collapse.  I can give any number of examples from the business world where western management concepts failed completely in India unless they were enmeshed with Indian value systems. Almost all foreign banks in India are under stress today. People who taught risk management to us, need to learn something from Indian private banks. These are the places where employees are still respected, age is not frowned upon and the experience of its people is leveraged for the organizational growth. Many western companies failed to sell their products in India unless they understood India. So while Nestle chocolates are never heard today, Cadbury’s continues to grow since it combined their chocolates with the Indian tradition of gifting sweets. Hindustan Unilever Limited and Colgate, companies having iconic brands with them, have Indianized their operations a lot. But even then the moment an Indian brand that connected with Indian value system and was equally good in quality like Patanjali was introduced, these century old brands came under pressure. Biggest gainers of advent of fast food chains like McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Subway etc. were not these brands but the Indian brands like Haldiram, Sweet Bengal, Saravana Bhawan etc. These people were able to combine the good aspects of western food world by bringing in hygiene and cleanliness, technology, ease of serving and eating, open and cheerful environments and Indian tastes.

 

In many aspects, particularly related to society, education has not really added to the wisdom of our people. But the fact is that age old Indian wisdom combined with modern education and thinking can do wonders in all fields. As the above examples show, business world has been one of the first off the block to combine modern education, western concepts and Indian value system and wisdom to create a winning combination. But we as a nation in almost all other respects are losing our wise men and their wisdom. Strength of a country can never be the business alone, but eventually it rests with the strength of its society, thinking of its people and wisdom of its leaders.

 

My Little Thought Of Life in this context is that we should not treat modern education as a tool to earn our livelihood alone. This education should be put to use for greater purposes like improving our ability to think and analyse, finding out good and bad of things around us, identifying our core strengths and building upon them. It is very important to question everything. Unless we do that, we never grow, we never progress. But what the education must never do is to question age old wisdom and discard it without even understanding it.  As it is said, we can’t throw out the baby with the bath water, in this case the accumulated wisdom, just because we were unable to understand the concept and its intent.  It shouldn’t become a practice to discard all norms and learning of the past by branding them as ‘conservative’. Strength of modern education and science should be used to refine our age old wisdom to make it better, stronger and contemporary. This can’t happen unless we understand the older concepts well for their importance and why they were created, reflect on the today’s situation and find a winning combination. Business world has shown that this can be done. It is for us to implement it in our personal and social lives.

 

To my friends and readers I wish a life that gives not only education but also an ability to understand our age old wisdom and build upon it.