In the book Jarhead by Anthony Swofford, the author says these amazingly bold lines in the opening pages. He says about the soldiers of the Surveillance & Target Acquistion Platoon (STA) who are watching war movies during peace time in their base camp in US (before being deployed at War duty during Desert Storm). The part that made me think lies at the end of tht chapter which very frankly explains the tragedy of prolonged training "to kill":
"Flimic images of death & carnage are pornography for the millitary man; with film your'e stroking his cock, tickling his balls with the pink feather of history, getting him ready for his real First Fuck".
This may sound very graphic, but the point is not about the training, its about nausea. We may feel, that we live extremely boring lives, but sometimes the grass is greener on the other side, if u know what I mean.
After 3 years of crap, I come to think of education with a novel perspective. Its not jus learning A B C's n stuff its a fucking joke. Sometimes I feel like being as eccentric as Jean-Jacques Rousseau whose philosophy of Naturalism eats the better part of my thinking these days. According to him, children must be left alone with nature to learn on their own, for a formal definition of naturalism, we can say 'its a doctrine that the world can be understood in scientific terms' .No teaching or preaching stuff, jus learn on your own kinda philosophy. Its amusing to think of something so devoid of todays social culture eventhough its responsible for building a substantial part of it.
Graduation is supposed to be the most pleasant & the most definitive time in anyone's life. Mine seems exactly otherwise. After all that I have endured, after all the brain damage, a feeling of apathy has come over me. I dont seem to care, or to be precise enough "I dont seem to fucking care". Some words hav the power to change the course of history, the word "Fuck" is totally one of them.
But beyond this irritating & oddly, real life, what I have learnt is the power of endurance. Jus as the soldiers in Jarhead see blood & carnage as a medium to get high, similarly I have developed this so called defence mechanism. All it has managed to teach me, is to face amazingly boring & against-all-odds kinda circumstances. Dealing with the college staff, dealing with the professors, dealing with the absolutely not-at-all-worth-a-crap experience has made me immune to any sort of irritation in the future.
Maybe graduation has taught me an important lesson that "The world doesn't revolve around you". It taught me the amazing power of tolerance, patience & endurance that the Zen monks long to achieve for decades together. Who says you need to spend half your life at Shaolin temple (no offence meant) to learn the extraordinary art of mind control. All you need is to take a cab & goto my college.
So whats graduation, or a broader view, education for me ?
I think its 54 K worth of anger management therapy in 3 years, i think its a steal :)
Song for the moment: Prodigy - Narayan
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