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| Sunanda K Datta-Ray: It's not about using the rod | | Human failings lie at the heart of many of India?s problems |
| Sunanda K Datta-Ray / New Delhi Jun 19, 2010, 00:58 IST |
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The controversy over Calcutta’s La Martiniere for Boys is a reminder that many of the institutions — public service utilities, newspapers, nursing homes and clubs — that were in robust health in 1947 are barely recognisable 63 years later. Yet, thanks to an upwardly mobile population’s yearning for education, all English-medium schools throughout the country are bursting at the seams.
The effects of this rapidly growing demand were, perhaps, indirectly responsible for the recent melee outside the school gates. The immediate provocation was the alleged suicide of a 13-year-old schoolboy whom the principal had caned. It would not be right to comment on the tragedy. Kapil Sibal’s claim that the principal saying sorry “is not enough” imprudently prejudged the matter even though he added that since La Martiniere is a private school, it’s for the Indian Council for Secondary Education to take up the matter.
Corporal punishment is not the issue. Nevertheless, it must be said in passing and as a general rule that if the law has outlawed caning, “the law is a ass — a idiot”, as Dickens’s Mr Bumble so elegantly put it. No doubt liberal hackles will shoot up sky-high at that suggestion but there is much earthy wisdom in the old adage about sparing the rod and spoiling the child.
A judiciously sparing use of the rod or cane by a wise and sympathetic schoolteacher never did a pupil any harm. Aberrant cases of excess and abuse don’t disprove that; all they prove is that some teachers may not be up to the task for which they are paid. That human failing lies at the heart of many of India’s problems. Perhaps errant teachers (and some lawmakers) would benefit most from what Martinians (and other schoolboys) used to call six of the best!
But old Martinian though I am, I must hasten to add that no sentiment colours my account of these events. The school long ago ceased to bear any resemblance to the La Martiniere I left 58 years ago. Only the name and the building remain at all familiar. And they, too, are becoming unfamiliar through use and interpretation.
The name is now plastered six or seven times on the school’s walls, pillars and in banners above its gates. I wonder if they fear that it might be stolen or sold unless possession is repetitively flaunted? Or is this advertising to attract custom? There wasn’t a single name plate in my time. But no one thought the building — which seems to be threatened more and more as the surrounding playing fields shrink to make way for ugly commercial structures — was anything but La Martiniere. Good wine needs no bush, as they say.
Public attention was aroused when a father’s complaint that a teacher had demanded a laptop to promote his son prompted the teacher’s arrest. Whatever the truth of the charge — and the matter is sub judice — such is current cynicism about the big and immensely popular English-medium schools that no one dismisses such stories out of hand. Such schools are the temples of modern India. They are immensely coveted status symbols, portals to a prized career in the globalised future. The figures bruited about as unofficial admission charges suggest an organised underground market in which what parents must pay depends on who they go through. That’s what parents, educationists and officials should have taken up long ago. But nobody thinks it’s in his (or her) interest to do so.
It’s not just La Martiniere. It’s not just schools. India would not have featured prominently in Transparency International’s list of the most corrupt countries if there had not existed a tacit (and often not so tacit) compact on greed. Everyone has something to gain — or lose — from a system that no longer works without speed money.
I recall a judge censuring prosecuting and defence counsel for colluding to drag out hearings to inflate their fees. It’s no secret either that lawyers, like doctors, demand cash from clients and issue no receipts. Ironically, even qualified tax consultants do the same, charging, in addition to their own under-the-table fees, unspecified sums in cash to grease palms at the tax office.
Rajiv Gandhi argued that the solution lay in a strong consumer movement. But how can a movement succeed if the police, bureaucracy and judiciary are hand in glove? Rajendra Prasad’s warning about corruption proving the nail in the Congress Party’s coffin now applies to the country at large. La Martiniere’s crisis only highlights the national rot.
sunandadr@yahoo.co.in
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