Donors on the rise??

       "Phew! Enna veyilra saami?". I thought as I stepped into my office, in fact I ran inside the office unable to bear the Chennai heat anymore on that Tuesday morning."Only two days to go for the monsoon.Yes!". With this hope which I knew was unrealistic, I entered my module . As I entered, I saw a small group of people gathered around the desk of a senior friend of mine in the module. Intrigued to know the reason behind the crowd, I decided to peep in, on the way to my desk.

       There he was, the one who I was looking for in the crowd. He beamed on seeing me and gestured to jump the queue and come to his desk. It was not exactly a queue and I somehow squeezed in. At his desk, I saw two open boxes of mysurpa. "Cracked the case, Sherlock Prasoon!Reason for crowd is the sweet packet", I told myself. My friend, as expected, asked me to have some sweets.Being someone, who always obeys senior's words without any hesitation or query, I took his word by heart and had a couple of pieces of the sweet without even an attempt to know the reason for the same. After all,were I Vedhaalam to ask questions just for the sake of asking. I was only concerned about the task in hand,mouth rather.

       As the sweet packets became empty, the crowd started to disperse. When I too was about to move to my desk, I heard a couple of people telling my friend ' Convey my congrats to your kid'. Unable to yell 'What?' thanks to the mysurpa in my mouth, I was thinking why were these people congratulating a kid who just turned 2 last month. Looking for reasons, my instant thought was that probably the kid might have participated in any of the umpteen kids talk shows(that is how it is called) in the TV channels. Convincing myself, I asked my friend " So, everyone is congratulating your kid. Did he come on TV?".

        My friend grinned and told "Not yet! But he would. He got LKG admission in Zyx school for next year after interview with 10% off on donations". " Donation la 10% off a? It is not even the festive season", I told myself."It is the best school in the city and they will surely make my son a topper in his board exams in 10 n 12 and talk about me in Tv. How beautiful it would be. I will only prepare the script for him to talk." Unable to sync myself with this day-dream , I waved him bye n moved. Since then, I have been pondering over this thought of best school and topper. Has Education nowadays become nothing but topping the boards, no matter how or what you learnt .

       Nowadays,parents have to shell out a greater share of their hard-earned money in the name of building welfare fund, chairman welfare fund, Aaya allowance, AI labs,state of the art parking donation and so on. But still, some are happy to become donors and pay all these VIBGYOR coloured bills hoping that the school would make their son/daughter score more in the exams than their colleague's friend's wife's in-law's cousin's grand-daughter . 

      The competition among schools is much more fiercer. Some of the schools which promise and boast of top ranks work similar to "Shawshank" where the students are bound by umpteen dos n don'ts .If the ancient Gurukula type of education was all about polishing our skills and understanding the society, most of the modern schools and exams look to hone only the memory capacity of the students making them mere machines who do a Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V from their cache memory in brain on to the answer sheets.

    One of the ancient Tamil classic Thirukkural tells about learning as "whatever you learn, learn it thoroughly. After you have learnt, learn to apply what you have learnt and live your life according to it". Courtesy . But going by the attitude of few mentioned above, this verse gets modified as below.

'Karka Maradhiyara Karka Katravai

Thervinpin marakka thagum'

(Whatever you learn, make sure you do not forget it till your exams, after which you need not remember the same)

         As long as we are ok with this transformation, we can see many donors queuing up at such institutions to get the machine out of their kids. After all, who doesn't want to be on TVs n papers telling how much their kid struggled to top the boards.