Our school, sometimes, held unusual assemblies. Such assemblies were called abruptly; usually during the mid of a period. Students used to throw their books in happiness and run to the assembly area to listen to the principal. For, such assemblies were held to announce the demise of some important person and to declare the closure of the school for the rest of the day after observance of silence for two minutes in the memory of the departed soul. The delight at the sudden revelation that one could go back home early and get rid of the boring lectures was too great to be suppressed. Students giggled with happiness while observing the silence; ending the ritual with a dash to the class room to fetch their bags and run towards home.
That happened when I was a child. Death those days bore hardly any significance other than being a harbinger of the welcome news of the sudden termination of the misery of being in the school, albeit only for part of a day.
Matured people are expected to react differently to death. Or, to any failure, for that matter. But we don’t. We rejoice at the failure of others. We take pride in predicting failures. “Take my word -- India will never win this tournament!”, is an oft heard declaration. When a rocket launched by India fails, the ‘Mr Know It Alls’ are fast to comment, “What else did you expect from India?” Near misses of aeroplanes over the Indian sky are reported with great enthusiasm, the agency never forgetting to add how many people would have died in case the collision had not been averted.
Today’s newspaper carries the picture of a young girl sentenced to life imprisonment. Just behind the girl walks a happy man, eager to have his face captured in the frame. We are happy when others fail or perish. We are very reluctant to acknowledge the success of others. For example, the same newspaper which never fails to report incidents of murder and rape, never reported the extraordinary achievement of Dr Tathagat Avatar Tulsi.
Tulsi did his high school at 9, BSc at 10, and MSc at 12. Jealously raised its ugly head, and Tulsi was accused on an international forum of memorising heavy sounding scientific terms and vomiting them out without understanding a single word. The boy went into a shell temporarily. In 2003, the prestigious Time magazine named him among the world's seven most gifted youngsters. Tulsi, when 21, completed his doctorate in Quantum Computing from the Indian Institute of Science. He turned down offers from Waterloo University in Canada and the Indian Institute of Science Education & Research (IISER), Bhopal, to become the youngest faculty member of the Indian Institute of Technology at Powai in Mumbai at the age of 22. He is set to join as an assistant professor in the Department of Physics from next week.
The story of Tulsi did not appear on the front page. Not on the back page. Nowhere. News of Tulsi does not sell. News of death and failure sells.
Are we the lovers of doom only?
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