THE FLAME

I have noticed one thing. In life, at every point of time, I’ve had several complaints, about several things. But as time passed, my complaints started diluting and I moved on…

But there is one complaint that has been with me throughout the 21 years that my heart has been pumping blood – about my education, the education system.

I always had complaints that ‘my school is so boring’, ‘my teachers are very strict’, ‘my subjects so useless’, ‘my uniform so colourless’, from as trivial as ‘my lunch break is so small’ to as serious as ‘my teachers hit students with wooden sticks’. After school I thought these too would dilute away; but they grew.

Now I had a new set of complaints. These ranged from ‘my class looks like an overcrowded Mumbai local train’ to ‘ragging is physical as well as verbal’, from ‘why did I opt for commerce’ to ‘God knows what’s my future’, from ‘why professors favour girls’ to ‘how do I pay to straighten my attendance’, from ‘what do we gain by learning the already outdated syllabus’ to ‘are the marks that I earn by rote learning significant’…

By the end of the three years of graduation, these had increased to a level where I had developed a fresh set of complaints. They were: ‘why cant they leave me alone?’, ‘Is getting a good job the only thing to do in this world?’.

And there was an eternal complaint: Why cant I be free? Free to do what I want, free to explore life, free to learn what I want and when I want, free to take my own decisions, free to be myself, free to lead my life as I want and not as others feel it is right…

But these complaints remained in my heart…and looking back, I started losing hope of leading a life that I desired. I started giving up and reluctantly entered ‘The Rat Race’.

But little did I know, that somewhere in a valley, there were some dreamers, working hard to rescue my hope.

And one day it came. It came in front of my eyes, and I could feel the hope jumping inside my heart. That hope had subsided, but never died. It looked too good to be true. So I had to feel it, touch it and when I took a closer look, I was almost dancing…

Yes, it was a dream that I always had: to go into a Gurukul, that liberated the students, from the programming, from the conventional mind-set, from ‘the rat race’…

And so a FLAME was ignited. For me, that is a FLAME of hope, a FLAME of knowledge, a FLAME of ‘freedom’…