(this is a 2000+ word ‘essay’ interspersed with random screengrabs – so feel free to quit, now!)

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…once in a while, given my circumstances and in spite of my rather insignificant capabilities, acumen & life experiences, I get the opportunity to work with some really bright, high IQ kids (and a significant number of such youngfolks – some of whom are still in touch with me, after all these years – and quite a few have become tech entrepreneurs), infused with a good work-ethic & finitiative – a fantastic product of their inherited genes, parental and other environmental factors nurturing them along… leading to & nudged along by their incredibly self-propelled curiosity, agency & capacity for slog. (Level-1)

ALL of them, stochastic combination of events & pathways, if you will, of course.

…and even with this already very thin population, only occasionally does one get even a sideways opportunity to talk about LENR, Quantum sensing, Microcontrollers, Dissipative structures, Fluid analogies, Recursions, Liouville’s theorem, Vlasov-Poisson system, Oort cloud, Kardashev scale, HAARP, Godel universe, Hamilton’s equations, Maxwell’s fantastic ideas, Bell’s theorem, Synthetic fuels, Super capacitors etc etc kind of magical stuff +++ +++ – with these autodidactic kids. (Level-2)

…and within this, there is a very very extremely thin slice of youngfolks who also have this incredible appetite for DIY.

Working with hands, I mean. The doers of the physical world. The non-conscious practitioners of Gnana & Karma yoga. Polymaths. (Level-3)

And, within this incredibly thin slice, there are some who have this bharatiyata also ingrained in them. +Bhakti yogins, I mean. (so far, even given my limited sample size & of course knowledge – I have met one such; so there must be several thousand such brilliances, given the size/population/diversity/scope of bharat!) (Level-4; would-be future Polymathaadhipatis!)

And so, when one gets that (really probabilistically very low chance) delirious luck of even bumping into Level-1 folks, that is definitely nor indifferently frittered away.

Definitely not by me, if I can help it.

One grabs such a grand-gift with infinite greed & enthusiasm. And, one seizes the day, night & everything in between, to provide even a hint of a nudge perhaps, like that mongoose from Mahabharata (Anugita parva?) or that squirrel from that Ramayana of Sri Gona Buddareddy (of ~13^th Century CE?).

(or is the earlier reference to this gilahari/squirrel incident from Sri Thodaradippodiazhwar?? (of the very over-enthusiastically if not iffily dated usual & typical ‘Tamil’ timeline fiction trash))

…one grabs such folks, because the future of Bharat as a Civilization depends on them – for both thought as well as action leadership, moored in the bharatiya traditions dating back to the swirling mists of the pasts, while pushing for progress, oh the infinite & endless progress…

However, a sobering thought & reality is that of some 15+ ‘high potential’ lads/lasses (some 90% of non-Tamil parentage, many with ‘mixed’ backgrounds, language-wise; also true that 3 others dropped out after a few months of engagement) that I have been fortunate enough to work with, specifically on a 1-1 basis in the past few decades, only one young man is (still!) in Bharat. Incidentally, this lone youngman was/is also interested in Sanskrit. The very few Tamil ones, were clueless/non-curious about Tamil, could barely read it – the sigh of the times, what else!

Currently am sort of engaged with just one, intermittently with another; have become very choosy too, given my other commitments. And in any case, I don’t think any of them will stay back in Bharat, beyond a couple of years hence, at the very best.

A bummer, but ‘if what is leaking out a barrel is oil, then what is there in that barrel is likely to be oil.’ And, some lads may come back, not necessarily because of any notions of patriotism (fair enough), but may be because of opportunities, avenues & openings- that would make professional, career & comfort sense for them. May be. In all likelihood. Also, there may be ‘push factors’ from wherever they migrate/drift over too. (whatever that works for Bharat)

Again, I know that there are many, many kids with great potential, all over Bharat, spread across various stratifications in our society, who are merely waiting for opportunities and scope to flower – with or without affirmation action hijinks.

Irrespective of the above, am generally upbeat about Bharat, of course. Now, after the past 10+ years of BJP rule at the centre, even more so.

(screengrab from Captain Fantastic (2016))

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Okay.

Whenever I see Physics school textbooks (especially of the world-famous education system of #DravidianModel Tamilnadu), I weep. I lament the fate of an endless number of hapless kids who go through the mostly pointless drivel – with all its horrible mistakes and meaningless nonsense.

Like for example, the laughable myth that electrons/charges run around the wires causing current – which we use to light up lamps (or in the Tamil case: for spreading darkness). To rub salt into the wounds, there are these infernal comparisons to plumbing systems that books routinely use, and the teacher-cheaters usually vomit out! Stupid analogies, bloody hell!

In fact, so incensed that I was because I had to deal with such useless texts year-after-freakin’-year, I feverishly wrote up a reasonable Physics textbook (within the ‘syllabus’) draft (for Higher Secondary) in some two months and even sent it unsolicited for free to TN textbook society. I also submitted/handed-over a printed copy of the text! (I think the office was then somewhere near College Road, Nungambakkam, IIRC)

(p.81 of Vol 1, 12^th Grade Physics text book, reprinted in 2022; leave alone the fact that the idea is WRONG, even the water flowing out from the pipe is flowing to the left, a physical impossibility! TN Govt #DravidianModel text books are choc-a-block with such mistakes of cognition & representation, across subjects! Perfect models for ideal shoddiness!)

This was in 2011-12 or so, IIRC; of course, I followed up etc for a while and gave up. #DravidianModel hates excellence in anything, except in the case of its favorite activities of loot, rape, drugs, alcohol & propaganda.

…So, frustrated though I am, when I had to deal with some exhilarating stuff with a kid at Level-1 recently, I had to post about it on X, which of course had ‘become viral’ eventually and had a whopping 64, 000, 000, 000 x 10^-9 views! Amazing!!

Never thought I could be such a great ‘social media influencer!’

Thanks for all the support. Really,

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A note that I wrote to another lad, in the context of working with promising young fellows, last week:

Am focusing almost entirely on everyday macroscopic biology and chemistry — the stuff that makes up our human bodies, tissues, cells, molecules, and how they ‘touch’ or interact without literally contacting. Of course we have beaten these ideas to death, however, am providing a summary, wrapping up our such discussions, as we are nearing the endpoint of our youngagement.

In that specific domain (99.999…% of the forces we humans actually feel or experience in daily life), the electromagnetic force really does dominate all relevant interactions – and after beginning to work with you youngman, thinking about the whole deal as a constant background-nagging thread, dreaming of Poynting vectors, waking-up with a start and then occasionally ranting about life, meaning, reality, abstraction – and therefore – math, physics and the like – let me summarize, perhaps, the only fundamental truth:

We (including all the ‘inanimate’ objects that constitute our universe, including blackholes, stars, planets, neublae and insterstellar clouds) are all a coherent self-interacting formation of fascinating electromagnetic fields, and these fields are radiated and supported by small clumps of matter that are very extremely rarified/sparse in space and do not physically touch each other, at all.

(the source for the above italicized portion in my text is an adaptation/copy of the highlighted portion from the snippet)

Everything, E V E R Y T H I N G, including our objective reality, perception are all downstream of the above.

May be the energy (consciousness??) of the whole thing, carried by the aforesaid fields (also including the three other fundamental forces – weak nuclear, strong nuclear & gravitational) is what is called Brahman – as in Hindu-Indian philosophical systems.

Atman = Brahman. Of course.

(may be this is too much reality, completely orthogonal to talent search tests, schoolboard exams and syllabi, but the above summarizes what some ‘similarly disposed’ friends and I have been discussing/arguing over for a while now, not that these thoughts are original or anything!

(remember? aren’t we all are standing on the shoulders of giants? – and of course we have incidentally chatted about it a bit)

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Oh well. I must also mention that, for a few years, I had been a part of a group/outfit which was supposed to focus on ‘gifted’ kids, give them exposure to various avant-garde things along with the development of ‘critical thinking’ in them etc etc – a fundamentally good idea (except critical thinking), but the effort is somewhat lumbering along in delirium because the addressable market is not tappable and scaling-up operations is oh so laboursome. The outfit also chases the chimera of ‘teacher training for excellence.’ My heartfelt best wishes to it. This is because, mostly it operates in ‘good faith.’

Anyway, I quit the outfit not exactly cordially, as the activities/core-ideas became more and more LeLi & Secular, more or less cabalish, if not totally into I-scratch-you and you-scratch-me ideology; of course – the founders were/are all exCorporate high-fliers, bright folks with pedigreed/hallowed education backgrounds – but with a twisted deracinated outlook.

That’s a long story, but the point is that – if at all there is some additional exposure given to bright students via non-govt sources/entities – it is mostly done only for urban-elite (this is not incorrect per se, and needs to be encouraged) save a few ‘scholarship’/sponsored lads from financially challenged families.

But Indian population is HUGE, and in each and every small village there are at least a couple of exceptional kids who need to be identified and nurtured – so that these kids and Bharat, benefit immensely from the efforts. There would of course be collateral advantages to these merit-based (really based) efforts like mediocrity falling by the roadside.

And, this can happen only via robust, long-term, Government funded special-ops schools, with their own dedicated/excellent staff, commanding good pay+infra structures.

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A Nation/Civilization can meaningfully progress only when its talented folks are nurtured, admired & celebrated instead of the pursuit of the obtuse & criminal DIE (Diversity Inclusion Equity) nonsense. These talented folks would then help directly and/or indirectly via entrepreneurships, especially via hardcore manufacturing – thereby increasing GDP, employments scenarios and hence, more revenue for the Government.

Imagined victimhoods, hallucinated oppressions, propagandized historical-hysterical wrongs and the like will not take us anywhere. Nor do nondescript freebies. Nor do ‘blaming the past’ for our current inadequacies/fate…

“…die, DIE!”

Bharat’s education should focus on Engineering & Technology including design (and Sciences, selectively) instead of on bullshit stuff like sociology, cultural anthropology, english literature, MBA, post-modernism & political science(!!!) etc, including the ‘Critical Theory’ derivative nonsense! (of course including any X Y Z to which ‘studies’ is tagged/appended – like gender, women, dalit, subaltern, southasian etc)

Of course, we should take pride in our genuine civilizational achievements & listen to our hoary traditions; of course, if there are/were issues, we should acknowledge them, adapt and go.

(screengrab from Captain Fantastic (2016); of course as the Starwars grandmaster Yoda says, “Do or do not, there is no try.”)

As a nation, our foci should be on good nutrition availability for all children, affordable healthcare systems, more navodaya type schools extending to the block levels, ‘vocational’ current-trade courses, encouragement of entrepreneurship by closing down bullshit regulation/admin departments (whose only current focus is on graft and harassment) and spread of useful infrastructures.

(and am not very sure about the need for ‘more’ higher education institutions (anyway they are mainly for networking, elite formation & virtual signaling) except in the case of hard sciences, medicine, high-tech and the like – the rest would probably be irrelevant thanks to democratization of ideas, media, courses etc via the Internet)

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END

(ps: am not sorry about the gratuitous+unsolicited advice and general rabidity embedded in the above post, they are my views after all, and of course, your mileage may vary – so be rather wary)