The Rise and Rise of the Educated Illiterates

Hope all my dear readers have had a very joyous Diwali over the course of the last week.

I am not too worried about my few non-Indian readers wondering what Diwali is. Reason being that of the 6348 odd festivals that a fifth of occupants of Planet Earth, aka Indians, celebrate every year, to Diwali goes the honour of being the one festival that has been effectively marketed globally. To an extent now where not celebrating Diwali in the White House or 10 Downing Street or their equivalents in many parts of the world is seen as being politically incorrect.

Things have reached such a high (or low, depending on your perspective) when it comes to the export of the way we celebrate Diwali that a family friend of ours told us that they block out entire blocks in their New Jersey suburb they reside in just so that everyone is able to burst crackers. He was also telling us that there was some initial resistance in the local councils, but eventually everyone had to fall in line given our sheer numbers. Now, he was telling us, there are a couple of fire engines and ambulances with full medical crew specializing in burn injuries are deployed to ensure that there are no untoward incidences due to the fire hazards that the celebrations have inherently built into them. Mind you, he didn’t seem exactly proud telling us this.

This ‘enlightening’ conversation and a few other recent personal experiences led me to introspect a bit (after all I have to live up to the name of this newsletter) about this malaise afflicting our society. I thought I had hit gold when I coined the term ‘educated illiteracy’ for this affliction. Turns out it is a much-discussed term already on various fora like Quora (sheeeesh!!!). So much for my hitting gold! Below is a definition that I came across that I simply had to share:

If you can manage to ignore the obvious typos (tell me how you did it, if you managed), it succinctly captures the spirit of how I would have liked to diagnose the affliction.

Diwali and many other festivities that we indulge in all year round have become the perfect demo windows that showcase the best and the worst of us, and among us. Our many celebrations have ensured that our educated illiteracy has become default setting. It hits you every now and then on a daily basis but given the perpetual rushed lives that we all lead it we have stopped attaching any importance or significance to the many transgressions. However, festivals become the time when we tend to get a breather from the daily humdrum, when each one of us feels extra special only because we get to spend those extra minutes in doing ourselves up and adorn garments and jewellery that we otherwise wouldn’t. Festivals offer us a respite from the drabness of our daily lives, brilliantly captured in the below lines:

Another working day has ended

Only the rush hour hell to face

Packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes

Contestants in a suicidal race

(Synchronicity II, from the album Synchronicity by The Police, lyrics by Sting)

Festivals offer us the chance to transform ourselves from mere mortals into royalty for those few hours or days. And royalty, before they had to bend to the will of societal norms and start behaving themselves at least in public, were the very definition of wanton behaviour. Educated Illiterates, in their head, must be telling themselves what Mel Brooks said in The History of the World: Part 1 - “It’s good to be the King!”

Q:- What has caused educated illiteracy to rise and rise in plumbing to newer and newer depths over the last few decades? (I particularly like the way the question shaped up.)

A:- One word: Impunity

In my past post/s I have written about how we changed rapidly as a society thanks to economic liberalization, how we suddenly had more than we could handle, how middle class became upper middle class and the advent of the neo rich. I have addressed how we now have an entitlement mentality that makes us lords of all we survey.

We have now broken free of the multi-generational psychologically shackled existence due to societal norms that were often dictated by economic hardships. And it has come because of general higher and better (?) levels of education and exposure to global concepts. But this freedom has also led to a certain amount of impunity creeping into how we conduct ourselves.

The definition of good education itself has morphed from wholesome development of mind, body and soul irrespective of the monetary cost, to the one that is imparted in institutes that charge the highest fees.

Also, education wasn’t restricted to schools. We were taught everywhere, at every step, by everyone. Community Living which was a curricular subject was practiced on a daily basis in real life. It hardcoded in us a sense of what’s right and what’s not – whatever strata of society you were from. Notwithstanding a mild fear of retribution from elders or authorities lurking underneath, we grew up in an environment that made us better behaved individuals.

So, what changed?

They say that money is the root cause of all evils. Access to a ‘better life’ due to more access to money slowly started eroding the value systems. We all became powerful in our own eyes. But we conveniently forgot Spiderman’s dictum of ‘with great power comes great responsibility.’

We replaced ‘responsibility’ with ‘rights’.

Affluence made us aware of our rights, but made us forget our duties and responsibilities towards becoming better citizens. From joint families we became nuclear families and have been atomic units since the last couple of decades. We are all leading a siloed existence, caught up in our individual rat races to earn more since economic prosperity automatically led to more power. And more power sans responsibility led to more impunity.

I vividly remember my very first instance of impunity. This was in the early 90s. We had gone to get some ice-creams after a night out. It was a newly launched brand that had only one outlet then. So people from all over the city drove down or rode down to that one parlour which was perennially crowded, more so if it was a weekend. To ensure that the surrounding locality was not burdened by this inflow of traffic, a No Parking sign was put up outside the parlor. While placing our orders, we heard a loud voice. That voice was berating a traffic cop! The man with the loud voice had parked his imported car right under the No Parking sign thinking it was late at night and he wouldn’t be bothered. But that was not to be. So a cop had materialized and was asking the man to take his car away. The impunity of the man, with his kid in tow, was such that he berated the cop for spoiling his evening (speak of ‘ulta char kotwal ko daatein’), that it was only an ice cream that he wanted to lavish on his kid and that he shouldn’t be bothered with such trivial matters like parking under a No Parking sign at this time of the night. The cop wasn’t relenting. So this is what this guy did – he flashed a 100 buck note at the cop (a scoop of ice cream then was around 22 bucks if I remember), tucked it into his shirt pocket, ordered an ice cream for the cop and several for his kid, and told the cop to not bother him anymore. The cop too sheepishly took his scoop, and the 100 bucks, and sauntered right off. There was stunned silence in the parlor. But the man was unaffected. He rightly ordered his scoops, waited for the kid to finish, then sat in the car and drove off. Am pretty sure he must have been chuffed with a sense of pride and accomplishment at having done what he had.

That was my first real encounter of an Educated Illiterate.

This was a one-off instance then. It is de riguer now. I shudder when I think how that man’s kid must have grown up with those kind of value systems. I shudder even more when I think that that kid must now be having kids of his own who must be of the same age that he was then.

From a multi-generation shackled existence, we are already in the middle of a multi-generational impunity epidemic.

Educated Illiterates harbour a delusion that money can buy them anything. Which unfortunately is increasingly becoming a truism. However, to demonstrate one’s educational illiteracy one needn’t have inordinate amounts of money, either. There are different price brackets of impunity.

Educated Illiterates can buy education. The astronomical fees that schools charge - not just IB board schools, but just schools in general – and are happily paid for, have become a surrogate for good parenting. If those are not enough, there are private tuitions that offer another avenue to show off our status. If the child still doesn’t measure up, it is the fault of the institutions. And if you have enough money (which many have) then you buy your way into a U.S. or U.K. university. Abilities have stopped mattering behind getting a degree from a trophy university.

In the race for pricier education, we have compromised on our ability to learn.

Education only teaches one the ability to read and write (grammar and syntax is nowhere in the picture as was amply evident in Kumar Bhaveshnu’s definition of Educated Illiterates). It’s not as if modern education has abandoned imparting value systems.

It’s just that the world outside of schools and educational institutes operates on a different set of value systems that, though being diametrically opposite to those taught in school, seem to be doing just fine. In fact, these alternate value systems seem to be thriving. What incentive will newer generations have to practice what is being preached to them when the very preachers don’t exactly live by their sermons? So entire generations are being brought up where the lines between right and wrong, correct and incorrect, permissible and not permissible are blurred to an extent that they have been rendered invisible.

How will community living be taught when we lead our respective lives in silos, in our own bubbles? The effects percolate to even the simplest of things like crossing roads, for example. Observing road manners leads me to believe that many simply don’t believe that crossing the road involves looking both sides first before crossing. Why do I think that way? Because they are probably being raised in an environment where the impunity of their elders has given them the feeling that they own the roads and that it’s the duty of motorists to halt. The virtual absence of footpaths for pedestrians is no less a contributor. Why, you ask? Because they are all occupied by hawkers or squatters who have shown their own impunity in occupying public spaces at will. If you argue that their levels of education and hence their literal literacy is suspect, then my argument is what the hell are they doing with the latest smart phones? In my books if you can open your Instagram account and are able to link your bank account to a payment gateway, then you qualify as an educated illiterate.

Better standards of living have enabled educated illiterates to indulge in cars and two-wheelers. The jugaadu mentality has enabled them get their license without really undergoing a driving test.

Impunity prevents them from following basic rules of conduct in driving or riding. So we have rampant violations of traffic light rules, incessant honking, random parking and double parking, driving on the wrong side of the road – even on highways, driving with phone in hand or gingerly balanced between ear and shoulder in case of bikers, etc.

Impunity prevents them from recognizing the inherent dangers of not using seat belts or wearing helmets. In both cases, once again the jugaad mentality has found shortcuts – so seat belts are fastened, but only to stop the irritating seat belt alerts from beeping. The jugaad here is that drivers here keep the seat belt fastened, but not around their front. It is fastened first and then the driver sits. It is quickly pulled up from behind on sighting a traffic cop and then promptly shoved back after the ‘danger’ has passed. Similarly, helmets are to be quickly placed on the heads by the pillion riders only on sighting a cop.

One of the major cities in India had a public interest litigation filed that had prevented the local transport office from imposing a helmet rule. What was the litigation? That helmets can actually be dangerous since wearing one tilts the center of gravity of the head because of its weight, leading to the head hitting the ground first before the rest of the body, thus increasing the chances of someone getting a severe head injury because of wearing a helmet!!

I am not making this up.

The advent of nuclear and atomic families has seen hitherto unseen levels of house ownership in the last couple of decades. The average age of a new house buyer has gone down from the mid to late 40s into the early to mid-30s. It is a matter of immense pride to own your house. It is a mini kingdom that one builds for their family. Each flat in urban centers or built houses in semi-urban centers is then done up to individual tastes. Sometimes as much as a quarter of the money of buying a house is spent on the interior designing and decoration.

These highly individualistic and customized cocoons help elevate the already heightened sense of ego of its occupants. Often, the grim reality behind these customisations is that they are done by flouting the rules set by the building societies of hours when interior decoration work can happen either by throwing some more money as fines or as hand-offs to the building security guys. Some of them seem to be especially proud that they are fined.

Then once they occupy those properties, they think they own everything else as well – the podium facilities, the surrounding compound, the amenities, etc etc. In true royalty style, there are instances of these educated illiterates also formulate bizarre rules like segregating elevators! The faster set of elevators for residents and the slower service elevators for everyone else. After all royalty doesn’t mix with the hoi polloi, conveniently forgetting that it is the hoi polloi who they can’t do without in helping run their kingdoms. Irony then dies a thousand deaths when it is these same educated illiterates start complaining that schedules go haywire because their maids, drivers, courier boys, food delivery guys, etc take a long time to reach their places.

Siloisation, a false sense of supremacy, absence of any values, morals, ignorance of societal mores and impunity become a potent mixture that often results in depraved behaviour.

A recent incident that I experienced bears proof of this. A couple of weeks ago we had one of the Japanese expat residents staying in our complex ring our bell. On opening the door we saw a woman whose hair, face and dress were splattered in some kind of gravy. Turns out someone had chucked a plastic container with some gravy dish out the window which unfortunately landed on the Japanese woman as she was taking her walk in the complex compound. The fortunate thing was that the container narrowly missed her, else the projectile would have resulted in severe injury. Being Japanese, propriety, fastidiousness and above all politeness is inbuilt. So, the poor lady was going from floor to floor, ringing bells and checking with each flat owner if someone from their flat they had thrown that food item out their window! Not so that she could then raise her voice and fight, but just to tell them that it is not right to do so. That the container could have hurt her. I wonder if she succeeded. Worse still, I wonder what kind of impression she will carry with her about well-to-do Indians.

In keeping with modern needs, wants and desires, Educated Illiterates also feel compelled to have a pet at home. Nothing wrong in that. Then stature and/or lack of time come in the way of giving these pets their daily dose of activity in the open – their walks. So, dog walkers are hired. But those dog walkers are neither trained, nor told, leave alone equipped with poop scoopers or poop bags. The result is that cleaning up after the pet has done its deed is left to the natural elements or the building maintenance teams. The WhatsApp groups of many a housing complex are invariably full of litanies of non-pet owners or sometimes even pet owners venting their travails of dodging dog poop on their morning or evening walks in the complex. What gives!!

Speaking loudly in public or playing videos on WhatsApp loudly in public places with scant regard to those around …

Reserving half the restaurant for a party and inflicting the other half of the restaurant patrons to noise levels that will make a Rohit Shetty movie look like a meditative experience …

Chucking things out of windows – home or car or train – so that your personal space is spic and span citing absence of bins nearby …

Not keeping mobile phones on silent during plays and movies (I wrote about this in an earlier piece on Entitlement Mentality) …

Going in groups to visit an ailing patient in hospitals and then converting the waiting lounges into nukkads complete with chai and snacks …

The list can go on … I am sure you can add your own few instances of the exploits of the Educated Illiterates.

If you feel that these illustrations are restricted to those who are filthy, stinking rich then perish that thought.

Educated Illiteracy is truly democratic – it straddles strata, income levels, genders, age groups, and, of course, actual education levels. Educated illiteracy is of the people, by the people, for the people and inflicted on the people. But no one seems to mind since Educated Illiteracy comes with different proficiency levels. And you don’t only need money to raise (or lower) the bar of demonstrating your level of educated illiteracy.

You only need impunity.

It’s reached a stage where I have become like the kid from The Sixth Sense who says “I see dead people” … I see “Educated Illiterates” everywhere.

Is there any hope? I don’t think so. We have reached far enough as a society that we can’t turn back to how things should be as those norms and mores all seem to have vanished (and banished) beyond the horizon. And then videos like these only reaffirm my pessimism. It has to be seen to be believed.

Be braver. Be kinder.

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For Keep Watching this time I am sharing the review of a movie which I feel showed us a glimpse of what a world completely ruled by extremes of Educated Illiterates would look like - no holds barred, violent and toxic.

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A wafer thin plot (son loves father obsessively, father has no time, son becomes wayward, son can go to any extent to avenge attack on father, father repents in the end) is stretched to 3:20 hrs. Meanders a lot, unsurprisingly. Stuffed with action that touches new levels of blood, gore and violence (slurrrp for those who love such stuff). Replete with toxic masculinity. Ranbir Kapoor excellent and fills up the screen. Anil Kapoor is bechara. Rashmika is all gritted teeth. Everyone else is incidental or there only to be killed. The movie jumps from one thing to another abruptly. Just like this review. 2.5* (purely for the action)

Animal | Netflix | 3hr 20min