Nirvana in Knowledge: A Sense of Pride

Lots of friends were flooding my mail box asking for some new writing on my blog. I couldn’t convince that I’m not a typical blogger who keeps on adding something or rather and wait for responses. Their pestering and nagging nature sometimes compel me to jot down some thought which I don’t give the tinge of my creative writing. I ponder on their thoughts a lot as they matter to me as a writer. One such thought emerged recently. Let me discuss that with you guys.

Just couple of days back, I attended an international conference and as everyone would conclude that this must be filled up with jargons, bombastic words, complex theories, which may OHT to most of the people who attend there as just observers. OHT…oh sorry…Dear its not the transparent papers you’re thinking about. It’s a typical jargon used by most of the students –Over-Head Transmission, which simply means, a student purging his lips and questioning, ‘What’s that?’ As expected, the participants were all academicians, research scholars, social scientists, in one word ‘Erudites’. Please now don’t categorize me in that ‘Erudite’…To be modest, I’m on the process of learning. So can’t be in the group of intelligentsia.

Anyway, the point I want to make is simple, this conference have strengthen my thought of ‘the more learned you are the more intolerant you become’. My Maa use to teach me that a human is like a tree however high one grows, one can never touch the sky, nor can one leave the ground. So be happy with what you can do. These words resonated in my boggling mind.

Probably when the erudites argue they puke out suppressed anger in form of verbal utterances, which would be on high decibels probably might not sound like educated people arguing, it would be more like arguments with your maids or the driver. One doesn’t even hesitate to hue the angst with personal remarks. It sounds to me like people attending an Indian marriage and saying white lies on the hosts’ faces and later bitching around that ‘this was bad’, ‘that was awful’, and so on.

One thought that stroke me was the reluctance of accepting the ‘other’ becomes more difficult with the enhancement of knowledge. Does that mean then, the psyche also envelopes with increase of knowledge? I probably don’t have an answer for that but yes, sometimes I feel that the sense of eradication of tolerance is directly proportional to enhancement of knowledge, and that’s may be the most prominent reason that we tend to develop an attitude of superiority and a sense of pride in our trait. Beside that there are other socio-economic structural and paradigmatic schemes that germinate the seed of schism inside us. Than my question ultimately comes up, is being highly educated better than being just literate and tolerant? I don’t know, you guys may have an answer to that.