I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
     flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
     went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
     bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

                                             --Wilfred Owen
Dulce et Decrum est pro patria mori: Latin for "It is both fitting and honourable to die for one's country"

Something somewhere...
Yesterday as I sat browsing the internet, 2 of my friends came to my room, one of them is a guy called A. Now, A is a very smart, handsome guy who like most guys dreams about wealth, fame and adulation from the fairer sex. A was feeling very bouyant, he kept slapping our backs, shouting loudly, laughing loudly and at the silliest of things .. being too funny.

The incident: Death of my uncle.
The cast: my parents, my uncles, my aunts, their families.
The setting: Condolence meeting
People gather-express sorrow for the departed-talk a little with departed uncle's wife-catch up with each other's lives-some go for a movie-some go for shopping-very few (including my parents thankfully) remain with the wife.

While nothing is going to bring back the departed, while life has to go on, is it too much to ask of people to forget commerce and entertainment for a few hours?

But then as with other things, condolence is also a rite, u perform ... and u forget.. no emotional hang ups!

         What do you say about an education system which reduces education to mindless donkeywork? As the movement for education reform gathers force, we see one set of rituals being replaced by another set. In the early 90s, there were a lot of demands for practical work in technical colleges, activists demanded greater emphasis on project work, problems rather than theory. As a result, a lot of universities changed their academic structure to allow students to pursue project work and  practicals... exam question papers started having significant number of problems. But this failed too...
         The reason it failed was that few people realise that syllabi are rarely bad by themselves, the success or failure of an education system is ultimately in the hands of the people implementing the system viz. the professors. In most of the colleges, professors are incompetent, incompetent to the extent that they concentrate more on lengthy meaningless lab reports (or submissions) than the content of those reports. Things have come to such a pass that one can get a distinction all throughout one's 8 semesters of engineering without really understanding the subject. Step marking was introduced so that people don't mug up the answers and reproduce in the exams. This degenerated into steps becoming rigid and only the steps mentioned in the model answers getting marks. Since it is these same handful of professors who check papers, the fates of some millions of students depend on their competence or the lack of it. The greatest farce is the lab report and submission rite. Students write pages after pages  on experiments they least understand or worse still, haven't even performed. They spend hours just reproducing text from textbooks.
         The fall out of this farcical exercise is that students start believing that this is how education should be.. they too start concentrating on the manifestations of education rather than the content. More than that, they lose confidence in themselves because at some level they too realise that they aren't learning anything. The present condition of Indian universities(especially those in Maharashtra) is that students are content just to pass. Every 6 months, universities release a list of scores with a grade without any justification for those scores. So students rarely know where they went wrong or where they lost marks or why they failed. For any thinking person, this causes a huge dent in his/her self esteem. He/She loses the morale to study, and the whole exercise gets reduced to just completing 4 yrs and getting out with a degree. Since this is the condition in most Indian universities (with the notable exceptions of IITs, IISc and to some extent, BITS, Pilani), is it any wonder that Indians rarely do fundamental research?

The more I look at everything that surrounds me, the more I get the feeling that the human race is steadily going downwards, that the contribution of each new generation to art, literature, philosophy, music etc. is less than the last. This is all the more true for India which from being the "seat of all that is good in the world" has spiralled down to being a nation of vocal incompetent morons. Its a wonder to me that the Indian society has not collapsed into itself, or then maybe it has...
The place where I get to examine this collapse more closely than anywhere else is IIT or The Indian Institute of Technology. Now we all know that IITians are media darlings and the apple of the eye of Indians (and probably Americans too). Before I got into IIT, the image of IITians that I had in my mind was of industrious, dedicated, innovative, smart intelligent beings taking all worldly problems by their horns. Now, having survived this system for 3 years and but a few months from graduating, I know otherwise. We walk into IIT thinking we own this world and we leave disillusioned and frustrated.
This contradiction between image and reality stems from the larger issue that Indians, specially post-colonial Indians are spineless mindless people who don't know who they are or what they want. The same is true for the average student who takes science just because he scored well in class X Maths and Science papers. In the same spirit of thoughtlessness, he chooses to appear for JEE. Nowhere is this mindlessness more apparent than during counselling .. where top 150 students take Computer Science & Engineering, next 150 take Electrical, next 200 take Mechanical and so on and so forth. It strikes me as uncanny and unnatural that all top 150 students find CSE interesting enough to take it up as a career. The issue of interest and aptitude does not even feature in the mind.. atleast not until departmental courses start and you figure that you really don't care which among hole and electron is lighter, or the differences between NP hard and NP complete problems. Then attendance starts falling, frustration starts rising, students seek refuge in drugs, alcohol, smoke (all mechanisms to numb the mind and prevent thinking). They blame the system, they blame the professors, they blame the exams which test nothing, they blame the assumption that proficiency in Physics, Chemistry and Maths is tantamount to intelligence... but the one thing they don't blame is the one thing that got them into the mess .. their decision (forced or otherwise) to get into a line they never had any interest for.
The issue is not as simple as a matter of choice ... there is the societal pressure to get into engineering or medicine, there is the issue of that incorrect assumption that one has to be an engineer to be rich ... or that all IIT engineers are rich. What people forget is that they won't ever be happy till they do something that they like ... regardless of their proficiency in Physics, Chemistry and Maths, till such time engineering does not fascinate them ... they won't ever be good engineers. This malaise is not only in IIT. IIT is a microcosm here of all the colleges in this country. The real reason why the youth is so frustrated is that nobody really paused to think and ask himself "What do I want from my life?"