- Please bring me a piece of mount board on your way back home.
It was past noon and I thought I shall pick it up from some book shop on my way to our ancestral home at Salkia, an almost seven-hundred-year old township in the district of Howrah in West Bengal, India.
The apartment I live with my son and wife is nearly four kilometers away from our Salkia- base we had left fifteen years back due to space-crunch. There was no way left in that house to extend even a half-room at any direction. Sunlight is a blessing to the rooms in that house because of its claustrophobic location. My parents live in that one-hundred-thirty year-old building, still with tough challenges to cling to the roots.
This four-kilometer-drive through the shortest possible way along the main roads of the Howrah township did not confront a single book or paper shop.
I wondered that Dr. Prabir Hui, the teacher who first had injected in me to ponder over catch-lines for advertisements and I was elated to have an opportunity to take up ‘Advertising’ as my special paper during the final semester of a Diploma Course in Sales and Marketing, was never wrong. He was a wonder-man because his teaching techniques were unique. One was, he kept on telling us stories from around us and summed them all up as examples to the leaden and dry theories. That inverse-method juiced it up all. These all boiled down to a bottom-line -- the eternal truth that I still follow is that, in Economics there is a fundamental Demand-Supply equation which further ignites the ‘Consumer Behaviour’ – the main axis of the present global and open economy.
En route to Deamand-Supply or Consumer Behavior, I did find out the fact that down that four-kilometer drive, there was no demand of a book- shop among the consumers. The iron-industry-infested-road had the subtle touches of market places at points. They had biriyani corners, snacks stalls, breakfast corners, hardware shops, photocopy counters, banks, grocers, stationeries and even at one point I found a bedding store. But there was no book-shop all the way along. Not a single one.
During my boyhood, I used to visit my maternal uncle’s place almost in a remote village. After a mile’s walk there was a single grocer’s shop. It used to keep pens and copies to sell. With the progress we have made, in the meantime, I doubt if they keep them anymore. All-purpose-shops are eaten up by giant market complexes and down the line of specialization, the first thing all the local shops have done is that with the call of ‘dedicated product line-up’, they have stopped keeping educational articles to sell.
The priority of life has shifted to things astray where educational parts are just to add a piece of paper to life as a credential. This mediocrity in demand has grossly cut off the quality of thinking and its depths which in turn commercializes almost everything even personal relations. Money can buy love too, now. We are all turning to business and politics without proper education and values. There is no demand for education even in the middle of the vastly populated city where one needs to travel a kilometer almost to get an exercise book while cigarettes are available downstairs. What can be more dangerous than this, I wonder.
This acute lack of demand for education makes its supply/availability in galore in the cities. The advertising guru once had defined advertisement through the following lines:
"Advertisements are made for selling everything that a human life can live without."
When there is a competition of snatching student from one institute to the other for even basic education, and the businessmen are taking this opportunity to set up education for sale, it may be concluded that Education has lost its demand for basic survival of humanity.
The existing system with the best available human resources is running dry without any fruitful production. Consumer behavior, in a broad way, is looking forward to a future of politics as a mighty profession, where education is null and void, either as a base or a support.
Thus right now, India, with all its educational backbone ready, is acutely suffering from a disorderly nervous flow of current gushing right through that backbone itself, which is hitting the mind hard with paralytic blows enough to ruin the country and its stability in future shortly.
This not a whodoneit-murder-mystery. Let us stop the blame-game and step-forward to create a stable demand for proper education as a basic necessity like water and food to survive.
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