The Great Indian Popular Culture
Everyone got excited about Higgs "boson" (aka GOD particle) in 2013 and its immense importance in particle physics, Peter Higgs got his Nobel Prize and everything is good. But we didn't paid attention to this fellow "Satyendra Bose" he was a genius and worked with Einstein and his contributions were so important to our understanding of Quantum world that the family of particles "bosons" was named after him (Bose => Boson)
Many people like to call India "Jagat Guru" and some would even argue that we were the most something something civilization and we were a world leader in the past... The irony is we are so blinded by our greatness of past that we don't pay attention to present.
Indian News channels and media created shows and newspapers talked about this GOD particle thing in a rather dramatic way (you remember - “This might end the world and all the bullshit”), but nowhere did I find the mention of the name "Satyendra Bose" Because we celebrate celebrities who entertain us. We are so lazy that entertainment has higher value in our nation than science.
We as a society is miserable, not because we have problems like ever growing population, decremented nutrition values of our food, malnourished children, poverty, illiteracy, terrorism, pollution and semi-functioning governments . Everyone has problems. We are miserable because as a society we don’t want to do anything about it.
We want to be leisure and want to be busy being entertained. Glamour and Bollywood gossip even News debates entertain us hence we consume it. And no wonder our youngsters are eager for release of a movie trailer and have no interest in release of a scientific journal. We want to watch who won the Film-fare this year and do not have any interest in who won the Nobel or Pulitzer. We want to buy iPhones and show it off and impress others but never tried to understand how its touch screen works and why it’s better than other touch screen devices.
It’s not their fault, it’s our responsibility to direct the youth and we have directed them in wrong directions. Glamour and Stardom have laid a curtain in front of truly meaningful work. For a youngster - Sports, Movies, TV Serials, Reality Shows become more important and learning Science, Economics and Engineering. I am not saying that entertainment and leisure is not necessary, they are essential. But we have got our priorities wrong. We don’t need more movie stars or cricketers, we need more scientists and engineers (actual engineers not just the degree holders) to solve our problems.
We need more people working on the issues we are facing, but we are not encouraging them. We have to glorify what needs to be glorified. We need to clearly state the problems we have and the areas in which we need our youth to be interested. We have to cultivate this interest in our youth, not by imposing it upon them but by prioritizing what gets importance. Then there is some possibility of getting out our miseries. But instead we glorify wrong kinds of professions and celebrate wrong events, hence the problems remains.
The point is we don’t have nearly enough educational awareness. And by our actions we don’t seems to have any interest in fixing this either, we could have encouraged lots of students by a mere mention of this genius. Delivering a message “He was also from the same country as you.” and that our students also have the same environment and opportunity to discover, invent and make the world a better place (rather than watching Big Boss).
I am not Satyendra Bose’s fan, nor have anything to do with his social media marketing. I just wanted to point out that we have talent is here and now capable of solving our long facing problems. Nurture them and don't let them into the trap of being so and so... We need to direct them in a way that's constructive for everyone, we need to let them be themselves, you never know many of them have hidden "Satyendra Bose" in them.
Anant Parmar
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