Too fast, too much....or survival?

Human civilization has been aligning itself to an industrialization model for years now. I feel like we are at a point where our schools, colleges, entire education systems are oriented towards finding a high paying job and teaching you to climb 'corporate ladders'. Perhaps not directly so, but that's definitely the underlying theme. Public exams mean make or break for several kids, especially in developing nations. The fight for survival is much more real here and makes the competition in the education system almost a matter of life and death. Once you claw your way through the maze of exams and grades, you enter the "real world". You worked hard, prepped for and went through stressful interviews and made it in one piece...whew! You got that job you wanted in your dream company. From that point on it's even more complex. Deadlines, insane schedules and performance reviews determine your worth from here on out. Now it's all about 'growing' and becoming bigger and better than everyone else *ALL* the time.

Now, there's a certain amount of survival instinct that plays into this. I've noticed that people who are generally poorer or have seen more hardships in life tend to want more and make more of their lives - the more being defined by said corporate ladders. Naturally. But think about this: if everyone is educated in a world where the education teaches alignment with a 'corporate' way of thinking, what happens to something like agriculture? Or arts? Shouldn't we be thinking of ways to better our lives with more options than typical corporate jobs? Shouldn't we create more opportunities to make an equally comfortable living with farming for example? Hmm.

I can't help but wonder, are we simply fighting for survival of the fittest? Or are we really making our lives more and more complex?

Jodha Akbar

We rarely watch Indian movies these days unless it comes *highly* recommended by a million people! This wasn't the case for Jodha Akbar. But we are both huge history buffs. So we recently watched it anyway. It was certainly not a bad movie. Though I wouldn't say it was phenomenal or anything. The pacing was good and songs few in number (which we forwarded of course). Hrithik Roshan did a decent job of playing Akbar. Aishwarya as usual was her pretty self without much to offer on the acting front. Seriously, for the Rajput she played, the woman wouldn't sport a sword convincingly. Overall not a bad movie although mostly fictitious.

So naturally, the trivia girl within me got curious and I went searching for articles on Akbar the Great. I remembered very little about him from my history books. All I could recall was that he was the most tolerant of the Mughal kings and quite successful in uniting large parts of the Indian subcontinent into a single kingdom under his rule. The first article I came across was, of course, a wikipedia entry. As A & I read along, it became increasingly evident that it was either written or edited heavily by a Hindu fanatic. It portrayed Akbar in a rather anti-Hindu light. After browsing through several other articles, it was quite clear. Sad.

Akbar was known as an intellectual. He had quite a collection of artists and learned men in his court. He was apparently very fond of intellectual debates on religion and spirituality. He expanded his mind beyond the borders of his own religion and even tried to start a new one garnering the hope of a united civilisation. Though that didn't get very far. I would love to read and find out more about him. I'm still looking for a good book though. Hopefully, it will confirm my (and many many others') suspicions about the biased wikipedia article. Aah, humans!