Doctor’s orders

If you can't give them literacy, give them moralityThe good doctor is working on the ultimate prescription. One that would fix this natio...

If you can’t give them literacy, give them morality
The good doctor is working on the ultimate prescription. One that would fix this nation’s cultural and social disorientations — at once and for all time to come. Dr Murli Manohar Joshi, the honourable Union minister of human resource development, is a man in a hurry, a man with a mission, or to put it more succinctly, a man with a mission in a hurry. He knows that if the new century is to be the India Century, as his partymen never tire of reminding the nation, he has to do a smart bit of social engineering and he has to do it right away. He seems to have also come to the conclusion that if you can’t give the children of this country literacy, give them morality instead.

In a Joshian utopia, children would eat up their spinach without demur and extol the virtues of vegetarianism. They would also chant the Saraswati Vandana, eschew wicked ideologies like Marxism, familiarise themselves with their fundamental duties and imbibe moral educationlessons from classes 1 to 12. Indeed, even as this is being written, the HRD ministry’s new panel on moral education is hard at work designing the right courses for the moral rearmament of an entire generation because it has been ordained that morality is to go on stream from the next academic year. The project is an ambitious one, to say the least. Teaching morality in an age where attention spans have shrunk to the size of Barbie’s beach briefs and minds tend to travel only as far as the pizza outlet down the road is certainly going to be a task riven with challenges.

MTV’s minions have thus far displayed a marked disinclination to engage in lofty thoughts of spiritual salvation or ethical engineering. And the fact that there is a conspicuous lack of role models in the adult world doesn’t help either. Today, the path to Parliament could often run through Tihar Jail and Harshad Mehta remains something of a sex symbol for the sensex-watching classes. Just the other day, a Berlin-based monitoring agencyrated India as one of the most corrupt countries in the world and nobody here expressed the slightest bit of incredulity over the conclusion or screamed that it was unfair.

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So will Joshi’s morality pills change this fairly widespread tendency towards amoral behaviour? Can this country look forward to a future free from state assemblies choc-a-bloc full of criminals who throw loudspeakers and paperweights at one another? Would this country have the luxury of being spared the sight of communally-charged mobs who think nothing of mowing people down because they don’t belong to the right religion or the right caste? Will a day dawn when people will not have to know the chief minister of a state personally or pay a large consideration in order to get their child admitted to a decent school? It seems unlikely that large doses of morality administered in the classroom could combat the widespread sickness.

However, if Joshi were to seriously consider eliminating the disadvantages that numerous people in thiscountry experience through educational inputs and human resource development, it may have the effect of helping to make civil society more egalitarian and aware and to that extent more free of ethical and moral misdemeanour.