Does Grey Matter?

We humans have penchant for seeing things in stark Black or stark White. For us the grey seldom counts.

There is news doing rounds for two days that a rag picker’s son cracked the exam to become a doctor. The newsmakers are singing hosanna of how a boy from poor family background who lived in a hut, that didn’t have even toilets, has cracked the prestigious medical exam.

Though there is no taking away the credit that the boy deserves, yet I have my grouse with the way the success of students from weaker economic class is eulogized. The news article reads that he didn’t have toilets in the house (or the hut) and look where he has reached. Now the thing that irritates is that as if living in a hut that is sans a loo is some kind of yardstick for praise. What I mean to say is that there is no talismanic properties attached to the status called ‘poor’ that helps you crack prestigious exams of career path. It is your mental abilities that enable you to achieve such success.

Why I am saying this is because people tend to generalize things. There is a belief in my side of India that if you are bereft of fundamental facilities in life like loo and electricity then your daily life qualifies to have the status of ‘struggle’ (even if you are owner of lands) and if your daily life includes the facilities like loo and electricity then you are leading life of a decadent. What I am trying to put forth is that even the students who have facilities of loo and electricity go through their share of struggle with studies and with life. 

But, since, we are such a sucker for extremes that we totally ignore the tribulations that the students with average abilities and moderate facilities have to go through. 

There is a coaching institute in my part of the country that boasts for sending the students from poor background to IITs. While there is nothing wrong in the ideology itself but how many institutes are there in India that focus on making a student smart,who is weak at maths, physics, and chemistry. 

These coaching institutes take only those students who have the ability to solve scientific equations and they are sure that they can groom them to crack the exams. You might say what is wrong in it? Because, unless you have a certain ability, you can’t qualify a certain exam. Point taken, but why there are no initiatives to make the learning easy for students who have difficulty with learning? And when you are taking only the mentally sharp students, then why give the argument that they are poor? Ok, you can say that you are providing them a platform that otherwise they would not have. But, even then, don’t publicize that how being only poor helped them crack IIT exams. And from here starts the out of proportion exalt of students belonging to poor background as if they have done a miracle. If they didn’t have a bend of mind that is responsive to scientific equations, however poor they could be, they would never be able to crack the exams that seek such abilities.

In the process of extolling the achievement of the poor section of students, we somewhere belittle the efforts of the students who belong to a class that have a loo and electricity in their houses.  Even if, they fail to crack these exams, their struggle deserves no less praise. But who cares for grey, we love only Black or White.

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