I am seeing some of my friends, of my age, become parents of university-going kids, some whose children are married or getting married, and soon, some of them will become grandparents. And I am surprised, nay, shocked at how many of these people continue to hold idiotic and completely and objectively false (and, dare I say, easily falsifiable) views of many things in the world.
I know I am going to be 50 this year, and I keep joking about how old I have become, but I am aware, or at least was under the impression, that I am from a generation that is more in-tune with the internet and everything it brings, more aware of the kind of narratives one sees all around (and the intent of those that weave them), and generally less prone to falling for bullshit. I always thought that those within my generation who did not ‘get it’ were just a little immature and young, and soon, as they see more of life, they’ll come around.
Seems I am wrong. Someone who will probably be a grandparent in a year or two can hardly claim to be young and immature in regards to such obvious stupidity that they demonstrate fairly regularly and in public. And this is not just in terms of their consciousness about their privilege, or their justification for their beliefs, whether religious or political or economic, or their understanding of sex and gender, or their grasp of basic history (e.g.: their beliefs about ancient/medieval India), geography (e.g.: their lack of understanding of Adam’s bridge), physics (e.g.: their loose usage of ‘quantum’), biology (e.g.: their refusal to try to understand evolution), chemistry (e.g.: their misconceptions about how medicine works), mathematics (e.g., and I must demonstrate this more vividly here: more number of them than I would have hoped think that if they had Rs.130 Crore, they could give each Indian Rs.1 Crore), socio-economics (e.g.: their completely wrong and rather aggressively held beliefs about affirmative action), politics (e.g.: their mistaking democracy with majoritarianism), or even their knowledge of and skills to use the readily available and vast resources online to look stuff up without spending the kind of bandwidth, money, or time as it would require to say, a couple of decades ago.
And these are not people who are failures in life, mind you. Far from it. They are very successful in their careers. Unfortunately, just like our education system that teaches more about how to crack exams and less about the subject it purportedly claims to impart education on (the very system most of these ‘successful professionals’ are a product of), our professionals can be, and mostly are, damn good at the job they do, having excelled at cracking that code, without ever needing, wanting, or able to gather even the most superficial of knowledge of subjects and matters around and away from the core proficiencies required by their immediate profession.
However, that does not stop them from being misled into thinking that somehow their being extremely skilful at their profession automatically makes them knowledgeable about every other subject in the world. So, someone who is a good coder or program manager or actor or director or accountant or salesperson or pilot or soldier or doctor or engineer or mountaineer or writer will start to think that their success in their profession translates without requiring further study into them having the right to be taken seriously in whatever else they may fancy.
This was funny, to me, till I thought that these are young, immature people who are still discovering the world and they’ll soon see things in a more mature, nuanced, sophisticated, studied manner as they learn. Now that I learn about their becoming grandparents, I am appalled that this is the limit of their maturity, and no more improvement may be expected from the said specimen.
What about me? Am I perfect? Not at all. The whole point of this post is that I consider myself young and immature and learning about life, with (turns out wrongly) plenty of time ahead of me to study something, educate myself, and correct my beliefs and thoughts if found wanting. Apparently, this is a misimpression that I have carried since I was a teenager, always thinking there’s time for me to reach adulthood. This was reinforced with Kymaia coming into my life at the ripe age of 42, and me mixing with young parents and generally seeing and interacting with young people around me.
But today, I stand corrected. I am the adult in the room. I better start behaving in a manner befitting this. And as for the idiots I see around me, that’s how they will always be. You see, lack of knowledge can be corrected. But there is no cure for intentional ignorance. As the Marathi proverb goes, ‘झोपलेल्याला जागे करता येते, झोपेचे सोंग घेतलेल्यांना जागे करता येत नाही’ (you can awaken a sleeping person, but never someone who is pretending to sleep).
