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I’ve just had the weirdest dream ever, last night…

I’ve had the weirdest dream ever last night. I was in post-apocalyptic Delhi, which looked much like a landfill, and was being chased by a pack of vicious and rabid street cats. I ran for a long time and lost them, came to this clearing were two big black bears were attacking a tiger. The tiger was losing. I hid behind a pile of garbage and was watching all this.

The tiger somehow escaped, and there was Pierce Brosnan in his James Bond character also standing nearby so the two bears set upon him instead. Brosnan / Bond started dancing, and the bears started dancing along with him. Like on two feet. That kept Brosnan/Bond safe for a while.

Then, he noticed me hiding in the garbage. So he decided I think the best idea would be somehow get the bears to eat me instead of him. So he took out a tranquilliser gun and shot a tranquillizer dart at me. Missed. I started running again, Brosnan/Bond started running after – while dancing, to keep the bears distracted – and the bears followed while dancing. I kept swerving and dodging while running but Brosnan/Bond kept shooting tranquilliser darts at me laughing a maniacal laugh that he’s had “enough shooting practice in the movies”.

I ran into a mall to lose them. It was full of Chinese people, for some reason. I knew I was conspicuous in that crowd so to push through the crowd and reach the elevator, I was crawling on the floor between their legs, shouting the only bit of Chinese that came to my mind at that time: “Taigo lo!” (which I think means “It is too expensive!”)

I pushed my way through the crowd to the front where the elevators were. They were made of a glass cylinder reinforced on four sides with a golden-coloured steel bars. The elevator was free hanging in the air, like, not in an elevator shaft, it was just hanging in the air. And then, it fell and smashed right in front of my eyes. Then my dad walked out of the crowd from nowhere and asked me what was the password to login to Tata Sky’s website so that he could renew the annual subscription pack. (I told him it was “tatasky”.)

Then, in my dream, I cut away to a different scene. I am watching a documentary about how (my dream world’s) economy works. The financial power of countries in my dream world, and I quote the exact words here, is “measured by the magnitude of a normal vector drawn on the political map of a country”. And then the documentary shows this animated map with a single, normal vector sticking out of each country, each with a varying magnitude.

“The magnitude of the normal vector is determined by how much cumulatively a country’s population score in the popular game of Minesweeper.”

Not on a computer of course. Instead of laser quest and paintball venues like these days, in the dream world, there are Minesweeper parlours where friends go to have fun and play Minesweeper on actual tiles by stepping on them. Fake tiles of course with computer-generated displays, no real mines. And yet, even though people pretend they are having fun, it’s a dystopian society where they know that what their game scores affects their economic rating and thus their economy. Of course, people in wealthier countries can play Minesweeper more so they get higher ratings. This whole Minesweeper parlour franchise as well as the rating system is owned by one private corporation.

This is where my dream sequence ends.

“Goodbye JEE”

And most of all, people might start questioning more seriously which college they want to be at. The IITs seem to be becoming more general too. I’ve heard of some introduction of some biology degrees at some IITs. I think a college ought to be general. And very loose about what they want the students to do. And there should exist no 300 student classes at any point of time, because they serve almost no purpose at all.

This will be of interest to my Indian readers in high school / university. I really liked Vishesh’s blog post “Goodbye JEE“. For a long time, I have rationalised, argued, and ranted with spittle flecks leaping out of my mouth about what’s wrong with the Indian higher education system. I’m glad there are still people fighting in that corner. On that note, also read Espera’s “Stupid TAs Annoy Me“. Me, I am done with trying to convince people, partly because I realised that a large part of understanding what’s wrong comes only through self-realisation. Epiphanies that you have through self-realisation have a far more powerful effect. I’d rather just smoke and pass the joint saying “It’s cool, bro”; I don’t feel the urge to make people drink my Kool Aid any more.

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Even when I was in Singapore, I felt an overwhelming bad influence of all that I feel is bad about the education system is in India. Don’t get me wrong, Singapore is doing so many things right – yet it’s getting so many things wrong too. I had this really awesome Canadian expat lecturer in software engineering who’s one of the few fighting to make learning more worthwhile and meaningful. You know what happened to him? He got brutally hacked in the student feedback. A different professor (also in Singapore) also once confided to me that a lot of them don’t want to challenge their students too hard in classes because their pay bonuses are linked to student feedback. Theoretically that’s a nice idea but what happens is that any professor or lecturer who really wants to push boundaries and challenge the class to do more get poor feedback from students across Asia (India, China, Vietnam…) who have been really used to one way of thinking / learning. The few professors who care and the new president of the university though really need to be commended for trying to shake up the system.