How education changes lives
We have a privilege we do not think about much.
Hello my friend,
I am sorry for the late email today.
Been under the weather for the last three days. Still am. Fever, weakness, throat infection — all of which command supreme rest.
But the one learning I derived out of this episode was to schedule this email in advance, so that you as a reader know what to expect when.
I cannot build India’s most read newsletter by being inconsistent with timings.
I own it. I will fix this.
Now, let’s start.
Raw and Real Conversation
When I was in class 8, we had a house help named Sunita.
When she would come to our home for her chores, she would often bring her elder daughter along, whose name was Rajkumari. We made sure Rajkumari wasn’t involved in the chores (child labour), but she was an almost daily visitor.
One of the things that did not sit well with me in this set up was that Rajkumari did not go to school.
So during my summer break that year, out of the blue, I offered to teach her.
She would come at our home for one hour, I would take her to my study room to make sure she had the best quiet environment, and we began at ground level — teaching of the alphabet.
In less than a week, she quit.
I was naive enough to not understand it back then. So I thought she was not simply interested in studies.
Now as I think about it, I realise there was an upbringing, environment, mindset, (lack of) family conversations, and conditioning I was single-handedly fighting against.
For me education was my oxygen. I knew even at that age that this was the only thing that would give me everything I wanted.
But for Rajkumari maybe education was another distraction.
Maybe at home she was already being prepared to be a nice wife very soon.
Maybe there was a boy she was already seeing, and her parents wanted to make sure she got no freedom.
Maybe the conversation of education in that household was as unfathomable as driving Ferrari sports car from New Delhi to Gurugram on a Monday morning.
The question, though, is: why am I telling this to you?
It is because we all want to change something in our lives.
Even though we are blessed with the best lives, there is always an improvement our mind is always inching towards.
What happens after that thought is what makes the difference between us and Rajkumari.
No matter what you went through, you have the tool of education with you.
All our lives we think that the formal education we got was meaningless, because the reality is so much different. But that education gave you the mindset to figure life out, which you did and are still doing.
The only mistake we make is at one point after our degree, jobs and some corpus in our mutual funds, we become complacent. We accept our current circumstances as the only reality.
We forget that it was education that changed our childhood reality into what we have now.
Shaant hokar socho: This means we change things through education.
And by education, I do not mean just going back to college.
I mean preparing yourself for real world by reading books, reading spiritual texts, changing your habits, and so on.
If you cannot get up in the morning and you want to change that, and one fine day you read “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius and he says:
“At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work, as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for, the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?”
Or you are trying too hard in your work, and you read “The Inner Game of Tennis”, by W. Timothy Gallwey and you realise:
“The secret to winning any game lies in not trying too hard.”
Or perhaps you are experiencing hair fall during monsoon, and you watch a video by Rujuta Diwekar, do those changes, and bam, within weeks your hair gets better.
There is so much wisdom out into the world, but you have to be a seeker, a relentless force of life seeking endless education, because you can.
Your basics are sorted. You know how to read. You have a degree. Rajkumari couldn’t, because she didn’t know how and where to start.
I know someone in my life (whom I stay at a respectful distance from) who would cringe at all of the above and say “I don’t have time. My life is the worst.”
Guess what? There are books on time management, like the ones by Brian Tracy, and if you need perspective on your “worst” life, maybe you need to watch The Secret documentary.
The answer to every problem of yours is out there.
But do have to develop the courage, the willingness, the inner drive to be a seeker. And an all-time learner.
Staying married to your problems never moved the humanity or a single human forward.
Some ways to begin that change in the smallest of ways:
Pick one book. Any one book that interests you. And start reading it.
Then pick the next book. A good book often refers many books. Or go to Amazon recommendations based on your book, go to Goodreads for recommendations, or the best ever: step into your local book store. We need to spend more money in book stores.
Try not to read for a particular “purpose” all of the time. Try reading good books, but for leisure.
A good world is non-fiction books. Although I would suggest staying away from dopamine fiction, and read only that fiction that is helpful and is beyond the likes of “will they/will they not?”
Proportion of slop has to be less than proportion of good.
The last time I met Rajkumari was maybe 2 years ago in the same locality, she was obviously married and had kids, and maybe she had the same life that her environment conditioned into.
The chasm between us and Rajkumari is that we know how to educate ourselves. It is our OG Brahmastra.
We have this privilege, and if we do not exploit it…I just took a deep breath.
We have to make that choice.
We can stay married to our excuses. The job is bad, family is bad, life is hard, back pain, environment, too hot, too much rain — whatever.
But you still have the agency. The only person who can take away that agency is you. The only person that can be the agent in turning your life 180 is you.
“The smartest people are all self-taught, even if they went to school.”
— Naval Ravikant.
2 Raw One-Liners:
Do not just look at the reception of your content. First look at how proud you are for putting it out.
Being useful is probably every human being’s personal Mount Everest.
3 (for) Real crips blogs to read, and a place without likes and comments:
That’s all for this weekend my friend.
If you wish to read ebooks in a PDF instantly, here are some of my instant access e-books. Feel free to not read them, but please start reading any other book this weekend.
There is nothing, absolutely nothing better for yourself ever.
Nishtha Gehija
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