Killing Fields

Ever so often, when I am lecturing to or taking clinics for residents, I say “You are all like my 14 year old son, - very intelligent people with no brains – fortunately for you,it is not your fault”.
In the last 25 years, I have yet to see a resident with native intelligence and common sense – a sweeping, hurtful statement, you say; so be it. During this same time, I have seen very bright young minds, sharp, incisive and quick on the take.
No. There is no contradiction – common sense and intelligence or being “brainy” are very different things. Common sense comes out of a lot of internal circuitry – developed because there was an unadulterated PCB on which it could develop. “Brainy – comes out of today’s education system – 2002/200 marks; 27 (!) levelling for the first position at 202/200. Kids - who know the structure of the neuron at 12 – without knowing what it is all about.
That is what our residents come out of. A totally polluted soil in school and college with a lot of garbage for manure; 12 hour “school days”; tuitions from the age of 12 and parents who all want their children to top the merit list. The residents have worn blinkers all their life. They see nothing but an MCQ for a frontage and a merit list at the end of it – a merit list on which their future depends at every stage of life - at age 15, 18, 24,28 …….100!
It is no wonder then, that what they travel through is not green turf of life but the blood-red killing fields of competition.
Tolerance, empathy, respect and admiration for their compatriots and colleagues are the last things that they have learnt – because if they did have these qualities, they would long since have perished in their competitive life. It is a dog eat dog world. These are the killing fields of Pnom Phen.
Today in our department I am seeing an extreme manifestation of this phenomenon; when no one is happy that their colleagues have done well – nay very well – in their exams. They are busy finding fault with whoever has done well. Tolerance is not a word in their dictionary.
Let’s face it – Life is never perfect – no exam is perfect, “no examiners” are perfect – partiality in life occurs in one form or the other at every stage of life – even parents have favourties amongst their kids. Look back from your school days – your favourite teachers; you were favourite students of one teacher or the other – look back and you will see that each one of us, has at different times, benefited or lost because of it.. But, it is important to be graceful in accepting an exam result just as it is important to be equanimous in accepting what life spreads out for us at different times.
When I see residents, crib and crab, back-bite and hurt at this “mature”: age , I am left if a deep sense of despair and sadness – a feeling that I have failed somewhere. Are we never aware of the hurt that our actions can do to others especially when we do it under the freedom of anonymity? Can we not be happy in somebody else’s happiness; can we not think of the “we” rather than of the “I”?
I still don’t blame my residents for what they are or what they do. We as teachers and parents are responsible for this mess – a mess that starts in school and one that ends at DM. But, we will be failing in our duty, if we do not point this out them; if we do not tell them that that there is another way, where character and not marks or medals matters. Because if we don’t teach them these values now, they will learn these late in their lives - but then, it would have been too late - for them and so too - for so many others.
Remember, my little fellows – it is possible to be happy in somebody else’s happiness!!

March 2006