Insect as metaphor

The insect kept struggling to stay afloat the dirty water standing on the side of the road. I stood on the footpath which was the bank, and watched its condition. From where had this insect come? It would have been happy and comfortable flying here and there, living its uncomplicated life. By some strange mix of circumstances, it had landed on this muddy bit of water. It certainly looked out of place. One can say that if the road had a proper system to drain the water, the puddle with the struggling insect would not have been there in the first place. The insect would have been elsewhere then, perhaps in a less hostile environment. But Kolkata is no different from any other Indian city, I guess. We keep spending crores of rupees every year on ‘maintenance’ but one good rain is enough to make the water stand and trap insects such the one I was watching.

Was the insect used to this watery environment? It looked like the flying type, with its tiny, immobile wings. In that stagnant pool, it was desperately moving its jointed legs, trying to find surer ground. One bit of a solid surface would have been enough to get it airborne again. I saw a piece of cardboard jutting out of this stagnant pool, about three feet from the struggling insect. One stride at the most for me but for the insect in that condition, three feet was large.

The notion of scale is relative, isn’t it? For instance, what distance would this insect travel all its life? What about an ant? A mosquito? Lice in the hair? Viruses? Many insects may travel within very limited boundaries all their lives when compared with humans. May be for them that distance is normal or even huge. From our anthropocentric view (we tend to follow the dictum that ‘man is the measure of all things’), the insect distance may be small. But what about the lice in the hair of a person who travels across continents? It has a great chance of seeing the earth. So does a cockroach that gets packed in your suitcase which is flown from Bangalore to Kolkata! Both in terms of scale and speed of travel, the oblivious cockroach has not seen anything like it before. The best example I can think of right now is the H1N1 virus which my friend thinks is the ‘Varaha avatar’, a reincarnation of God in his various forms. This virus has traveled all the way from Mexico, free of cost.

For that matter, even those of us who do not travel much beyond the immediate confines of our home and community are all cosmic travelers, aren’t we? For one, the earth goes around the sun at an astonishing 18 miles per second, the sun completes one turn around the center of the Milky Way galaxy every 250 million years, while the galaxy itself (like millions or billions of other galaxies) is hurtling through space-time at this very moment, or so we are told. Nothing is resting then, everything moves. There is no absolute rest anywhere in this universe. No minus 273 degree Kelvin.

The struggling insect was closer to the piece of the wet, jutting cardboard. It sparked off another set of thoughts. What about what happens in our schools? Children struggle day after day, year after year in this often hostile environment, searching for pattern, searching for meaning. That search is not fruitful, except in some cases. Like the struggling insect I saw in Kolkata, most children just manage to stay afloat. There are very few anchors in any case, very few wet cardboards jutting out of the muddy waters of the experience we call schooling. Last night, I was reading Margaret Donaldson who says ‘…that some of the skills which we value most highly in our educational system are thoroughly alien to the spontaneous modes of functioning of the human mind.’ This is one view.

The other way of looking at the struggling insect is to ask: What is life without a struggle? Growing and becoming are all as a result of struggle. What is life without a scar, a deep imprint? Without an experience that brings you close to the edge and sometimes takes you over? A sense of achievement follows struggle. Once you reach the wet cardboard that juts out, you have a vantage point which helps you understand where you are. It also offers possibilities for where you want to go, and what you want to become. Genuine understanding perhaps develops like this. The ‘Aha!’ moment of understanding is the cardboard climbing moment which was preceded by struggle and engagement. That is joyful learning – the struggle for understanding, the understanding itself, the looking beyond. Not, on the other hand, the doing of an activity for the sake of doing it, to be followed by 'real' (actually, rote) learning, as many teachers thought when the wave of joyful learning swept all over us in the decade of the nineties.

Schools are supposed to make children struggle to reach the cardboard and even go beyond. They can do it but end up not doing it. Instead, children struggle mindlessly. The human potential for meaningful struggle leading to achievement is lost on our teachers and educators. It is lost the moment the child steps into school.

I didn’t wait long enough to see what happened to the insect. Had to get back to my workshop session where I narrated this story.

18 August 2009
Bengalooru