The Inscrutable Americans by Anurag Mathur

Author:Anurag Mathur
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9788129121585
Published: 2013-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

7

Back in college, Gopal devoted himself to his work. Though he knew it was an illusion, he thought he sensed his mind flower and expand. The Indian system of education had drilled his mind and beaten it until it was a tight, rigid mass laid upon the fundamentals of science that had been dug deep until they sank into his subconscious. Now from this unshakeable base, he was able to make sorties that his American colleagues couldn't imagine trying, unsure as they were about the basics.

For the first time he began to learn the joy of analysis rather than retention. Based upon the core of fundamentals that had been hammered into him - often quite literally - he experimented with leaps of logic. Often he paused uncertainly, as though in mid-air, waiting for someone to admonish him and demand that he return to thinking by the book. Instead he found encouragement. His mind soared. He felt himself flying. For the first time in his life he gloried in studying.

I came out of India at the right time, he felt. He had got the best of an educational system where the early years instilled discipline and the basics, but the subsequent repetition of the same crippled minds that were ready to take off. In America he found that encouragement, yet simultaneously he found that the American students seemed unable to utilise the truly astonishing opportunities that their educational system offered at the higher levels.

He found himself studying late in the library, staying even later in the lab, not because he wanted higher grades, but because he was enjoying it. He felt that his grasp over his subject had become so thorough, that he was able to go back to the fundamentals, to those dragons of his earlier days, and look at them with a new eye. Why were they constructed as they were? What was the intent and what the result? Could they be improved upon? Such questioning would have been heresy to his Indian teachers, a scandal. But they had done their job and Gopal had left them behind. He often considered amusedly with what horror they would react to his questions and the viewpoints he held now. But now he thought of them, the giants of his childhood, as dusty, shrunken old men with barred minds.

Here, he exulted, they loved questions. They didn't care if they were insane, in fact the crazier the better, so long as they were also intelligent. Even the students, astonishingly, didn't seem to resent his clearly superior abilities. At least, he amended, most of them didn't. They said they enjoyed his sallies and they spoke to him, asked to study with him and expressed their admiration to him with a frankness that was staggering, yet deeply touching. Initially he was so incredulous at their straightforward talk that he suspected they were being sarcastic. But very quickly he realised they were transparently honest.

In India, he sighed with real pain, we could write the definitive book on envy.

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