The Trap of the First

It seems to me that whatever comes first becomes an organic part of our brain. It is as though the brain, as an organism, awaits the first wave of information to complete its being. Strangely enough, the cognitive makeup of the mind repeats this process. To expand its grasp of the world, the mind once again internalises whatever ideological inputs it receives first. The mind’s template is thus formed by these initial inputs, and everything a person encounters later is processed through that template. Powerful organisations often develop sophisticated mechanisms to alter such templates, yet even they prefer to recruit people when they are young, before the first impressions harden.

I have come to understand education as the transfer of culture to the next generation. Ideally, education is not only about transmission but also about renewing and rejuvenating culture. Yet its true task reaches deeper: liberating minds from the fixations imposed by those first inputs. Perhaps this is why the Vedic seers made it mandatory to pray daily to Savitr—“We meditate on the adorable glory of the radiant sun; may She inspire our intelligence.” The prayer itself is a reminder that the mind must remain open to inspiration beyond its earliest imprints. It pains me, therefore, to see many academicians—supposedly the guiding souls of society—still repeating the ideological rubbish they absorbed during their college days, unable to free themselves from the very templates education should have helped them transcend.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Cognitive Upgrade

Advancing to a higher level of cognitive skills and competence for any individual or group is not an easy passage. It requires training for learning and actual learning, and in addition, it needs accessible resources. Most of the collective cognitive abilities, which sustain, for instance, our democratic order, came to us as gifts from our old scholastic traditions, humanist thoughts of thinkers from different civilizations, and many of the gifted personas which we are fortunate enough to have. And, as a result, we could overcome the formal arrangement, which was nothing more than colonial and ideological epistemological traps. So far, we have done fairly well but a constant, conscious, and organised revitalisation of our cognitive skills is a vital necessity. It does happen on its own but the lag and chaos of anarchic ways costs.

Niraj Kumar Jha