Artificial Life

I may have cheated you into this article by giving the topic. I have to say that it will not deal with making artificial, life-like organs inside top secret laboratories, but with the frustration arising from social, personal and academic pressures forced upon people struggling to make a beautiful life in future.

We were born free, but then started priorities, with the first of them being made by our parents. These set up a social character by developing a lifestyle. Today these lifestyles restrict the possibilities of exploring life and unfortunately there are prominent phenomenon helping the cause.

By teaching a child, a few rhymes, the alphabet, counting numbers, etc., within the four walls of dimly lit classrooms and few grown-ups interacting with them, a preset of life is being created. These hinder a child’s natural learning ability by experiencing things. Practical learning is not to be seen and by the end of schooling, he finds a set of formulae and a few futile experiments with the equipment as the experience gained in the better part of his learning stage. This underlines the fact that the current educationist methods create closed minds and restricted lifestyles. This continues in the college, graduation and in life.

Here learning takes place only through mugged up notes and indicates your ability to reproduce them in examinations and to happily and comfortably forget them thereafter. Sometime later, you get a scorecard to show how much you have forgotten, instead of showing how much you have learnt. This is happening in local universities, pre-universities, schools and the like. Even as students are provided with learning equipment, well qualified faculty, a disciplined, dynamic and a dedicated leader such as a principal pr a dean, the effort goes into making a set of pre-programmed bots who can hardly find interest in wonderful things in nature. Here the main assets of humanity, such as creativity and imagination are stabbed. This can explain to a certain extent that earlier, discoveries or inventions were accredited to a sole person, or two. Whereas now, a group of individuals combine their reduced abilities and patent their product to a company. This apparently creates human-waste that goes not into sanitation, but into society.

It should be clear enough now, that academic pressures build up in an individual from the tender age itself, much before he starts to make an independent living. The joy in learning things by experimentation is snatched and the heavy competition from similar individuals adds to the pressure, agitating him further.

There are things which can be done only during the age when you have the zeal and the time to do something interesting. These pressures, starting from academic, leading to social and resulting in personal, hinder us from enjoying subtle things in life which form sweet memories and help you stay young at heart forever. And finally when you are seemingly well settled in life with a sloggy job, unhappy family, poor health, unsatisfactory lifestyle, etc., you either are too old to change these things in spite of your hefty bank-balances, or you do not have the brave young heart to flip your life and enjoy the other side.