By a Victim of Female Infanticide

Lying on the barren ground,

Naked of all emotions.

Struggling hard to open my eyes.

Distant unknown voices strike my ears like darts.

I can feel rough hands groping my body,

Pushing, tugging at my wrap.

Observing the cold, blood-less wrists.

Do they want me to wake up?

No, I can’t open my eyes,

I had to shut the world out.

And now when I try to unglue the eyelids and flick them open.. I can’t.

They had abandoned me; left me on this barren ground,

When they realized I came from the land of Venus.

They didn’t want me.

Buried me on the same ground.

Do I sense a feeling of regret, a desire to undo the done?

Is it possible to bring back the light of life?

But then I have more companions around me,

Ones who have had to face the same fate I did once.

Now I know there is no feeling of regret.

The age old tradition will continue without any variation

And I will have more lifeless bodies surrounding me on this barren ground.

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The path of uncertainty followed by a confused soul

Jack of all trades, master of none. This is how my babai likes to refer me as. Passing class12 with just average marks is not an accomplishment. For families such as mine even 90% is not a big deal so someone as ordinary as me had nothing in store for her in the future.
I have always been a confused person. Till class11 engineering was all that occupied my mind. IIT was a dream, NIT was the second best option, Jadavpur University was the last refuge for a girl who always performed well in all class tests and terminals, a girl who got 95% in class10 boards.
As the days passed by I realized the most grievous mistake of my life. I hated science. Physics or chemistry is not what I love. It is not what I am passionate about. But what exactly was my calling I did not follow. You see, that is why I am a confused soul.
Creating,designing and drawing was something I enjoyed so may be fashion designing was an option for me.
Babai was against it. My father is a strictly emotionless and artless person. He is sort of like Oliver Barrett's father in Love Story. Fashion designing was a useless career with no scope and no future. So I was never allowed to sit for the NIFT or NID admission tests. Then I came across CLAT. Law could be a bright career choice for me. I loved fighting for a cause, expressing strongly my opinions, had a good hold of the language. It seemed a perfect and lucrative offer. However I did not qualify for the NLUs. 2 extra marks was all I needed. That hurt.
Neither was my engineering entrances good enough. IIT's dreams did not come true. NIT was far away. JU was unavailable. I am in a government aided college now with computer science engineering. Still hoping for CLAT 2013. Unaware of the trauma that I might have to face this year, the doom that might follow after the results of CLAT 2013. I will keep posting updates on the hostel life in an engineering college.
And there is one piece of advice that I would always like to give my juniors. Do what you are good at. Remember what Albert Einstein said “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

Is JEE the correct way to judge a child?

Knowledge is a thing of the Gods. Since the day dust became bone, it has been passed from the teacher to his worthy students, and from him to another and so on. Knowledge was imparted on those who were willing to know the value of life, willing to discover the reason behind every phenomenon, willing to learn the practicalities. There was no materialistic aim behind education, no eye for gain, only a desire for enlightenment. Back then, there was no hustle-bustle, and everyone went through lessons to morph into a proper person.

The recent scenario tells a different tale. Parents want their children to qualify the examinations so that they can grow up to get filling jobs, a prestigious position in the society the ensuing luxury in life. For this purpose, most of the children are admitted to renowned coaching institutes where they are prepared in such a way so that they can easily be selected for colleges through JEE. These expensive institutes give various facilities to their students by solving the questions that generally come in the test and making them go through tests in the mock- JEE environment. This puts the equally capable children coming from average earning families in a fix. Their pockets don’t run that deep, hence they fall back on the things taught at such centers. They don’t get the right guidance and thus cannot pass the wrongly formatted JEE. Teachers no more teach to develop skill and knowledge in an individual and students no more study for intellectual development. Today education is isolated from career and both are seen in different lights. Over-pressurized children tend to miss the classes in school and attend coaching classes and prepare rigorously for the competitive examinations. He ends locked up in his coop all day, basking in the light from the table lamps his father has bought him. This hampers the social skills of a child drastically. The environment and every other interaction that is required are not received by the child. He doesn’t experience the normal school life like any other child. He doesn’t interact properly and later develops into an unsatisfied person. The objective questions format of JEE in someway favour luck or probability. Few children mark the answers in a random manner and many a times these answers turn out to be correct. Hence the ones with Lady Luck in their pack win the game, while the rest lament at getting up at the wrong side of the bed that morning.

Two papers on three subjects, duration of six hours and that decides a child’s future. If he qualifies the cut-off then life is a bed of roses for him and if he doesn’t then “Life on rocks”. A child who is capable of performing well might falter on the day of the examination due to various mishappenings. Ultimately examinations are just a method to judge one’s superficial knowledge. One test at the end of two years cannot decide someone’s ability. A thorough overview of the child’s capability throughout the year is required. This one judgment day is not enough to judge a child’s potential.