KNOWLEDGE & SKILLS

RW -2. [Random Writings. Book 7.Part 37. Pages 07to12.]

I had been waiting for Pradeep’s SIMC results – the machine open, web site up, refreshed after every few minutes when Jwala calls from NUALS. Excited she is. ‘It is over, Pappa,’ she tells, ‘the arguments’. 23 minutes the Moot Honourables argued her down and still she bubbled and jiggled and seemed to keep her cool. I say her to count the minutes each of the five courts takes to dispose a competitor and make a study which can be used in organising such an event later. I do not elaborate. After all what an old schoolmaster has to do with with legals, a class which Jesus cursed and infuriated and His disciple, St. Paul shred to shambles by arguments which, sorry, I am ignorant to follow.

At 11.30 night I try typing in a piece but soon I find parts of my shrinking brain refuses to function in a dual mode. I cannot type and think together, they both being s different. Knowledge and skill.

Skills are acquired through practice - intense, disciplined, methodical and whatever other means of regimentation practiced in early centres of learning, mostly the seminaries, some f which cherished the traditions. How else could Dr. Illich propagate deschooling? OK. Skills meant the disciplines, including the one aimed at acquiring knowledge, the academic skills.

Then there is knowledge which involves inaction like meditation and tapas and all. One who actually imbibes knowledge did not do anything except a little teaching and spend a lot of time thinking. Knowledge meant that which enlightens the person, the surroundings, the persons he meets and so on. The light, the path, the lighted pathway. Both of its sides have the stations of cross. Such suffering. Every one suffers if everything is a suffering. That is not it. Instead suffering preceded salvation, the goal, My Lord, You set and demonstrated by resurrection, the happy ending of an exciting real-time drama which climaxed in a trial and execution. The divine twist makes it great.

So the typing skill doesn’t go with the enlightening knowledge. Means when typing, current failing, machine offing… That is India. No, Kerala, or say Kochi or just my place a suburb where current, meaning Current Thoma, a VKN character, caricatured on the fashion of great Mundassery master’s own son who published so many major titles in Trichur the cultural capital once. Then the town lost it out to Kottayam, pronounced as kottaayam, double stressed in the middle by Dr. URA, who, later, was Vice Chancellor there. There are about six of us his students in Kochi. Three of us plan to meet in a new house built by dear NC, Shri Sasidharan, retd. Principal, Govt H S School. Prof. Thomaskutty Mukkatt [TK, my room-mate] waits there.

By the time I get ready for my bath, with all these oils over my balding head, the SIMC puts up the results and Pradeep fails to make it up in spite of Prof. Choudhari pumping in all hopes and I bathe and get ready smearing Men’s Active on my drying face to go to Sasi’s new house. TK waited for me there. Both of them were my batch-mates at Mysore, doing a four year course of education. We share a lot of hearty nostalgia and break up for the next rendezvous at a Professor K. P. Sankaran’s place on 25th.