Now that the great nightmare of an exam, SLC is gone forever, gone for good, this quasi-intellectual, pseudo-educated, quintessentially hedonistic society has got another important thing to do: Talk. Talking is a wonderful gift that we humans have but we take it for granted. The ubiquitous result is blabbering. 

Because of the social media and other online portals, all of us have become great talkers, philosophers, therapists and all-round advisers. Helping people who are low at ebb, and being helped during the time of chaos have become a social culture. Generalizing a problem is a common thing. That is why, we fall in the pitfall of generalizations and shallow argumentations, yet we are always available with an arsenal of asinine advices. 

Social media and teashops are full of gossips. Fatuous and mindless babblings. Wagging one’s tongue, speaking about others, and revealing secrets and intimacies are what we do every day. We have become a self-deceiving adviser, the platonified scholar, who first fool ourselves then fool everyone around with our ceaseless talking. Why? Because biology shows that we have always been a talking-mammal. 

But the thing is talking itself is not a self-esteem enhancement device; it has no healing power. In fact, it functions just the opposite. Yet, this does not stop us from quitting our beloved habit. We are the slaves of our habits; as this slavery continues and reaches its peak, so our self-esteem naturally goes down, deep down in the yawning abyss of hopelessness and despair. 

So, what should we do? 
First we must learn that talking is cheap. 
Second talking can never replace the unending importance of thinking. History has shown that we do much less thinking than we believe we do. What we should be doing is sticking our necks out and thinking about our world that is full of the unknown and the improbable. So what makes sense is brainstorming. To live in this world that is so capricious and constantly evolving, we require a lot more imagination than we think we need. For that we must think. 

The sad fact is history has mistreated some people, some great thinkers. Be it Devkota or Bhupi. They were both scorned by society first and later worshipped and force-fed to school children. (You may still remember, in retrospect, some of the dull explanations about their works and life that were drilled into your cranium by your dull high-school teacher.)  

History has abused the silent thinkers, garlanded the moronic speed talkers. Yet, that is history and it doesn’t matter. What matters is the change that we want to see in this semi-literate society – the kind of society that still believes that the Sun-God goes round the Earth, when, in fact, even a nursery kid knows that truth is the other way round.

This incessant talking will make people shrink, the words sinking into them, through their skins, through their bones, until it wrenches out of their silent thinking brain. 
What will our young minds learn from this talking when, as a matter of fact, they have so little to share and so much to learn? 

This situation might keep our SLC-graduated students from growing past the petulant, needy, aggressive behaviors of a pre-adolescent, never developing a positive emotional attachment to this society, never being able to move beyond their resentment and their sense of themselves as the center of the universe. So, the straight question is – what kind of society are we producing? Moving from intellectuality to foolishness, silence to noise, development to disintegration, this path will obviously create a never ending labyrinth, where walking will seem like a ceaseless struggle into absolute nothingness.   

Doesn’t this endless talking scare you? 

Why not sit quiet and observe the world with an objective eye and hear the cosmos sing inside the spherical encasement of your cranium? Why not do it now?

Bibek studies at IOE, TU.

 
• afterwards