3 Idiots: “Aal Izz Well”

This may not be the perfect forum for a review, but the film "3 Idiots" is about education versus training, science versus engineering, fear versus hubris (and the happy medium), life and death, love and despair, laughter and tears. And it has colorful Bollywood dance numbers, too! I rented it on a whim, as it was billed as a movie about too-smart engineering students versus the educational system. I was puzzled when it began with English subtitles during the (Indian accented) English dialog. I remembered a 1990's PBS/BBC series on the English language, when some of the impenetrable-to-me accents of the U.K. had no subtitles, but the perfectly intelligible-to-me Cajun and Ebonic dialects did. But as the blend of Hindi and English became apparent, I saw the need. I loved this movie. Once one gets into the esthetic swing of Bollywood productions, it makes perfect sense when serious issues become silly dance numbers, and all characters are played as borderline caricatures. One can observe the essential cultural differences between our familiar American dilute-Christian one-life-to-live and anyone-can-become-president attitude and the Indian institutionalized attitude that reincarnation is the only way to improve your lot except through extraordinary means. Why I think this is appropriate to this forum is the take on education. The protagonist has a scientific mindset that is often at odds with engineering philosophy and even more with institutionalized education. The system of teaching to the test is questioned, as is the principle of square pegs hammered into round holes. Vocation versus avocation is central to this, and expounded toward the end. The 3 Idiots - Official Trailer has embedding disabled, but preview is fun even without subtitles. You get the idea of how English and Hindi have merged in their culture. I defy you to watch it and not have the songs "All izz well" and/or "Zoobi Doobi" stuck in your heads.

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The breadth of the corporate state

Chris Hedges explains that the corporate state has not merely confiscated our political system. It stretches much further into our lives. See the following video starting at minute 5:30, where Hedges explains that affected systems include communication, education and culture. In fact, there is an assault upon liberal institutions that once made meaningful political reform possible, such as labor unions and our great universities, the latter of which are oftentimes run as corporate entities uninterested in teaching the humanities and extolling an artificially narrow analytic view of what it means to be "intelligent." What modern education excels at is training up systems managers who strive to be hyper-deferential to authority. Modern education no longer strives to teach students how to think, but rather what to think. Hedges has a "dark" view of what's going on, essentially that the corporate state is "harvesting" what is left to be had of America "on the way out the door." (min. 28:00). At this critical time, there is no mechanism for changing the system by way of voting--Hedges argues that there is no way, in light of the corporate loyalties of Barack Obama, to vote against Goldman Sachs in the upcoming presidential election, which is using tax money to re-inflate the bubble before the next crash. Lawrence Lessig prefers to use all of our resources for reforming the system, "even if there is zero chance of success." Both men are big supporters of the Occupy movement.

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Jobs, Jobs, Jobs.

There is only one thing the President should talk about in his State of the Union and that is Jobs. If we look at what President Obama inherited, the GW Bush administration had eight years of private sector job losses and only had a net job increase due to government hiring The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that private sector employment decreased by 673,000 over the eight years of GW Bush, while public sector employment increased. Total jobs created under the eight years of the GW Bush administration totaled 1.08 million. Ironically, increased public sector employment allowed for the Bush administration to not be the first to have net negative employment over its term since Herbert Hoover. Total private sector jobs created since 2010 by the Obama administration number over 2 million (more than the total for the eight years of George W. Bush). President Obama has cut public sector employment by over 357,000 since taking office. President Obama’s initial 2012 budget, despite yowling from the right that he never submitted any for a vote in 2011, was rejected in the US Senate at the same time as the Senate rejected the US House Budget plan drafted by Rep. Paul Ryan, (R-WI). But, the US House Budget plan passed through the House on an almost party-line vote and supported by all the GOP Senators was projected to cost as many as 800,000 jobs and a 2% decrease in GDP in 2012. The next jobs effort of the Republicans was to foment a false debt ceiling “crisis” which if the US had defaulted on its debt would have been catastrophic in causing a 5% GDP drop in 2012 and a loss of some one third of the value of US equities. [More . . . ]

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