DailyPost 278
PROGRAMMED FOR MEDIOCRITY
Though the buzzwords of innovation, creativity & out of the box thinking is being flaunted with with consistent regularity, yet the products of professional, personal & academic use are creating one of its kind mediocrity, unimaginable even a decade ago. Professional life has generally been restricted to a couple of screens / templates with no need, utility & urge to go beyond this stunted requirement.
Life has slowly moved on to templates & screens. These templates & screens were to be the value add, to the capabilities we had, for ease of usage & to deliver on time & of the right quality. Lots of hard work should go, in at the back end to understand the issues or the operations & fill in relevant fields & text as the rationale. Unfortunately, filling up the templates & fields in the screens has become the be all & end all of professional work. But for transactional data, rest of supposedly relevant information is not of much value. The capabilities to analyse but for pie charts / bar diagrams etc has taken a serious beating.
Competencies related to proposals, reports, RFPs, summation & opinions based on ideas & intuition seems to have lost in the process. May be the art of application of mind to issues & problems, the present professional feels is not required & is in perpetual search of instructions / SOPs or fields to be filled up. We have got into a crazy vicious circle of mediocrity, quite contrary to the excellence, the digital age had promised to usher.
Students have gone digital, completely getting rid of textbooks, the habit of gleaning through researched material, reference works & library visits. This has been replaced by ppts of questionable quality. The teaching faculty has got immersed into it, in a big way. With exams also getting based on the same material & consequent evaluation at self proclaimed (autonomous) institutions, the end result is mediocrity. Social media heralded as the bandwagon of ideas & thoughts has its own story.
EASY AVAILABILITY OF KNOWLEDGE HAS BEEN TRANSFORMED INTO PERPETUATION OF MEDIOCRITY.
Sanjay Sahay