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We Never Asked: A Letter to the Indian Education System

Suppressed fury finally exploding 

remains a vision  far away from my reality.


Jealousy towards those free, 

And the red hot fire in my throat.


In a "free" country, why are we the only ones openly oppressed?


Stripped of our inherent love of learning 

Our sense of dignity plucked out


Which one of us asked you to teach us submission?

To abuse us and to push us over the edge?


We didn't, and yet you act as the edge exists only for you but never for us.


Did we ask you to decide what our time is worth?

Did we ask you to impose your assumed value on us by force, and waste our six hours not useless but blatantly wrong "information"?


Did we ask you to shut us down when we ask questions and then preach about how "good students ask questions"?

Did we ask you to show that your fragile ego can't handle being wrong, and somehow seems to think shutting us down rewrites reality to make you right?


Did we ask you to model abuse from when we were 3 and punish us when we follow your revolting examples? 

As if there's a punishment worse than having to carry pieces of you within us.


Did we ask you to average us together and try to reach none but that average, only to mistreat all of us including your sweet "average"?


Did we ask you to cripple our instincts, trash our delight and destroy our self worth?

Did we ask you to control our words, when we talk, when we stand, when we sleep, when we move and when we pee?


Did we ask you to instill sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and racism under the guise of teaching us acceptance?

Did we ask you to do repulsive impressions of humans that are simply different in front of 60 children?

Did we entrust you with this wretched attempt at making sure we don't turn out gay or trans?


Did we ask you to traumatise us with lies?


Did we ask you to make learning about little points on a sheet of paper?

Did we ask you to force us to memorize nonsensical words in not one, but several languages we do not understand?


Did we ask to let go of your schedules and place them at your wicked will?

Did we ask you to analyse our self worth and teach us we're that same as the digits you write?


Did we ask to be your puppets that you unleash your anger and frustration on?


No, we didn't.

We asked you to help us learn.

Not copy pages and pages from your handbook that's rigged with inaccuracies and gross mistakes, learn.

To love it as much we already did.

To not want to tear away our textbooks and burn our uniforms the moment we graduate.

To be protected from abuse.


But how is that going to happen when you care more about the length of our socks and the brightness of our ribbons than the children crying in the classroom from parental abuse and torture?



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