Rationality in India, a myth??

Hey folks

I was talking to a friend the other day.... He very carefully warned me that the next day there was a partial solar eclipse and so I should not venture out and I should not eat anything. Neither should I eat in that time frame nor should I drink anything!!! I was appalled at the narrow mindedness of the individual.... And hey, just to set the record straight, this guy was a pass out from one of the best schools I know and is a post graduate, in guess what, sciences!!!
Then, when I began to think about this, it stuck me that, the narrow-mindedness was probably not his fault.... Those problems were probably a manifestation of all the crap that is taught in schools in India....
Please do not get me wrong on this... We have an excellent system of education in this country inherited from the British... The problem is that, it is NOT as we inherited it from the British.... What we, as a nation have added to that system is a heady mix of emotion, politics and mass hysteria.... not a very potent combination!!!!
What I am going to pen down in this para needs to be read with a very open mind.... We as a nation are used to idolizing and we need one person or people to look up to and worship. They also serve as a means to blame in case of a mishap.... Collective hysteria has rooted itself so strongly in our pea-sized brains that we try to go any heights to twist the annals of history to accommodate our idiosyncrasies!!!! It just takes some bit of extra reading and expanding one's horizons to realize that Gandhi was human, Ambedkar did not actually favour Dalits, Solar eclipses do not cause anything, Nehru was an adulterer, just to correct a few anomalies in our thinking. The worst part of all of this is that schools in our country drill all of these mistruths into a child's mind when he is at an age where the intake and retention is maximum.... The purpose of education is to provide facts and allow the human brain to make deductions, not provide deductions based upon convenient and falsified facts to encourage mere machine like thinking.
If India indeed needs to progress politically, economically and more importantly socially..... we need to come out of all these idiosyncrasies and learn to trust only facts!!!! Schools need to realize their role and more importantly, parents need to encourage the child to read and assimilate a lot of stuff on his/her own....

Eminence