Apropos of the new story “Foreign curricula should be banned: Educationists” (THT, February 18, Page 2), what are national curricula? Are there any local curricula in physics, chemistry, botany, engineering, medicine, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, statistics, calculus, nuclear science, zoology, hotel, travel, airlines management, environmental sciences, politics, economics, business management etc?

Forget about local curricula, it seems our glorified business and literary schools have prescribed photocopies of the books in their entirety as their curricula. While introducing nationalistic local curricula, Nepalis must think about individual identities of 125 ethnic groups.

The mediums of curricula must be local dialects and languages promised during and after the Maoist war to uphold individual identities, local history, geography, flora, fauna, culture, heritage etc.

With Nepalis’ aspirations for their individual identities, and the seven provinces already established, the next logical step is to do without all other mediums save individual dialects for teaching and use. This will fuel our nationalism like never before.

Manohar Shrestha, Kathmandu

Humility

Which quality has mostly been misunderstood since ages? It is undoubtedly humility. Two groups of people—hypocrites and defeatists—have abused it in two diametrically opposite ways. While humbugs and hypocrites feign humility to get puffed up inside with a feel of vanity, defeatists and pathological slaves use it to extract masochistic pleasure. It is either our superiority or inferiority complex that uses humility in the wrong way. In both of these cases, it is

humility before human beings. But true humility is humility before the divine and not before any human being. As the Mother (spiritual collaborator of Sri Aurobindo) said, “True humility consists in knowing that the Supreme Consciousness, the Supreme Will alone exists and that the I is not.”

One can attain such an unalloyed humility if one realises that everything is One in this infinite universe and to mark oneself as a completely separate entity is a falsehood. We must reflect on the fact that the atoms of my body will constitute other individual/ animals/ trees/ materials after our deaths. Even the atoms of our nail and hair clippings become part of other bodies and things during our very lifetime! As a matter of fact, humility does not belittle us. As CS Lewis had said, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.” By thinking of ourselves less, we will actually be able to enlarge us to have a feel for infinity and a feel for oneness where there is no room for little vanity, little self-complacency and little self-pity.

Humility, as it were, hatches the ego—egg to break the hard shell of the ego to give birth to a psychic conscious being who can live infinity.

Sujit De, Kolkata