The Great Indian Insectary

How We Are Raising Zombie Cockroaches for Corporate Cubicles

To: Pradhan Sevak

CC: Shiksha Sevak (or Sevak-in-Charge of Shiksha, though who is servicing whom remains a grand mystery)

BCC: Pratipaksha Sevak (so you can take time off from walking out of Parliament to actually read something)

From: Tailaktapa Amma (Cockroach Amma)

Subject: On the Glorious Industrial Production of Zombie Cockroaches

Respected Sirs,

Let us forgo the traditional, dripping-with-honey Indian pleasantries. Life is far too short, and my evening peg of dark rum is getting warm.

In that delightfully forgettable Hindi film Aiyaary, young Siddharth Malhotra stares down Manoj Bajpayee and demands: “Aap ke generation ne hamare liye kya choda?” If I were a poet, I’d frame that line. But since I am merely an old, cynical cockroach who has survived decades of DDT, toxic school syllabi, and bad Indian politics, worse Medical College, I suggest you tattoo that line directly onto your esteemed foreheads.

Because what you, I, and a billion obsessed Indian parents are leaving behind for our children is not wisdom, nor art, nor even a decent sense of humor. It is pure, unadulterated, gold-plated trauma, packaged neatly as “quality education.” IB school you know…And for what grand, divine destiny? So our children can eventually spend twelve hours a day sitting in an air-conditioned glass tower in Gurgaon or Bangalore, writing Excel sheets for a multinational company that treats them like disposable paper napkins. Truly, a breathtaking pinnacle of human civilization.

Look at what we have done to the simple act of schooling. Once upon a time, school was where a child learned that some kids were smarter, some were faster, some were bullies, and some smelled faintly of stale boiled eggs. We learned to live together. We forged crude, beautiful human bonds. Then came the grand bureaucratic stroke of genius: Division A, Division B, and the untouchable wasteland of Division C.

Naturally, our middle-class Yuppie parents—a species of cockroach far more frantic than myself—saw this and lost their collective minds. They turned primary schools into Wall Street trading floors. Mothers began offering bribing-level “donations” just to slide their seven-year-old prodigies into Section A, as if Section B contained airborne bubonic plague.

I personally knew a poor little chap who was unceremoniously dumped into Section C simply because his obstinate father wanted him to learn Kannada. The boy spent his entire childhood feeling like a outcast in a Victorian parish. When he finally cracked the code in the 8th grade and got promoted to Section A, he celebrated as if he’d won the Nobel Prize for Physics. His life’s ultimate spiritual peak was moving three classrooms down the corridor! And what happened after he reached the Promised Land of Section A? Did he bloom into a philosopher? Did he invent a cure for baldness? No. He simply stopped sweating. He realized the game: maintain a 75% average, keep your mouth shut, do not disturb the teacher, and coast smoothly into an engineering degree you don’t care about. BTW he is working in HDFC bank forex department, after having a BTech and MTech degrees.

That is your glorious legacy, Sirs. Survival strategies for middle-management paper-pushers. We are not raising human beings; we are raising urban cockroaches that can pass multiple-choice tests.

Now, in your infinite parliamentary wisdom, you have decreed that “vocational training” is compulsory in 11th and 12th standards. How wonderful! How progressive! I can already see the future with crystal clarity. Within six months, a thousand “Proxy Vocational Institutes” will sprout like toadstools in Kota, right next to the IIT coaching centers. Desperate parents will pay ₹2 lakhs to buy fake certificates proving their child successfully spent sixty hours repairing a diesel engine, while the child was actually locked in a windowless room memorizing organic chemistry reactions until his hair fell out. We have successfully franchised child trauma and sold it on a monthly subscription model.

We obsess over foreign tech startups and biotech firms selling skin-lightening creams made of imported mud, while our own traditional crafts, grassroots knowledge, and ancient healing rot in the basement. Exotic sells; indigenous rots. If it’s written in English and costs a fortune, Indian parents will buy two of it.

So, my dear Pradhan Sevak, if you insist on calling yourself the Prime Servant, then for heaven’s sake, serve us something digestible.

To the Shiksha Sevak: Stop acting like the Grand Inquisitor of standardize testing.

To the Pratipaksha Sevak: Stop pounding your desk in Parliament like a frustrated toddler and start offering a real alternative to this madness.

And to the parents reading this over their morning filter coffee: Stop using your children as trophies to flex at family weddings!

If you do not change course immediately, history will not record you as visionaries or architects of a “New India.” It will remember you simply as a bunch of well-dressed, blundering grandparents who handed an entire generation a poisoned chalice—and then asked them to write an essay on how good it tasted.

The pushy parents are conveniently forgotten.

Yours with a raised glass and infinite skepticism,

Taulaktapa Amma

(Cockroach Amma, surviving despite your best efforts)