Beyond Skills: Giving Teenagers a Compass for the Future

Think about the hashtag#teenager in your home or near you. Smart, capable, digitally fluent, and at the same time also overwhelmed in ways they cannot name. We live in a hashtag#VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous). hashtag#AI has turbocharged these as it rewrites entire industries between one school year and the next. A young person today will navigate careers, relationships, and ethical choices that no previous generation has a map for. And into this storm, we are sending them armed with information and skills, but almost no internal compass.

Every civilisation that lasted long enough to be worth studying understood that hashtag#puberty is the precise moment to hand a young person that compass. The Jewish Bar Mitzvah assigns a 13-year-old with an important responsibility. From this day, you are answerable for your own actions. Similarly, the Aboriginal Walkabout sends a boy into the wilderness alone for months, to deepen his connection to identity and belonging before he returns as a man. Japan’s Seijin Shiki gathers every young person who has turned 20 and says collectively: you belong to this society now. You owe it something.

Indian Culture had its own answer, the hashtag#Janeu or hashtag#Upanayan sanskar just before hitting puberty. Upanayan means bringing near, bringing a young person into proximity with dharm, with their own deeper nature. The child receives the sacred thread, taught the Gayatri mantr, and is formally initiated into student life under a guru. In South India, the Ritu Kala Samskaram marks the same threshold for girls. These are civilisational frameworks designed at exactly the moment a young person most needs one. There is nothing stopping us from removing any caste, religion and gender barrier from this sanskar, is there? Who will say no for this to their child? Gargi underwent it. Maitreyi underwent it.

At the heart of the Upanayana is hashtag#Vivek, the faculty of discernment, the ability to distinguish hashtag#dharm from adharm, right action from merely convenient action. A young person with Vivek does not get overwhelmed by VUCA. They read it, they develop appropriate frameworks and become capable of seeing around corners, prepare for what may be coming, and make their moves with steadiness and purpose. That is a very different thing from anxiety, from reactivity, from the paralysis that so many young people carry today without even knowing why.

Most Indian families still perform the Upanayan, but the gap between ritual and meaning is the gap an entire generation is falling through.

hashtag#EduCulture proposes to close it. A young person shaped by their civilisational inheritance does not need to be told how to behave in a VUCA world. They already carry the framework. They know what changes and what stays constant. They can take advantage of what is coming without losing their sense of what is right.

When did we decide that producing skilled people was enough, and stopped asking whether we were producing good ones?

Ramayan Beyond Religion: An EduCulture Perspective on Civilisational Heritage

Ramayan Beyond Religion An EduCulture Perspective on Civilisational Heritage

A friend called last night and asked me after my last post — why Ramayan specifically? Are you trying to make this about religion?

Fair question. Here is my answer.

Do you know who wrote the dialogues for B.R. Chopra’s Mahabharat on Doordarshan? The one that stopped the country every Sunday. The one that 100 million people watched without fail.

It was Dr. Rahi Masoom Raza. A Muslim scholar from Ghazipur, Uttar Pradesh. A Urdu poet with a doctorate from Aligarh Muslim University.

When people objected and asked why a Muslim was writing a Hindu epic, Dr. Raza’s response was simple and final. “I am the son of the Ganga. Who knows the civilisation and culture of India better than I do?”

And the actor who played Arjun in that same series? Firoz Khan. Born into a Pashtun Muslim family with roots in Peshawar, where I have never been to but have known the name growing up in the town of Sher Shah Suri and crossing GT Road almost on daily basis. Firoz became so completely one with his character that he eventually changed his legal name to Arjun. His own mother started calling him Arjun.

This is the point I am making when I talk about EduCulture.

The Ramayan and the Mahabharat are more of civilisational inheritance tham only some religious property. There is a difference. Religion is about belief. Civilisation is about the shared values, aspirations and imagination that holds a people together, the stories they dream in, the values they reach for when they need language for something important.

Bali is a Hindu island in a Muslim nation and it has built a thriving cultural economy around the Ramayan. Indonesia does not seem to be seeing a contradiction there, we may be creating a fuss out of it on our own. Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Trinidad, Fiji, all of them treated this inheritance as a living thing worth tending, worth performing, worth building institutions around.

The gap in India is an hashtag#EduCulture gap. We stopped asking what our stories are actually for. We reduced them to ritual on one side and controversy on the other, and lost the vast middle ground where Rahi Masoom Raza lived, where Firoz Khan lived, where the Kecak dancers of Bali live every single evening.

An hashtag#EduCultured person does not need to be Hindu to understand the Ramayan. They need to be Indian. Or, as the rest of the world has amply demonstrated, they do not even need to be that.

The story belongs to anyone willing to live by what it teaches.

That is all I am saying.

EduCultured Youth will Lead the way in AI Era

EduCultured Youth will Lead the way in AI Era

Look at the young person sitting across from you in the next team meeting. Chances are they know how to use five AI tools, can automate a workflow in an afternoon, and have a ChatGPT tab permanently open. And yet, when the actual problem needs a decision, a direction, a point of view rooted in something deeper than a prompt, perhaps they have gone quiet.

This issue is being noticed by many but not talked about openly as yet, and I blame the breakneck pace of changes to deal with by one and all. I dont think we should blame AI here as AI is simply the “loudest” mirror we have ever held up to ourselves. What it reflects, for a whole generation of educated but not cultured youth, is a gap between information and wisdom, between skillset and character, between knowing what to do and understanding why it matters.

The Sanskrit word Vivek means discernment, the ability to separate what is real from what is maya, what is right from what is merely convenient. It is neither taught in engineering colleges, nor is available as a course on Coursera as yet. The ability to differentiate between sat-asat, dharm-adharm slowly grows in a person who has been dealing with real life situations of ambiguity, and looked for references within and in collective experiences of the society presented as Culture.

An EduCultured youth is one who carries both. Educated enough to operate in the AI era, and Cultured enough to lead in it.

Because AI will very efficiently give you ten answers to any question you ask. The one thing it cannot do is decide which question deserves to be asked in the first place. That judgment comes from somewhere the algorithm cannot reach as yet. It comes from a civilisation’s accumulated sense of what a human life is actually for.

This question of Vivek, of how to listen to what is real beneath all the noise, is precisely what I have been focusing on in my own life for a long time. Eventually it became a book, “Freedom! Let Us Begin the Journey” which is an exploration of that inward path, drawing from the Vedantic framework of the PanchaKoshas, the five sheaths through which we either live consciously or simply drift. If the idea of knowing yourself as clearly as you know your productivity tools interests you, the link is in the comments.

India has spent thousands of years asking the harder questions. The epic Mahabharat did not just teach archery to Arjuna, and through him everyone who came after, that the battle outside is always a shadow of the one within and Bhagvad Gita guides us through this journey. The youth who will lead in the AI era will be technically capable, yes. But also rooted. Grounded in something larger than their last performance review or their Social Media Posts’ likes and followers count.

The question worth pondering is this: are we raising young people who know only how to use AI, or young people who also know why they are here?