Education, or is it?

I've never been an A+ grade student. Ever. In these 14 years of schooling, I have never aced a single exam. Not once. And so they called me daft which I didn't have a problem with because I knew exactly who I was and their opinion didn't hold much importance to me. 
I knew that it wasn't for the lack of brains why I didn't ace an exam. It was for the lack of trying for I don't quite get the institution of education, in our country. Atleast not at school level, no. I fail to fathom how memorizing facts and theories counts as education. I fail to understand why we are forced into cramming things that are already written in books. That doesn't exactly make sense to me, however barbaric I may sound. 
At school, we should be taught to work on our skills. We should be taught to question everything in order to move forward. We should be made to work outside of our comfort zone rather than to circle inside it. 
How would memorizing a few formulas help us? The basics, sure. But I don't quite get the point of cramming things that we can already find in the books. 
I guess that's what's wrong with our society. We've been taught to spend a lot of time remembering things instead of questioning them and wondering why. 
I remember asking my teachers questions about a few theories and the only reply they seemed to have was "You don't have to learn this. It is not in your course so don't worry about it being there in your exam." It was statements like these that left me baffled because I wanted to know what I wanted to know in order to quench my thirst and not because it might be asked in some god forsaken exam. 
And so, I do not get the institution of 'education' for it is not educating us to question why a certain thing works the way it does. It is just educating us to learn what has already been printed. It trains us to continue living the rat race instead of teaching us to break the trend. And that, I cannot quite comprehend. 

Happily ever after? What

I remember how we held hands thinking things would stay this way forever. Do you? I remember how we used to nap together because we were extremely tired to go back home. Don't you? I remember all those promises we made sitting under the trees. Broken, are they now? I remember how we were convinced this would last forever. Or would it? I remember everything. From the first fight to the last laugh. I remember the good, the bad.
Do I want to? No. Do I miss you? Yes. Do we want to get back? Definitely not.

It is only after experiencing something do we realize how stupid it was, in the first place. All of us, we crave love so much that at times we accept whatever comes our way. We confuse love with lust or infatuation or just plainly, attraction. We are so desperate to be loved that we justify the actions of our beloved in our head, just so that we wouldn't lose them. I know I did. It's a very stupid thing, to do that. Why do, all of us base our entire lives on some romantic love, though? There most certainly is more to life than a puerile relationship. Why are we all so hell bent on finding our-significant-other-half?

Someone asked me what my bucket list was and as I stated it, I was astonished to find that it had nothing to do with my-soul mate, or whatever. I realized that I want to travel the world, party a lot, be good at what I do and eat loads and loads of food. That was when I realized that I don't need a guy to complete me or define who I am. That there's more to my life than a love that went wrong. That I'd rather travel the world alone than be stuck at home with a guy.

Like Lana Del Ray once said: It's good to love and be loved but it's better to know all that you can know.
There's no such thing as forever. There are no happily ever afters, either. You might think you've found-the-one but believe you me, you'll never find the-one, for that is not the purpose of life anyway. The people you thought would stay with you till eternity, won't. The people you thought were honest souls, aren't. So while you can't change the universal truth: Nothing is constant. Nothing lasts till the end of time, you can make yourself get accustomed to it.

So go ahead, live your life exactly the way you want to live it. Don't let anyone make you feel like you're not good enough. Travel the world, if that's what you want. Drink up, if that's what floats your boat. And just know that you don't need someone to complete you. There is no other-half. You're the entire picture, yourself. I realized that soon enough. Did you?

To simpler times

Do you remember the simpler times when we clicked photos because we wanted to preserve moments and not because we wanted to upload them on a social networking site? Or the time when selfies didn't exist because no one thought it was sensible enough to click photos of their own self? Or perhaps the time when all these Instagram filters and photoshop techniques didn't exist because no one thought it was important enough to edit photos. Because they were perfect the way they were taken. No one cared about their butt looking big or their shoes matching their clothes, at that time. After all, why would they? It's not like the picture was going to be shared with some thousand people on their Facebook list.
And believe me, I notice the irony too. This is coming from someone whose phone consists of 5600 photos at the moment.
We all do it. We all think we have some kind of a 'social image' to uphold. Or people that we need to impress by the wealth we have.
And you know what the worst part about clicking all these monotonous selfies are? We try to look happy. We try to look perfect in these pictures. And that is a very stupid thing to do. This concept has made us even more complex than what we already are. It has made us into these social beasts who pretend to be happy or partying all the time. It has inculcated the habit of us showing everyone that we're better than them. But are we?
They said it best in The Fight Club:
"We buy things we don't need with money we don't have to impress people we don't like." 
We all do it. And we all know it's not a very clever thing to do. Yet, we somehow in that twisted little head of ours justify our actions and tell ourselves that what we're doing is different than what others do and that our case is special. But is it?
Are all of us not getting lost in the rat race to impress others? To pretend to be different?
There are a lot of complicated things in the world. Socialising shouldn't be one of them.
We shouldn't click pictures because we need to show our arch nemesis that we're leading a better life than him. We shouldn't care about the number of 'likes' we get on social networking sites. We shouldn't care if people think a picture of us is ugly. We shouldn't take down a photograph because someone tells us that our nose looks distorted. It shouldn't work that way. Somewhere down the line, we are losing our individuality because of it. We're forgetting who we truly are in order to impress others. And it shouldn't be like that. You should be able to dictate how your social life works and not the other way round.
Go ahead, wear sweatpants. Take down some of that mascara, you're prettier without it. Eat like an animal if that's what floats your boat. Tell someone you like them without thinking what they might say or who they might tell.
And I know that writing this won't change a lot of things. Not in your life and not in mine. But I'm hoping it does. For, I'm writing this for both our sakes.

Life is too short to be lived according to what other's definition of 'perfect' is.