freshlime

In the grand architecture of Greek myth, Zeus rules Mount Olympus not through consensus or empathy, but through the absolute terror of his thunderbolts. From his celestial heights, detached from the dust and sweat of the earth below, the King of Gods demands unquestioning compliance. To question his decrees is to invite immediate divine wrath. The tragic flaw of such Olympian rule, however, was always its complete blindness to human reality—the assumption that because you sit at the highest peak, you possess the right to micromanage every mortal breath.  The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) seems to have styled itself after this very brand of autocratic deity. In its modern incarnation, the Board has increasingly shed its role as an academic facilitator and assumed the mantle of an all-seeing, all-powerful deity, ruling its affiliated institutions not through partnership, but through bureaucratic absolutism. The latest manifestation of this "Big Daddy" syndrome is ...