Minneapolis Musings

For the very first time in my life, I find myself in remote, distant  Minneapolis in the long months of  October, November and December. The house I live in is centrally heated and the inside temperature  is monitored at  67 degrees fahrenheit.  Outside it is around 8 degrees fahrenheit, the ground is covered with snow, and the concrete stretches outside car garages  are cleared by the people who own them, either manually or with the  help of  snow blowers. The snow on the roads  in upmarket suburbs is  scooped up by giant snow shovelling machines that deposit it on the once green stretches or on the sidewalk in mounds, Sand and salt  are spread  on all motorable  roads to prevent ice skids.  Little snow  hillocks   rise slowly on the pavements as each day, fresh snow storms swirl by, and the sun makes brief, sporadic appearances, choosing to be a fair weather friend in this bitterly cold season.

Except for the fir trees, that provide the only outdoor green, every other tree, oak, maple or birch has surrendered its foliage to the cold season. Each of these trees now stretches leafless limbs into the sky, supplicating perhaps  the sun. Life however continues comfortably, inside of heated cars and schools and offices and malls and eateries, where the temperatures are maintained at tremendous cost, providing relative comfort  and  hot beverages to everyone who can afford it.

Driving past houses  in the dark, once the fall ends and the trees are bare, house fronts and porches start dressing up noticeably, a little before the onset of Halloween. I saw a fair share of cobwebs, witches cycling,  flying on brooms or upside down, spiders, ghouls, ghosts and zombies as house front decorations. I even met the three witches from Macbeth in front of a fiery cauldron at a humongous store selling Halloween decorations and I watched enraptured as they spoke Shakespearean lines at programmed intervals.

The witches and ghouls are replaced by endless pumpkins well before  Thanksgiving and  the leafless trees in the roadside along market places  are adorned with lights that outline colourful Christmas tree   silhouettes. With Christmas barely ten days away, every house in the suburb I live in is decorated with bright lights. White tubes run around the house walls encasing twinkling lights that can be multi-coloured or monochrome, depending on how the remote switch has been zapped. Trees in front of homes wear bright lights too, returning in the daytime to their more recognizable bare outlines, while the white plastic casings   merge with the snow. Inside homes, Christmas trees are retrieved from their cases in basements and decorated, with ornaments and trinkets stirring memories and weaving colour and light into the cold season.

 The malls beckon and Thanksgiving sales followed by Black Friday sales are succeeded by sales that will go on until the end of the year. Meanwhile trees in homes and hearths glitter and twinkle , and bags of gifts to be given and received accumulate around the tree. There is good cheer in food and drink and festivities indoors and the bitter cold has been very firmly confined outdoors by man made technologies. Indoors, all is aglow and warm. Thankfully, the little match girl  from the Hans Christian Anderson  story will never walk through these streets and press her nose against a French window, where the curtains have not been drawn and look longingly at the food and fun heaped around trees and in cupboards and on table tops and counters, and chests of drawers because even if she did possess a sturdy  pair of shoes, she could never cover  the required distance to these affluent homes. How well the cold maintains established hierarchies, freezing them further.....  

A Shout Out to Atishi

This  is  a shout out to Atishi  Wahi Singh. In choosing to add  Wahi and Singh to her name, I am also addressing her parents,  Tripta Wahi and Vijay Singh,very dear friends and senior colleagues at  Delhi University.  I am sorry you are in this place,  Atishi. To you,  Atishi, I will not say that elections are about participation, not about winning, because it would have been wonderful had you won, for then you would have taken our hopes and  aspirations ( with regard to  education and learning and schooling ) to Parliament and availed of the opportunity to strengthen and reform and transform education , which lies  in shambles, through the length and breadth of this country. So your loss is a huge loss for those of us who believe in the transformative and empowering possibilities that holistic education offers.

It is unfortunate that the constituency that you wished to represent did not vote for you in entirety. I know this must hurt and that it also erodes a sense of self-worth, because as the daughter of university teachers, with enough academic credentials, the world was your oyster and there was no dearth of opportunities available for you. You chose to put aside the comfort and pleasures of a privileged life and enter into the public domain which requires incredible courage. You have enough credentials for representing the cause of education in India as well as an accompanying   imagination and sensitivity, so do not think otherwise at any point.

For any woman to have  a political life anywhere in the world, intelligence and vision and clarity and imagination by themselves is not enough (although , as one has seen , men with none of these  qualities are the ones who thrive in the system). Women need to have a very strong solar plexus Atishi, maybe ten times as strong as the solar plexuses of  those women who venture out of their homes into a life beyond, because  believe you me, that is where all the ugly punches land, always invariably below the belt, and  cause  enormous damage  as they smash through living tissues and organs. You fought the good fight  Atishi, and  all those women and men who spoke up for you when that   vile pamphlet was circulated and when rumours were spread about your being Jewish, would concur.

However Atishi, the nature of the battlefield on which you stood your ground did not change. The world of ideas,( including  those voiced by  Marx and Lenin, whose names your fond parents yoked together to create  your idealized surname , because they believed that the world  needed to become an inclusive and equal space)  has always had to contend with recalcitrant  thought processes and calcified social and cultural practices.  Atishi, women live redundant lives in our world ;  they can be stoned to death  by men for violating imagined codes. Only an extraordinary leader, also a  statutory  male,   can ask the casters of stones  to introspect before  stoning a  hapless woman to death.. it is very long  since the world has seen any such saviour. Meanwhile learned women have burnt worldwide as witches. or have been  reviled and exiled  from their immediate communities.  Indian  grandmothers  have continued to say to  defiant granddaughters, “Look at  all that Sita had to suffer! If she could bear them despite being a princess, surely you should learn to adjust.”

I want to remind you Atishi that in our own country, Maryada Purushottam Raam  drove his pregnant wife away, in deference to public opinion, and continues to be revered. Gautama Buddha, abandoned his wife and new born child on a secret mission, and then chose a life, he did not want women to participate in. Our country is named Bharat, after Shakuntala’s son, and she in both Vyasa’a version and in Kalidasa’s had to speak up for her child’s rights and  defend her morality,  while she was  being publicly humiliated. Kalidasa let her weep and even stole from her power of speech that  Vyasa had  initially  given her. Do not therefore be surprised if mediocre men go on television to ask why your husband is not standing by your side and supporting your candidature.  Remember, that this is how the double standard works. Male politicians can abandon their wives, never bring them up for discussion or contribute to their welfare but no male  will say ..”But where is his wife.? Why is she not standing next to him validating his candidature.”

You have had to grapple with patriarchy and sexism and misogyny of the vilest kind. It is part of the trajectory of being a woman. Over and above this, Atishi, you have had to deal with little resources and word of mouth campaigning in a hostile and cash rich arena. So many of us are not clear even now  how the new EVM technology works or whether it makes for an even playing field.  So do not let this debacle leave you dispirited.

 Thank you for speaking for  us and continue your work as you have been doing over the past few years.  Many of us would be happy to pitch in and add our little bit to further the cause of learning and wellness in children. Please let us know how we can help. Here is wishing you more of that unstoppable courage and   large-hearted commitment. Do continue to inspire us   with your   innovative and imaginative ideas and projects.

Maddening May Musings

This morning's newspaper brings in  some more information about plans to decimate Delhi University further. A few days ago, there was an announcement  that an  entrance examination for students aspiring to study at Delhi University would now be outsourced. The amazing thing about such information is that it comes into our drawing rooms via the newspaper. Our Vice Chancellor has taken a vow of silence which he breaks only  to grace occasional events like Departmental Seminars when National participation is the stake. He arrives at these seminars , speaks to a room full of strangers, some real and  the rest  intentional and drifts away, presumably  to his Vice-Regal Cave.

Truth be told, were any of us to run into him anywhere in the city, it is unlikely that we would recognize him. Anonymity by itself is not a bad thing. Our previous VC, for example,  loved being feted in visual media, rode elephants to annoy a lot of us while alienating all of us from the university processes altogether. Our current VC is  neither seen or heard.  This kind of self-effacement  is wonderful for a meditative and mystical life, where one is developing an inner calm, but  as is now evident to almost  everybody, very  insidious and damaging  to the interests of a Premier University. Following the example set by our premier,  the  current VC of Delhi University has steadfastly  refused to communicate or address any of the problems that have been foisted upon  and continue to plague Delhi University  for well over a decade.

 CBCS or the Credit based Choice System was introduced as part of an ambitious, unplanned and never discussed  before Four Year University  Program and was thrust upon the university already reeling under a forcibly introduced semester system. The FYUP, the Congress's  unsought gift to the University, was disbanded in 2014  alongside  huge student -teacher  protests and a  change in Government. Ironically,  although  FYUP was  replaced by  a TYUP,  CBCS  which should be actually called Coercive, Banal and Constrictive Study was grafted on  to  the new syllabus. The problem with CBCS is not that it is a bad idea, but that it has never been implemented with student  interests and freedom in mind, nor was it the result of collective thinking and planning by teachers.

 Currently,  CBCS  continues to flounder because, the University is yet to release the second tranche of teaching posts that were  a mandated part of college rolls after the  introduction of  OBC reservation for students.  Due to the crunch in teaching staff,  most colleges cannot  provide options and are constrained to  teach only the minimum courses required. In case an option is provided,  the Department that is teaching it comes under severe strain.. Firstly this requires  a lot of hand wrestling between college administration and Teachers-in-Charge of individual departments. Also, no permanent appointments have been made for a very long time.  Departments, we must remember can only be built  on the collective expertise of teachers.Teaching new courses  requires a  teacher with steady employment  who is given an opportunity to learn and grow with her job. In most colleges, ad hoc appointments are often renewed upon administrative whim . So this is a terrible no win situation in which all of us , teachers, students, administration and courses continue to lose steadily. If there is a greater game plan, I confess my inability to see it or understand it.

Today's paper  informs that a proposal is afoot to provide students  more flexibility, allowing them the option of  studying different CBCS courses at different universities. This plan is even more dazzling than the one proposed by our former VC( DS)  who wanted colleges to offer  only one specific CBCS course thereby  enabling students to move between colleges, doing one option at one college and the next option at another.  Arguments for shifting students  from one university to another comes from a  incorrect sense  of empowered mobility. However, the reality is very stark, because physical mobility on the part of students is not really a marker of a student's  academic  development or  intellectual growth.  Serious reflection and re-examination of all these lop-sided top down schemes  being crammed down the throats of  hapless university communities, is therefore necessary.

Universities and colleges are not in the info-tainment business, nor are they meant to be.   A teaching calendar of almost thirty lectures per unit in the annual mode has been whittled down to twelve lectures per unit in the semester mode.  Learning and teaching cannot be sustained by reducing  interactive processes and further dilution by clamping down on teaching posts, shrinking infrastructure and making  both the teacher and teaching  optional to the processes of learning.

Things have only got worse in the University. Now,  with the  whip in place for implementation of fresh reservations, all semblance of  optimal student teacher ratios in the university will cease to exist. Colleges are centres of teaching and learning; converting them into cafeterias and cinema halls that will be filled with  students in short term transit cannot aid the cause of learning , academic rigor or university life.

Already, our best teaching and learning time  has become a casualty to the semester system and in the worst months of the year, namely,  bitterly cold December and brutally hot May students have been  unthinkingly made to take examinations. (and no, I do not think air conditioning and central heating are  options we should be looking for  anytime) . Evaluation of exam scripts and setting of examination papers twice a year has enormous costs, in time, money, energy  and quality. The bar on all fronts has been set   abysmally low, and  the farming out of   AECC answer scripts for evaluation at  individual colleges, allowing further leeway to  dubious internal assessment mechanisms,  damage altogether the idea of an impartial system of evaluation.

Given Delhi's terrible air, extreme weather, awful traffic, and congestion on the roads and within institutions, this would be a good time for the movers and shakers to consider shutting down all colleges and shifting everyone  to a cyber university. All teaching can be done online through bots and students can enroll into courses of their choice, with unlimited options.
Colleges reeling under shortages of water, electricity, classrooms and staff ( both teaching and non teaching) can be turned into visual sites that will provide "an idea of the University" to all visitors. A moderate fee to experience university life  can be charged from   all visitors who can have a choice of   simulated experiences  ranging from classroom lectures, tutorial and practical experiences,  library visits, guided walks within the campus and special canteen fare, et al.   Under the prevailing circumstances, this would be a democratic way of ensuring access to university experience  for one and all. I am confident that this pilot project can be put in place by 2020. We wont need to agonize over student-teacher-infrastucture-ratios or the idea of the university  ever again.