All In A Morning's Work

 I stepped out into the street today, armed with my mask to buy a small crinkled cantaloupe from  the fruit vendor. Another vendor cycled by slowly and I noticed that he had a stack of beautifully carved stones that are  amazing kitchen equipment requiring zero maintenance for upto thirty years.

I stopped him and we began a masked conversation, wherein I admired the chiselling he had done on the stones. Each stone slab  was  exquisite and a finished art work, reminding me  after a long long time that  everyday objects  could be  both functional and aesthetic, and add to working pleasure  every time they were put to  use. I use a silbatta (or ammi kallu as we call it in South India)  in my kitchen and it belonged to my mother-in-law. She would often use it to rustle up a small handful of dry or wet chutneys when the big and small mixies were not required or unusable in the event of a power cut. Now it sits on a ledge outside my kitchen, and it is a pleasant spot to grind and crush small spices and leaves, and little bits of rock salt when I cook.

 Silbaatas, other than being effective kitchen assistants could generate mirth and raise a laugh as I discovered when my daughter came home  from primary school with  news about an ohjective test on household objects and what they were made of. "Amma,what is a silbatta?," she had queried and I had pointed to the ammi kallu. "Oh! she replied, her face falling, "I didn't know this is called a silbatta and is made of stone. In the test at school I crossed out stone and circled paper as the correct answer." Amused at the idea of the  paper silbatta  I explained that  the grinding stone was named differently in different languages, wondering if it was solely up to mothers and language teachers to establish links and connections between languages. Shouldn't teachers of other disciplines also endeavour to do the same?

This year, it will be  thirty years since my mother -in -law passed away, but her silbatta continues to be one of the workhorses in my kitchen, because the texture of  crushed ingredients  in chutneys that silbatta -grinding produces followed by the effortless   wash  with water cleaning -up -after remains unparalleled. Over time, my silbatta has been worn down to smooth stone so I asked the iterant vendor if he could re-chisel my silbatta for me. He agreed and I brought it out  from its perch in my backyard to the front door where Bablu settled down to work his craft. A couple of neighbours also brought out their  old silbattas for chiselling.

Twenty minutes later, here below  is  my   new  Bablu -chiselled-silbatta., with its personal stone accessory. I  took an ordinary photo and then staged the next photo, on a red cushion.

  Kavita who comes in to help with  kitchen work  has been wanting a silbatta and I had promised to pick up a new one  for her, reluctant to part with mine. My sister confirmed that she too required a small  table top silbatta, although she hosts mom's  granite ammi  on her  terrace. Here are  two new guests, handchiselled  by Bablu, enroute to their new homes.

 After a long, grim winter,   the weather seems right and the possibility of connecting to the quiet pleasures of the quotidian have begun to surface. With many thanks to Bablu , here is looking forward to summery buttermilk  times, redolent  with the flavours of   fresh currypatta and green chillies,   silbatta -crushed with rock salt and hing!

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.

NBCC and the Ordinary Citizen

Redevelopment  cannot happen without either cutting or transplanting trees... Do we want people to live in slums?

This  quotation heads today's interview  on page 5 of The City Section, of  The Indian Express. with Anoop Kumar  Mittal, Chairperson cum Managing Director   of NBCC.  AK Mittal is currently conducting a tree census in Sarojini Nagar and pitches himself as the head of the National Building Construction Company, with a bleeding heart.

The less than three month old protest by a ragtag group of Delhi residents from all walks of life, protesting against  loss of  forest cover and the rampant  decimation of trees in the name of construction and redevelopment have brought matters to a head.

Ordinary residents of New Delhi, have usually been second class citizens in matters pertaining to allotment and use of public spaces. Year after year and decade after decade, master plans that shuffle just about everything come into place, allowing for an unholy nexus between the state and commercial builders.  A stay on  the cutting of trees  issued, by the Delhi high court,in colonies that were to be redeveloped has provided interim relief, putting the brakes on   NBCC's aggressive rampage and destruction of gorgeous, ancient trees in several colonies. 

 Does AKM's heart really bleed  for slum dwellers? Is he  the friendly face of a welfare state that is building inhabitants beautiful homes?  This is very  far  from the truth. A visit to  East Kidwai Nagar and the soulless construction that  now sits there, pretending to be a planned city  provides a testimonial, countering NBCC lies.

Here is another snap interview, conducted as a result of the dissatisfaction generated by  The Indian express interview. Since those interviewed are licensed to spin tall tales, it becomes necessary to counter this with a fictional interview where the truth can be told.


 Ordinary Citizen:  For whom and what does  your heart bleed AKM Ji?   How can we conceive  of a city without trees?


Anil Kumar Mittal: ..Look at New York, Does it have  any trees?

  OC: Excuse me AKM Ji..Have you not heard of New York's  Central Park?

 AKM: So what? CP has a Central Park too?

 OC: There is a difference in size, tree cover and usage,Nevertheless, you mention East Kidwai Nagar as a planned modern city. There seem to be too many commercial buildings in East Kidwai Nagar. Wasnt it a large housing colony for mid-level  government employees ?

 AKM:  Aap chahtey kya hain? We have built beautiful homes for senior government employees. Unki bhi koi status hoti hai. We want them to live in prime property, in luxurious homes

OC:  How many flats were there in Kidwai Nagar earlier?

AKM: There were over 2444 houses  earlier

 OC: How many flats do we have now where former residents will be relocated.?

AKM: We have given 210 Type II housing units. Very well planned with water harvesting. People can live without trees. They cannot live without cars.  That is why our new colonies will be redeveloped to have parking facilities for 40,000  cars. Yet people are complaining about our having  to cut  16,000 trees.

OC: Are trees not  our living heritage? Should we not aim for sustainable cities?

 AKM: Yes yes. So, we have made  beautiful concrete  trees, which will have no dead leaves and  no plant debris, so  no need to sweep and maintain the  public areas. Plenty of concrete birds and animals., will be placed around these trees.   Living species are pests. Cause too much nuisance.  This is real development, that we plan to sustain for 30 years.

 OC: Did you not say that we need to cut trees and transplant them because we do not want people to live in slums?

AKM: Absolutely.  To prevent slum like environment,  we have  built flats in higher categories.We have had enough of people living in prime  residential colonies, turning them into slums.  We are making beautiful houses  for beautiful people.

OC:  How do you explain the proposed  mall in Sarojini Nagar, or the plans for a WTC in Naroji Nagar? What happened  in these instances  to your plans of housing the city's millions?

AKM: Please don't be misguided. First you want redevelopment. Then you want beautiful homes.  Where is the money going to come for all this? We will build a mall and sell  off units. we will build a WTC and sell off units. Slowly we will collect the money. over a five year period.


OC: This sounds like social engineering. You have uprooted ordinary citizens living and employed in these parts, driven them away and ensured that they will never return. Do you think this is fair?

AKM: Arrey, what is your problem ? Are you an  urban  naxal?  Are  you threatening the developmental activity of the nation's capital?

No AKM JI. I am literate. I learnt  that a project from Tamil Nadu was  rehashed, cut and pasted and submitted as a proposal for Naroji Nagar, and that it was  hurriedly passed.
 
AKM: Isn't this a wonderful example of Unity in Diversity? The same blood and spirit, the same water and air and trees exist  through the length and breadth  of India That is why when we cut a tree we planted  fifty. Now we will plant five hundred.  JAI Hind.

 OC: When you are smashing and ripping up   the city to build anew  with our money,  should you not discuss  such important matters with us , the people?

AKM: Please stop this right now.  What do you people know about architecture or trees? Thanks to you all Urban Naxals embracing lemon and pomegranate trees I  will  have to measure the circumference of the only two real Indian trees , the  Neem and the Pipal. ? Why do we need any other trees anyway ? We can import  lemons and  all other  fruits we want from Israel. Foodhall is already stocking such good quality fruits. I do all my shopping there. You also do  the same please. Now please don't delay my work any further. It is of National Importance.





..
  

Now I Know What A Non-Khatai Is !

We were at the end of a long street, waiting to  to touch base with Rajender who was to escort us to the dargah and also take us on a guided tour of Fatehpur Sikri. The charming aspect of roads is that they have crossroads and intersections and we were parked in front of a ramshackle market with odds and ends and hawkers selling fruit and vegetables, small eating joints on either side. There were vendors with the  gazak and chikki and rewadi, winter ware that continues to delight, but the eye was also entranced by what looked like baked rose florets.

 I stepped out of the car and enquired as to what they were, thinking of their resemblance to what we called naun-khatai at New Delhi. The nankhatai is  usually a mix of maida and dalda  that continues to be made in bakeries all over North India. In Chandni Chowk the  dough is  kneaded in a plastic container and set to bake on a hot iron griddle on coals which is covered by a tin plate. The khatai,  warm and fresh from the griddle makes for   delicious morsels that shoppers and shopkeepers snack upon and are available off  cycle thelas that ply in the lanes.







I chose a vanilla flavour made with butter, and eventually  purchased  non-khatais for five rupees per piece. I carried them back to the car and distributed them, at that precise moment on a winter afternoon, when the sun feels a little bleak and the sky begins to  gray in shared anxiety. On contact with the mouth the  khatai  disintegrates into little khatai crumbs  that can be  slowly relished, munched and swallowed to allow ,   a comfortable warmth  to spread through one's being. A  cup of tea would  have  heightened the pleasure, but Rajinder had responded to our phone call and we headed in the direction of the monument.
 On our return  we stopped  on the other side of the road, at a larger stationary outlet and bought boxes of non-khatai to take back home to Delhi. All these years, I had imagined that these delicate biscuits were called nan khatai because they were made of maida in the same way as nans were. Innumerable local bakeries  at  New Delhi  which sell this  delicate biscuit always referred t it as nan -khatai.



 The nickel  finally dropped.  They were  termed non-khatai because no fermenting agent was used to make them, unlike the nan which requires a little bit of   be fermentation   before it can be rolled out and  baked into delicious crisp breads. Non khatai indicates a baked item that needs no fermentation.

 Odd, how language routinely fine tunes and  resets our understanding of both the everyday and the unusual. The non khatais on the road leading to Fatehpur Sikri are the largest  and most aesthetic  khatais I have ever seen.  They are also light, crisp and crumbly and  a great pleasure, both to view and eat. They definitely deserve a GI tag. Take a look and  try them out  if you are in the vicinity!

The GBM and its After-Math?

I attended the DUTA GBM yesterday because  well over a month had elapsed  since we received the  evaluation boycott call from the DUTA executive.  Serious evaluation requires us to examine  a  limited number of answer sheets over a reasonable period of time, and since I for example,  can  optimally  examine around  seventeen honours answer scripts in a day,  I was anxious to participate in a discussion which could review the evaluation blockade. Of course, if we are going to do eleventh hour evaluations, maybe we could formulate a"everyone will pass formula" or a "everyone gets  distinction methodology." Perhaps we could even take an aggregate of the previous two years and give our third year students  permanent provisional certificates, because I don't see how we will be able  to do justice to the evaluation process at this rate.

What is disturbing is that the moment this is voiced as work-related anxiety, one immediately becomes a fake warrior of  a particular political group. This was the response conveyed on my College Whatsapp group with accusations that  teachers who had participated in the evaluation boycott were being thrown to the wolves. This is astounding, because if we must  use such bizarre metaphors, students waiting to receive their  results are the people we are  actually throwing  under the bus. ( The fact of the matter is, wolves are really pretty noble creatures, so please let us stop  crying wolf ) 

I also don't think that because some farmers have trashed their crop and a few milkmen have emptied milk cans  on the streets, it becomes necessary for us to jettison our students. Yes, we mentor students and help them grow, but I don't think students should be equated with perishable goods. Also, I don't see how damaging student interest,  and saying that  harming only one batch  in the hope of  salvaging the futures of  generations of students becomes an  acceptable procedure. "The end justifies the means," is a terrible example to fall back on, especially when vulnerable, young people are involved.

The system of examinations we have in place is extremely problematic. So also is the system of evaluation and if recent results are anything to go by, we are now on par with CBSE , since  a combination of  the semester evaluation  and internal assessment  systems has succeeded in churning out  batches of outstanding students.

This aspect of our evaluation process, which has been reduced to a mockery, needs to be seriously examined. All of us are unhappy with the semester system, but as an academic body we have been unable to bring back the Annual Mode and put in checks and measures to make internal assessment a gold standard. To our chagrin, Himachal University, the newspapers tell us, has reverted to conducting its examinations in the  Annual Mode. Delhi University, meanwhile continues to shuffle its feet over very clumsily aligned and envisioned  syllabi, and  teaches and evaluates in Semester Mode. None of this is being discussed on platforms that matter.  

Yesterday's GBM was an eyeopener. After a few long drawn out speeches, one member proposed an out of turn closure motion. The President of the DUTA, for reasons best known to him (perhaps it was the excruciating hot weather) put it to mock-vote. This was followed  by considerable mayhem. Many teachers, who did not have any political affiliations never got a chance to speak. The closure motion became real and  absolutely no discussion  was allowed.

I was told by many people that the executive had decided the boycott  and not consulted the staff Associations. The executive had again voted and won 11:8 on the question of continuing the boycott.  When I asked about letters from over 25 Staff Associations  suggesting that the boycott be withdrawn, this was dismissed as not relevant, because had those members been really serious, they would have turned up for the GBM!

So I  understood a  few things from yesterday's GBM which i would like to place  on record: 

Certain procedures are irreversible, for a trade union movement to be successful. 

 I. If the DUTA executive takes a decision, then the decision must never be reviewed. ( trade unions follow the logic that  battles must be fought unto death)

II.  If the executive takes a decision on behalf of Staff Associations and does not consult them in the first place, then the Executive can never  ever  go back to the Staff Associations and ask for a resolution. Clause (1) comes into play.

 III . Students and must be  viewed as collateral damage.(as in the context of war, refer clause I) 

IV. Factoring in adequate time to carry out the evaluation process or drawing attention to it 

 is not a logical thought process. It is evidence of taking the high moral ground and reprehensible  because whenever there is a war zero-time comes into play. In such situations  trade unionists must not behave like educators because to do so is tantamount to  betrayal.( to the situation of war)

V. In a GBM, taking a stand as a teacher is both counterproductive and irrelevant. We must always take a position  that echoes the wishes of  one  political party that we  must compulsorily espouse. Although those who vociferously supported the  the four year program, now support  the evaluation boycott, they've probably got it  right this time.

VI. Speakers must hurl accusations and invective  at others. Without this modus operandi,  obfuscation  will not occur and the issue at hand cannot  be deflected.

 VII If there are other suggestions, like going back to evaluating scripts , and gheraoing the Vice Chancellor,  and garnering public opinion  at the ground level, these do not merit a discussion.

I hesitate to storm into the Exam Centre and begin the evaluation process, although I do sympathize with colleagues who are possibly doing so. It would be in the academic nterests of  the the DU  2018 Calendar, if the DUTA leadership would resolve this  post-haste instead of continuing the stale-mate.