On education

What is the purpose of education? There are many answers, and three common ones are below:

-'to succeed in the fast-paced, competitive modern world' (an answer that I find particularly moronic)
-'to equip the child with the knowledge and skills to find work to support themselves'
-'to discover one's talents'

Are you satisfied by any of the above answers ? I'm not, in fact I'm tremendous dissatisfied with the education system (of personal interest now that I am a father). Human minds are complex. We experience emotions - joy, anger, jealousy, contempt,love. We complain about other peoples' actions and justify ours. But do we have to take all these as given, these things are how we are, or is it possible to 'step outside' of oneself, and be able to observe how our minds work, why we react the way we react, what are the hidden motivations or insecurities. As the child is growing up and its character being formed - is it possible to have serious conversations about the rather imperfect nature of the world we live in, with how we rationalize the way we (in India atleast) make our peace with the enormous poverty and suffering outside our doorsteps in order to carry on our lives. Is it possible to teach children to be decent, happy individuals ?

Can we teach children to be alive to the mystery of life ? Here we are, blobs of protoplasm with odd projections that enable us to locomote manipulate, on a large orb circling a ball of fire, in the middle of a vastness we cannot comprehend. We are one in billions today and have been preceded by billions and will be followed by billions. So how do we come to terms with all this ? Normally all this is pushed to the back of the mind so we can get on with the day to day business of life, survival, freedom from pain and discomfort, pleasure, achievement and all that ? Can we teach our children to do a better of job of this than us? And what of the infinite complexity and variety of life on earth. Can we teach our children to be open to that?

Schools have to teach maths, physics and geography and so on. But if we as parents and teachers don't weave in the above we have lost the spirit of education. And this is the state of affairs across the board. I am sure the most expensive and fancy schools don't do that much better of a job than the middle-class schools in this, because the management and the parents are as much invested in the status quo of the world today, in fact even more, so that they are uninterested in questioning it.

Post Script:
We were casually talking about something related to schools at work once, and during that I spontaneously burst out: "I have zero faith in the educational system!". I was myself suprised by my vehemence as it was not premeditated, and to some extent I didn't even know that I felt this way. Some subsequent reflection resulted in the picture I lay out above. I find it ironic that having done excellently by conventional standards in most of my education, I now am completely disdaining it. But all the reflection, discovery and learning that happened for me, mostly slowly and haltingly, completely parallel to or outside the educational system, is central to what I am today. I see that as a tremendous failure of the education system.

I don't think many people feel so negatively about schools as I do. This leads to a nicely ironic dilemma for me: at least others are comfortable with the current system, and they are true to themselves if they don't fight against it. If I don't, I am being a complete fake. And the job I am talking about above is so gigantic and so seems so much beyond my capabilities.

The above thoughts are tremendously influenced by J. Krishnamurti's writings. But I have internalized them so completely and find them so obvious now, that I am not parroting what someone else is saying.


"It is our earth, not yours or mine or his. We are meant to live on it, helping each other, not destroying each other. This is not some romantic nonsense, but the actual fact"

Orhan Pamuk's 'Istanbul'

DONT READ IF YOU HAVENT READ AND PLAN TO READ ORHAN PAMUK's CLASSIC 'ISTANBUL'



The superb dramatic ending of Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul. To get the full effect, you have to read the book. Nevertheless, the context is that the young Pamuk is a very talented painter but gives it up temporarily after a painful breakup with his lover and muse. Meanwhile he drops out of architecture school and is having huge frequent fights with his mother who is adamant that there is no future or career for a painter in Turkey and that he must finish his architecture degree. Often he would leave the house in a rage after one of these fights and wander the streets all night:

"On my way up to Taksim, I'd stop for a moment to look at the lights of Galata in the half dark view, and then I'd head for Beyoglu to spend a few minutes browsing through the bookstalls at the beginning of Istiklal Avenue, and after that I'd stop for a beer and vodka in one of those beer halls where the television drowned out the noisy crowd, and smoke a cigarette, as everyone else was doing (I'd look around me to see if there happened to be any famous poets, writers or artists sitting nearby) and when I felt I was attracting too much attention from all those mustachioed men - because I was looking around me, and alone and had a child's face - I would go out again to mingle with the night. After walking down the avenue for a little I'd head into the back streets of Beyoglu and when I had reached Cukurcuma, Galata, Cihangir, I would pause to gaze at the holos of the streetlamps and the light from a nearby television screen flickering on the wet pavements, and it would be while peering into a junk shop, a refrigrator that an ordinary grocer used as a window display, a pharmacy still displaying a mannequin I remember from my childhood, that I would realize how very happy I was. The sublime, dizzying, pure anger I felt at this moment, after listening to my mother, would leave me after an hour of wandering around Beyoglu - or Uskudar, or the back streets of Fatih - wherever I went, as I got colder and colder, I'd be warmend by the furious flame of my brilliant future. By then my head would be light from the beer and the long exertion, and the mournful streets would seem to flicker as in an old film, a moment I would want to freeze and hide away - the way I used to hide a precious seed or a favourite marble in my mouth for hours on end - and at the same moment, I'd want to leave the empty streets and return home to sit down at my desk with pencil and paper to write or draw."

And then one day, the insight that resolves everything ...

"The streets of Beyoglu, their dark corners, my desire to run away, my guilt - they were all blinking on and off like neon lights in my head. I knew now that tonight my mother and I wouldn't have our fight, that in a few minutes I would open the door and escape into the city's consoling streets; and having walked away half the night, I'd return home and sit down at my table and capture their chemistry on paper.
"I don't want to be an artist", I said. "I'm going to be a writer".

Sensible things to do on (next) Independance day

1.) Join the Clean Bengaluru campaign and clean up some area of Bangalore (www.cbengaluru.com)

2.) Revisit and reflect on the freedom struggle by watching a movie or reading a book. "Gandhi" by Attenborough is of course the default option, but there are some other less known options like movies on Bhagat Singh.

3.) Acknowledge people who serve you. At our apartment complex they gave some recognition (including monetary) to some employees who had helped put out a fire. A really nice thing to do.

4.)Spend time at an old age home, orphanage kind of place, like Sourav Gupta. Or take the opportunity to donate some money to them.

5.) DON'T take part in meaningless displays of patriotism like flag-hoisting or singing the national anthem.

Notes on "Inception"

I saw it twice running on the same day to catch everything I had missed and get the movie out of my system :-)
'Matrix' did it already so in that way this one didn't blow the mind the way Matrix did. But still probably the best movie of the year? And certainly better than Avatar (thank god they didn't do this in distracting 3d).
The visuals and settings were gorgeous and pitch-perfect (except for the goofup with the carpet :-). And same with the acting.
Lot of gratuitous shoot-em-up.
The main motivator of one company battling other felt flat, did not have an importance or urgency to it.
And isn't it gratifying and amazing that a big-budget Hollywood film would do something like this without putting the romantic angle to Codd/Ariadne ?

==
PS: It isn't a co-incidence that the two blog posts I squeezed in, in a long time, happened when Priya and the kid were away. A one-year old is a real time consumer even for a hands off dad.

Notes from Raghuram Rajan's talk

The UChicago BSchool professor who was Chief Economist at the IMF for a few years, and gained prominence recently for having 'predicted' the financial meltdown talked at Bangalore today, mostly about the root causes of the meltdown and also about India. The main talk did not resonate much with me but a few points that did:

* India will be the 2nd or 3rd largest economy in the world in a couple of years he said (I think he must have meant 4th, or else he was referring to many more years than just a couple). Do we have the thinking going on that would be needed for a country with that clout ? Like geopolitical thinking ; what should be our policy towards different countries/blocs, towards Africa ? A country like the US has a whole bunch of people discussing and debating these kind of things, and finally it crystallises into policy. Absolutely I agree -- there is a complete lack of depth in thinking about all the many areas of a complex industrialized (post industrialized) society. (Now this is where I step in ...)
* He felt that land/real estate has become a stumbling block for India's growth. Like if you have land or control of land then you can make money and if you don't, you don't. There is lot of lack of trasparency and distortion in land ; political people influence things unfairly, who you know matters. He also cited POSCO which has been trying for a long time to get land for its plant in Orissa. While I don't agree with the POSCO example (there is a lot of popular resistance to this from the local people), I agree completely to the broader point. When I see all the building construction in the cities of India, it gives me a very uneasy feeling. I've tried to analyse this and usually conclude that putting up such large buildings feels such a complex business and requires so much financing, that it makes me feel very small in comparison. But now I think the kind of thing Rajan was talking about also feeds into it ; the whole business of real estate is so opaque and criminalized and common people feel completely helpless in front of the forces involved. This shouldn't be.

* He pointed to UID and cash transfers (apparently being proposed) as critical pieces to stem the massive leakage and put more power in peoples' hands.

*Government's role need not be as a service provider per se. in areas like education and healthcare, the critical thing is that govt. plays a transparent regulatory role, so that whoever is delivering the service is constrainted to deliver a certain quality.