Thursday 29 August 2024

An essay on equality

 

The idea of equality and equal rights has changed throughout the ages. Protesters have pointed out that rights deemed equal somehow or the other leave a gap through which some group or the other finds itself disenfranchised of some rights. As a brief survey of the most major documents proclaiming rights will show, the idea of equality keeps changing. What these documents do not claim is that inequality is a fact of life beginning from birth. Instead of explicitly trying to create a state of equality, which try as one might, can never be achieved 100%, a method of acknowledging inequality and then trying to ameliorate it by positive discrimination or affirmative action should be adopted, as it is in various countries across the world.

                The earliest human writings are from roughly 5000 years back. The earliest human rights’ documents are from the Mesopotamian civilisation from roughly 4000 years back. Thus, as long as people have written, people have roughly written about equality. Yet, history shows that there is always some other right to strive for. Among documents which have had a major impact on modern human rights’ documents, one may mention England’s 1215 Magna Carta which proclaimed: ‘To no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay, right or justice’ (Clause 40). The ‘one’ in this line and in the document referred to ‘freemen’, a term which excluded slaves and women.

                The 1776 Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America in its preamble stated ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [italicisation mine] are created equal’.

                The 1789 French ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man [italicisation mine] and of the Citizen’ claimed ‘Men [italicisation mine] are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on considerations of the common good’ (Article 1). This provoked Mary Wollstonecraft to write the 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman signalling that the agitating group had left out half of the human population.

                The 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights began: ‘recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world’.

                The Indian constitution adopted on 26 January 1950 mentioned ‘equality of status and opportunity’.

                The 1848 Communist Manifesto, though not a document of human rights, recorded that ‘the “dangerous class”, [lumpenproletariat] the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.’ In other words, it drew attention to the fact that human rights’ activists had not secured much rights for ‘the “dangerous class”, [lumpenproletariat] the social scum, that passively rotting mass’.

                Ferdinand Lassalle, in 1862, said: ‘The constitutional questions are in the first instance not questions of right but questions of might. The actual constitution of a country has its existence only in the actual condition of force which exists in the country: hence political constitutions have value and permanence only when they accurately express those conditions of forces which exist in practice within a society.’ He also drew attention to the wide disparities between de jure rights and de facto rights.

                In the 1936 BR Ambedkar versus MK Gandhi debates following the publication of Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste, Ambedkar pointed out that ‘the Mahatma says that the standards I have applied to test Hindus and Hinduism are too severe and that judged by those standards every known living faith will probably fail. The complaint that my standards are high may be true. But the question is not whether they are high or whether they are low. The question is whether they are the right standards to apply. A People and their Religion must be judged by social standards based on social ethics. No other standard would have any meaning if religion is held to be a necessary good for the well-being of the people. Now I maintain that the standards I have applied to test Hindus and Hinduism are the most appropriate standards and that I know of none that are better. The conclusion that every known religion would fail if tested by my standards may be true. But this fact should not give the Mahatma as the champion of Hindus and Hinduism a ground for comfort any more than the existence of one madman should give comfort to another madman or the existence of one criminal should give comfort to another criminal.’ Ambedkar’s politics was instrumental in creating the positive discrimination system in electoral, educational and employment opportunities in the government sector in modern India.

                The concept of positive discrimination or affirmative action acknowledges that unlike what the 1776 American Declaration or the 1789 French Declaration state, equality is not ensured at birth. People (men, women and intersex people) are born in a specific geography, in a specific family with some or no religious affiliation, some or no sub-community identifiers such as caste or tribal identity, speaking one or many languages (including non-vocal languages such as sign languages), having certain physical characteristics including the presence or absence of some senses or organs, with a set of neurological characteristics which may or may not be as diversely spread as in the rest of the population, and in a family with its own unique economic position. Thus, people are as far removed from equality at birth as is possible the stretch of imagination. How to ensure the 1948 ‘equal rights’ of the UN Declaration so as to achieve ‘equality of status and opportunity’ as envisaged in the Indian Constitution?

                My readers must have read about some or all of these rights in their school history or civics or philosophy text books. As we grow older, we realise that equality of opportunity can never be ensured. The inequalities with which we are born at birth and the inequalities we accrue as we keep growing ensure that opportunities are never perfectly equal. Imagine two lines which are at just more than 0.1 degrees from each other. They make look similar and parallel but the longer one keeps drawing them, the more apparent it will be that the two are not parallel but are rather divergent.

                Think of identical twins. Their genes may share a high degree of similarity but with some differences. However, as they keep growing older, their epigenes keep changing differently based on their different lifestyles. If we start off with an inequality, however small, over time, those inequalities will only increase.

                Given that inequality exists, how best to make the world a fairer place for a larger section of the world’s inhabitants? Positive discrimination is one way. In India, positive discrimination is geared towards providing better electoral, education and employment opportunities in the government sector for populations which may be subject to negative discrimination. The point is to increase income-generating abilities and to have a fairer share in legislation. However, once income-generating abilities have been provided and the beneficiaries attain a level of income above the minimum wage, the positive discrimination system in education or employment for the descendants of those beneficiaries does not always end. Positive discrimination is not always linked with income (though in some cases, such as in the case of OBCs, it is). A move to introduce such a check is under debate in the judiciary and in the legislature. In the public education sector, an implicit check is already there in the form that even those who apply for positive discrimination in competitive entrance exams are denied that positive discrimination if their marks are already eligible for admission even without the added positive discrimination. Given that the government sector itself is only a minuscule portion (2%) of the employment sector and is increasingly overshadowed by the private sector in education, it is not the only forum for ensuring a fairer place for previously negatively discriminated against populations.

                The recent changes in affirmative action in the USA present an interesting counterpoint. Beginning from the late 1980s onwards, Indian software engineers started to migrate in large numbers to the developed world, and a large portion of such professionals went to the next largest country by population size, the USA. Such professionals, one may argue, represented those who had managed to reach higher levels of education despite their challenges or because of their privileges over their compatriots. When they reached the USA, their children, too, often tried to live up to the high academic standards of their parents and their fellow immigrants from India. (The USA national spelling bee competition is a good example of this trend. Whereas there were a few winners of Indian origin in the 1980s and the 1990s, there hasn’t been a winner of any other ethnicity since 2008). Chinese students often also followed a similar trajectory but their comparatively lesser grasp of the English language left the field for people of Indian ethnicity to find better opportunities in the USA. The top-ranked universities in the world, many of which are in the USA, often found that their incoming students were roughly 50% of Asian ethnicity (given that India and China have 35% of the world’s population and the other Asian countries have another 25%, it is not surprising). In order to ensure greater representation of other previously legally discriminated against populations such as Black and Latino, affirmative action in the USA set down limits for incoming students of certain ethnicities. This reduced the number of incoming students from Asian backgrounds, who went to court arguing that it was discriminatory against them. The court ruled in their favour for the time being in 2023. This case study highlighted several issues. One, that discrimination exists in several layers and is highly contextual. Thus, affirmative action should also take into account the existing status of the intended beneficiary and not go by historical precedent alone.

                Other than through such positive discrimination, what are the other ways? One way perhaps is to acknowledge that inequality exists. The 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and a sexist Bobby Riggs, which was dubbed as one among many ‘Battle of the Sexes’ did little to address the core issue of gender inequality. In competitive sports where physical prowess is a factor, men and women compete separately. In sports such as wrestling, weight lifting and boxing, even for each sex, there are categories for a range of weights in order to ensure that physical strengths of the competitors are not vastly different. It bears to mention here that in several sports where physical prowess is a factor, hormonal and chromosomal factors often work against some people who identify as women. The standard response of sports bodies is to ban those sportspersons. Instead, these sports bodies could create sub-categories for women at the higher end of the weight scale or for men at the lower end of the weight scale or any such similar proposal to ensure greater participation but also be less unfair in the process.

                This brings in the question of empathy. What is empathy? Empathy may be putting oneself in the proverbial shoes of another person to feel what that person feels. It is only when one acknowledges the other person as being as much worthy of respect as oneself can one be empathetic.

                Inequality exists among men and women and intersex people, people of different religions, race, caste, geography, class, language, physical ability, and intellectual ability. Rather than striving for equality of treatment which leads to not acknowledging the inequality and doing nothing by way of positive discrimination, one approach of dealing with inequality suggests first acknowledging inequality, then finding means of positive discrimination and finally developing the capacity to empathise with others, none of whom are our equal.

                Returning to de jure and de facto rights and treatment of inequality, two factors become clear. Rights proportional to population is a path bestrewn with danger. In India, there is an ongoing political debate about rights proportional to caste populations. This ignores the logic that if one were to extend that to religion or language or any other aspect, it would be highly politically unpalatable. Thus, reducing inequality is not always best achieved through political means. Empathy lies at the core of reducing inequality. As the history of human writing tells us, empathy ebbs and flows and garners enough public support to achieve some kind of reduction of inequality only at certain points of time in history. A host of factors allow that moment of radical change. De jure rights often lose their de facto prevalence owing to a loss of empathy. Human beings are not automata and are subject to emotions. As long as society exists, inequality will persist because of factors beyond the control of any system. The point is to continually strive to reduce inequality by allowing empathy to develop within us. Rights are not given, they are seized; but rights are maintained not by State control but rather by empathy. If one were to look at various societies across the world, one would realise that various kinds of empathy in different degrees exist in society going beyond juridical laws. The answer to inequality is within us, rather than out there in the world. How best to bring it about requires educating ourselves about empathy and learning to see the various inequalities that exist around us. Learning to know and learning to see are more important than political struggles.

               

 

Wednesday 24 January 2024

Similar poems: Set 03

 Henry Wotton (1568-1639), The Character of a Happy Life

How happy is he born and taught
That serveth not another's will;
Whose armour is his honest thought,
And simple truth his utmost skill!

Whose passions not his masters are;
Whose soul is still prepared for death,
Untied unto the world by care
Of public fame or private breath;

Who envies none that chance doth raise,
Nor vice; who never understood
How deepest wounds are given by praise;
Nor rules of state, but rules of good;

Who hath his life from rumours freed;
Whose conscience is his strong retreat;
Whose state can neither flatterers feed,
Nor ruin make oppressors great;

Who God doth late and early pray
More of His grace than gifts to lend;
And entertains the harmless day
With a religious book or friend;

—This man is freed from servile bands
Of hope to rise or fear to fall:
Lord of himself, though not of lands,
And having nothing, yet hath all.



Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), If—

If you can keep your head when all about you   
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;   
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;   
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   
    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   
    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!


Similar poems: Set 02

 Francis Beaumont (1584-1616), On the Tombs in Westminster Abbey

MORTALITY, behold and fear!
What a change of flesh is here!
Think how many royal bones
Sleep within this heap of stones:
Here they lie had realms and lands,
Who now want strength to stir their hands:
Where from their pulpits seal'd with dust
They preach, 'In greatness is no trust.'
Here 's an acre sown indeed
With the richest, royall'st seed
That the earth did e'er suck in
Since the first man died for sin:
Here the bones of birth have cried—
'Though gods they were, as men they died.'
Here are sands, ignoble things,
Dropt from the ruin'd sides of kings;
Here 's a world of pomp and state,
Buried in dust, once dead by fate.



James Shirley (1596-1666), Victorious Men of Earth

Victorious men of earth, no more
Proclaim how wide your empires are;
Though you bind in every shore
And your triumphs reach as far
As night or day,
Yet you, proud monarchs, must obey
And mingle with forgotten ashes, when
Death calls ye to the crowd of common men.

Devouring Famine, Plague, and War,
Each able to undo mankind,
Death's servile emissaries are;
Nor to these alone confined,
He hath at will
More quaint and subtle ways to kill;
A smile or kiss, as he will use the art,
Shall have the cunning skill to break a heart.




PB Shelley (1792-1822), Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Similar poems: Set 01

 Josuah Sylvester (1563-1618), Love's Omnipresence

Where I was base as is the lowly plain,
And you, my Love, as high as heaven above,
Yet should the thoughts of me your humble swain
Ascend to heaven, in honour of my Love.

Where I as high as heaven above the plain,
And you, my Love, as humble and as low
As are the deepest bottoms of the main,
Whereso'er you were, with you my love should go.

Were you the earth, dear Love, and I the skies,
My love should shine on you like to the sun,
And look upon you with thousand eyes
Till heaven wax'd blind, and till the world were done.

Whereso'er I am, below, or else above you,
Whereso'er you are, my heart shall truly love you.



Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), I Cannot Live with You

I cannot live with You – 
It would be Life – 
And Life is over there – 
Behind the Shelf

The Sexton keeps the Key to – 
Putting up
Our Life – His Porcelain – 
Like a Cup – 

Discarded of the Housewife – 
Quaint – or Broke – 
A newer Sevres pleases – 
Old Ones crack – 

I could not die – with You – 
For One must wait
To shut the Other’s Gaze down – 
You – could not – 

And I – could I stand by
And see You – freeze – 
Without my Right of Frost – 
Death's privilege?

Nor could I rise – with You – 
Because Your Face
Would put out Jesus’ – 
That New Grace

Glow plain – and foreign
On my homesick Eye – 
Except that You than He
Shone closer by – 

They’d judge Us – How – 
For You – served Heaven – You know,
Or sought to – 
I could not – 

Because You saturated Sight – 
And I had no more Eyes
For sordid excellence
As Paradise

And were You lost, I would be – 
Though My Name
Rang loudest
On the Heavenly fame – 

And were You – saved – 
And I – condemned to be
Where You were not – 
That self – were Hell to Me – 

So We must meet apart – 
You there – I – here – 
With just the Door ajar
That Oceans are – and Prayer – 
And that White Sustenance – 
Despair – 

Wednesday 7 June 2023

Bullying records in school leaving certificates in South Korea

A kind of reverse bullying but perhaps will serve as a disincentive to every person who thinks about bullying in the first place.

Raphael Rashid, "‘We torment others’: the dark side of South Korean school life," The Guardian, 7 June 2023

Friday 26 May 2023

Languages, hand counting cultures and mathematics

David Robson, ‘What’s the best language for learning maths?’ BBC Future, 26 May 2023.

Please see the video in the article. It discusses different hand counting cultures. If you have seen Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), you will know that it can be a matter of life and death.

Friday 5 May 2023

Education and inequality

        One of the greatest features of the neo-liberal world order since the 1970s has been a rise in inequality. The top 1% has gotten exceedingly wealthier, the next 9% has gotten significantly wealthier, whereas the remaining 90% has more or less remained stagnant if we take into account inflation. The poverty line has not kept pace with inflation. Figures suggesting that the percentage of people below the poverty line has shrunk, have failed to keep in touch with the reality we see around us.
Basic literacy levels and the percentage of people acquiring increasing levels of education have increased. Yet our practical experience, especially in India, of the vast levels of illiteracy we see around us in the weakest sections of society convince us that the token school education that they may or may not have received has long since receded into oblivion owing to lack of practice and lack of a sustained years-long educational experience during their formative years.
The literacy rate was almost 73% in the 2011 census, growing about 1% every year since 1971. Such a growth rate would take the literacy rate close to 100% in roughly 2041 irrespective of whether censuses take place then or not. However, these figures need to be taken as most other figures—telling a story which we may or may not choose to believe in. Is the literacy rate around us 85% in 2023? Is that what our practical experience tells us? I would argue not, living though as I am in Kolkata. The 2011 census revealed that out of a population of 42 lakh in Kolkata above the age of 6, the number of illiterate people was roughly 23 thousand, or 0.5%. This does not bear resemblance to my personal experience of having lived in Kolkata for almost four decades.
Education is often seen as the only way to break free from the cycle of poverty. It is seen as a panacea for all evils—poverty, child marriage, crime, etc. Teachers in higher education in India regularly bemoan the unfitness of their pupils for higher education given their lack of basic language skills, numerical skills and socio-historical awareness skills. The fault is shifted to school education. Statistics reveal that poor student-teacher ratio, lack of basic amenities such as a roof in the classroom, gender-specific toilets in the school building, access to clean drinking water, electricity in the classroom—these affect a large number of public schools in India. Private education is expensive and better, though not always. Like any generalisation, this too can be countered by the numerous examples of high-performing public schools across India. However, those are exceptions rather than the norm. Guardians who can afford, tend to admit their wards in private schools unless there are high-performing public schools in their vicinity. Statistics will tell us that it is a trend that began with the rise of neo-liberalism and the shift away from thinking of education as public entitlement. The neo-liberal philosophy would argue that the public is entitled to nothing. Those who survive on government dole better make do with what they are provided. If they complain, they ought to earn more and spend extra to buy private services and commodities from the open market. You get what you pay for.
The problem with this philosophy is a large section of the people has very little disposable income. Education as a commodity has to vie with all the other commodities on offer. Given the low amount of disposable income, most people prefer to send their wards to public schools if there is one nearby which has any modicum of acceptability. However, with most public schools continuing to languish in abysmal conditions, people are often forced to borrow to send their schools to a private school in the hope of acquiring escape velocity and breaking free from the shackles of their cycle of poverty.
A lot of hope is pinned on education. Yet when these students enter a school, they are subject to similar forces that they face at home—pressures of poverty, caste, gender, sexual orientation, location, etc. The lottery of life is often decided in our very early years. The dice are loaded from the start. The idea of justice tells us that it should not be so. We should not be victims of the conditions of our birth. Yet, it often is so. Stories of individuals surmounting the odds stacked against them are what inspire us. However, we must always remember that they are exceptional individuals. The trajectory is not common. Such individuals and their stories find mention in the media and are often given prizes for the fact that they have managed to traverse a larger distance in the trajectory of growth than most of us.
Trying to surmount the challenges of poverty through education is tough. Also, it is a conundrum. For the majority of the school going population, does education exhibit the changing fortunes at home of the pupils or does a better-than-average educational process change the fortunes at home for the individual? In other words, those who succeed in getting out of the poverty trap—do they do so because of what they learnt at school or because their family’s income increased?
The media often report about individuals who manage to break free from the poverty trap through disreputable means. All criminals are not born poor. Some of them were even born with proverbial silver spoons in their mouths. However, a majority of people outside the top 10% who resort to financial crime have low educational skills irrespective of whatever formal certificates they possess. Education failed them. Moreover, they failed themselves in living the ethical life.
What is the solution? Throwing money at the problem will not make it go away. The money, also importantly, is never enough to throw around. Should one invest more in higher education and hope the teachers beginning from nursery level that the higher education system turns out are better educated and hence better educators? It should be mentioned here than anganwadi workers do not require to pass through the portals of higher education and they are often among the first teachers of a large section of Indian children. It is neither necessary nor desirable to increase the minimum eligibility criteria for nursery level educators.
The other target area of investment can be the nursery, primary and secondary levels of the school education system. Given that it is the education in these early years, that the rest of the education trajectory is often formed, it is crucial to invest in it if one believes in education being the cure to all evils. The first national education commission’s 1966 report envisaged a 4% of GDP spending by the government on education. It has been almost 60 years since that report but the percentage of GDP spending by the government on education has been a bit more than 2.5%. The Scandinavian countries (where inequality is low, poverty is low and educational standards are high) spend 7-8%; Brazil 6%; Australia, the USA and Mexico around 5%; the UK, China and Russia around 4%. Underinvestment by the government in education reduces the total money that can be spent on education by the government be it at the school level or in higher education. It is unfair to compare India to the Scandinavian countries because of vast differences in their nature. However, if one thinks of Brazil, China and Russia (the BRICS grouping) as large countries with similar levels of development as India (though there are immense differences among these countries at all levels), then the Indian government’s spending on education is still low.
If the Indian government reduces its spending in other fields and increases it in education and achieves that 4% of GDP mark, will it make India a better country? The answer to this question cannot be predicted as it has never been done. However, just increasing the spending will not reduce inequality. That requires similarly increasing the spending on health and public housing and creating enough job opportunities all the while ensuring a stability of population and an ability to prevent deterioration of the natural environment and climate—in sum, the main goals of any government. Performing the main development goals of a government with an eye to reducing inequality requires minute changes which cannot be reduced by education alone.
Education alone can neither reduce poverty nor inequality. Rather the current status of education in India further exacerbates inequality by perpetuating the systems that are already in place. The corporate world regularly bemoans that Indian graduates are mostly unemployable. The experience is borne out by most educators as well except those in elite institutions. Increasing the amount of vocational courses in secondary and higher secondary schools is unlikely to solve the problem if the other problems of school education remain. If a large number of students are not benefitting from general education in schools, they are unlikely to benefit if the type of instruction is changed to vocational practical skills.
In order to reduce inequality, one should not look perhaps towards schools but rather to government policy as a whole.
Critics may argue that inequality is the basis of life. Two siblings going to the same school are unlikely to live the rest of their lives on an equal footing. They may argue that the idea of liberty, equality and fraternity is flawed. Fraternity left out the women; equality is impossible to achieve and often undesirable if one thinks of positive discrimination in order to aid the weak; and one person’s liberty is another person’s captivity. Yet the point remains that global income inequality that had decreased in the 1950s and 60s, started increasing again since the 1970s.
Improving school education is likely to bring the intangible benefits of education—knowledge, awareness about the world, better language and numerical skills. Beyond that, there is perhaps little else that improving school education can achieve on its own.

Friday 4 November 2022

The ride of an options trader

I read

Alexander Hurst, ‘How I turned $15,000 into $1.2m during the pandemic – then lost it all,’ The Guardian, 4 November 2022

and

I remembered my stint with options trading, which was my first brush with the stock market, in 2015. I had just finished Varsity on Zerodha. My monthly UGC fellowship was Rs. 32,500. I was without a permanent job and my PhD literature survey was returning more misses than hits. I wanted to hit the big shot. Having learnt the basics, I thought all I needed to do was buy at the cheapest point, sell at the highest point, and earn a crore in a month. I thought having learnt the basics of the stock market, I had hit the jackpot--I had unlocked the secrets of Warren Buffett and Rakesh Jhunjhunwala and their ilk. In August 2015, I put Rs. 20,629 (almost 15% my savings) in Nifty options, and I ended up with a loss of Rs. 18,977, that is a loss of 92%. I felt like digging a hole in the ground and burying myself. On expiry day, when I ended up with this loss, after 3:30 pm, I had to go out of the house and go somewhere. On the bus, I looked at all the faces in the bus. Did they not realise that the Nifty had dropped by 5% in the course of two trading days? The world, in all its August heat and brightness, seemed to go on. I, in my curtained room, was apparently living in a world of my own. I was reminded of Pieter Bruegel the Elder's painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. I was like Icarus, a tiny dot in the background, while the world, like the farmer, was completely unaware of my presence.

I hid this loss from my spouse for some time because I was so ashamed of having lost such a huge chunk of the family savings. I did confess to her later.

I tried again in September. I put in some money, and ended up with a profit of Rs. 10,000. I thought, I have managed to win back from the world what the world had taken from me. I thought let me recoup my remaining Rs. 9,000. I tried doing that and poured the remaining 85% of my savings in it. I went all out to recover that 9000. On the day before expiry day, at 2:30 pm, I saw my trades going deep in the red and I exited all the positions. I finished September with a total loss of Rs. 36,411. After 3 pm, the markets started going in the opposite direction. By the close at 3:45, there was a 3% upside from the low at 2:30 pm. Had I held on for 30 more minutes, I would have noticed the trade going in the different direction and I would have made a profit of 2 lakhs! Instead, I had lost Rs. 55, 430 over the course of two months whereas my monthly salary was Rs. 32,500.

The experience was one of the lowest points in my life. I realised that the stock market is irrational and beyond one's control. I deleted all emails related to the stock market (except a spreadsheet where I made detailed records for the sake of taxation and which I am using now to come up with these figures) and closed my Zerodha trading account. I even tried closing the ILFS demat account but it was a cumbersome process and that inactive demat account exists to this day. I gave up the idea of finding quick money and get rich-quick schemes and laboured through my PhD, applied for all reasonable jobs and managed to secure one in 2017.

By 2018, I realised, I had to pay income taxes for the first time in my life. I had had a bad experience with stocks and so stayed off them. I thought bonds were safer than stocks and with inflation adjustment in long term capital gains in bonds held for more than 3 years, I would be better off than fixed deposits. I invested Rs. 10,000 in January 2018 and have had an annual unrealised profit of 8.6%. I was not unhappy.

Then came the pandemic and the unheard of gains in the stock market in 2020. I was unsure whether I would keep getting my salary and so stayed out of it. But the greed got to me. In February 2021, I opened another demat and trading account with a different broker. I thought I would buy individual stocks and hold on to them for more than one year. I invested Rs. 30,000 in exactly 19 shares of 7 companies (all in the Nifty 50) over the course of one year. Then the market started going down. I exited 3 shares (of 2 companies) at 30% annual profit but I am holding onto 16 shares (of 5 companies) with most of them in losses.

I thought I had learnt my lesson. No more Nifty 50 direct stocks for me.

After I did my taxes for Financial Year, 2020-21, I realised that the government had made such rules that if I invested Rs. 50,000 every year in the NPS (in mostly a Nifty 50 index fund), I stood to make a lot of tax gains. Irrespective of my desire to have little to do with the stock market, here I am trying to time the market and invest Rs. 50,000 every year in the NPS.

I read Warren Buffett saying that in order to time the market, one has to be right twice. One has to know when something has reached the lowest and buy at that point of time, and when something has peaked, and sell then. Since, it is impossible to know either, and knowing two impossibles is beyond the realm of the possible, it is futile to time the market. Yet, here I am, having learnt perhaps nothing, being forced by taxation rules to give into this form of gambling.

I can fully empathise with whatever Alexander Hurst has written in the article mentioned at the beginning of this post.

Friday 30 July 2021

Hum kaagaz zaroor dikhayenge

    The National Education Policy of 2020 has led to the establishment of an academic bank of credits where one can store one’s course completion progress verifiables and redeem them for a certificate, a diploma or a degree. Change is the only constant and if matters are unsatisfactory, as much of our education system is, we must strive to change it continually in order to achieve a more just education system. Striving towards the hitherto unknown is not the point of education. We do not wrench our hands in despair because we cannot stop the rotation of the earth. We do not expect our immediate education to achieve such unexpected seemingly impossible results. Education is often seen as a way of knowing what others already know and of catching up with them in terms of status, be it intellectual, social or financial. As an end-product of education, we seek the fairness that society otherwise denies us. It is debatable whether education exacerbates the inequalities that exist in society outside educational institutions or whether education is the panacea to undo the inequalities that beset society.
Striving towards universal literacy as a first step is a fairly modern state of affairs if one considers the history of humankind. Being literate and going through the educational system is something without which centuries of human beings have gone through, leading lives no less or no more happier than ours. What then is the point of education?
Certificates, diplomas and degrees—till recently these were only material objects and now they are soon to be available also in a demat form. What do they indicate? Do they indicate anything more than what a personal interview or a practical demonstration of skills can indicate? I would argue that the answer is no. However, interacting personally with applicants in the job sector or asking them to demonstrate their skills before hiring them is impractical. Hence, these verifiables. They are supposed to authenticate a certain standard and magnitude of satisfactory skills that job-seekers possess and that is required to complete the job that they are offering to do.
Till this new academic bank of credits churns out its first batch of certificates and diplomas, such verifiables indicated that their beholder had completed a course. Now, in addition to that meaning, they will also indicate that their possessor has failed to complete a course that they had signed up for. Instead of being solely a mark of achievement, they will also become a mark of failure. Dropping out of courses is like life. It happens. The academic bank of credits is being implemented in only the top institutions which follow the UGC’s mandate. The rank and file of the Indian higher education system is not required to follow them. Presumably, this is so because the authors of the NEP envisage that those who had managed to secure admission to the top institutions are the crème de la crème of the Indian school education system and hence they are savvy enough to drop out of a course and yet possess a set of skills that entrants to less distinguished institutions lack. The new certificates and diplomas will be a mark of failure but for those who will seemingly wear it as a badge of pride with an illustrious school education pedigree.
How to make the best of what is afoot and how may it be tweaked in order to further the idea of a more just education system? What to do with higher education drop-outs? Vocational education, which we need more of but which is often upheld as a second-grade alternative to the conventional three/ four/ five year undergraduate course, is an alternative but how to bring it into this system? Sajid Javid, the conservative UK politician, had school grades which were deemed low and he was offered a vocational educational track. He went on to change schools so that he could escape the vocational track which the educational system was offering him as the only choice. Changing schools led him onto a career path which made him one of the global heads of Deutsche Bank, a position one may argue more intellectually strenuous to get oneself into than that of a cabinet minister. Generally, opting for vocational education often signals the end of more bookish education.
If one is not aghast at offering vocational education to drop-outs from the top UGC-led institutions, one would see how the academic bank of credits is a good way to prevent drop-outs in higher education and also offer vocational education as a realistic career path.
Studying one year of humanities of a two or more year course, dropping out, and then leaving with a certificate is neither here nor there. Substitute the humanities with any other branch of study and the result is the same. One does not learn either the history of a literature or the fundamentals of a science or of a branch of engineering in one year. If all three/ four/ five year undergraduate courses were so arranged that all non-major subjects are studied only in the first year, then that would increase the chances that at the end of the first year when one becomes eligible to get at least a certificate, one has some basic knowledge of communication and the basics of the humanities, social sciences, sciences, commerce or any other stream. If the student drops out after having cleared the first year exams, handing over a certificate is unlikely to make it a useful verifiable. What is likely to prove useful is that those first year credits will be stored in the academic bank. S/he can utilise the time after dropping out to re-assess oneself and decide if s/he wants to re-enter higher education and if so, whether to pursue the same stream as earlier or a new stream. Year one of humanities basics, year two of science intermediate and year three of engineering advanced is impractical. However, year one of humanities basics, followed by year two of vocational intermediate and advanced is likely to prove more useful. Year one basics, if they do not focus on the core discipline courses but instead is all the minor, extra departmental general skill enhancement courses that are peppered throughout the current three/four/ five year structure, are likely to prove useful. Years two to higher should focus only on the core courses.
The year two exit point which is now going to hand over a diploma may similarly be re-designed. A diploma in the history of literature where one is aware of the history of literature in some eras but not in others or a diploma in computer science where one is aware of the ‘for’ loop and the two-dimensional array but not of the SQL database is unlikely to be useful. Year two must be designed in such a manner that it offers the complete basics of the core courses. Given my profession as a literature teacher, one suggestion would be to impart the skills required to scan lines of poetry, to identify figures of speech and form a general idea of the overview of literature as the subject matter of year two. If a student drops out after year two and decides that literature is not his/ her area of interest, a diploma in literature is unlikely to equip the student with skills which are perhaps necessary to teach literature in a school but it is perhaps enough to enable the student to pick a profession where language skills are required, for instance, as a mass communication professional.  Given the basics of extra departmental courses that s/he undertook in year one, the student would also have formed a general view of the stream that s/he enrolled in. The student should have an option to do year two of a vocational education course even then. The student may return to literature studies and complete year three and if there is a year four, then that too but if not, the student should be able to pursue vocational education and get down to the meat of it without re-doing basic general skills courses which most programmes contain.
The idea of the NEP to prevent drop-outs in higher education is noble. How best to execute it? Handing out verifiables which do not verify knowledge but rather that one passed some exams is unlikely to further the cause of Indian higher education. In the unequal world that we live in, more people are likely to possess a verifiable than earlier. Yet, the value of that verifiable would be paltry and the inequalities that education seeks to address would remain. What students need when they find themselves wandering and lost is to be pushed in a direction where they can find a more dignified way than the one they would have made their way into as a drop-out.

Tuesday 20 July 2021

English departments in India by UGC-Special Assistance Programme status

As found through search engines on the internet

1. Centre of Advanced Study (CAS)
a) Jadavpur University (Phase 3)

2. Department of Special Assistance (DSA) 
a) University of Delhi (Phase 3)
b) Jawaharlal Nehru University (Phase 2)
c) University of Hyderabad (Phase 2)


3. Departmental Research Support (DRS)
a) University of Calcutta (Phase 3)
b) Jamia Millia Islamia (Phase 3)
c) Osmania University (Phase 2)
d) Vidyasagar University (Phase 2)
e) University of Kerala (Phase 2)
f) Tezpur University (Phase 2)
g) Visva Bharati University (Phase 2)
h) Aligarh Muslim University (Phase 2)
i) Panjab University