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.

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

The legacy of David Attenborough

             His voice has enthralled millions across the world. His now-abandoned Instagram account was the fastest to be followed by a million people. He is often considered to have seen the most number of places in the world, starting his overseas sojourns soon after the Second World War when air travel started to become popular and seeing them before some of them disappeared from the face of the earth. The images that he brought alive on screen from the greenest jungles to the whitest polar regions to the bluest oceans with their giant whales and multicoloured marine life have made a large section of the TV watching population more aware of the earth and the various non-human species which inhabit it. He has been lucky enough to have enjoyed good health and be involved with a job he likes well into his late 90s. His work ethic is comparable to his Queen Elizabeth II, born seventeen days before him. The world, and its various species, has been lucky to have him around.
            His legacy may seem to mirror the smoothness of the vivid images which he presented on screen. Yet, there have been those who have had issue with his legacy. By presenting nature as undisturbed, was the urgency of climate change and the endangered nature of the landscapes and life he was presenting toned down? By travelling across the world and presenting uncommon images, was he enticing the rich to follow suit and did he threaten the sustainability of the environments he presented by attracting tourists?
            Son of an academic father and a mother who was interested in the arts, David Attenborough was born into a cultured household. By the time, he took up a job at the BBC, his elder brother Richard had already become a fairly well-known actor on both the stage as well as the screen. His early life and his initiation into the appreciation of the natural world have been recounted by him in various media to the point where his regular followers know there is little new to learn in another iteration of it. His discovery of ammonite fossils in commercial mines near his childhood home in Leicester, his father urging him to find out about them from the natural history museum and guiding him to seek knowledge from experts and find out on one’s own instead of being spoon-fed with answers on the tap, his reading of the nineteenth-century explorer and naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace and his acquired fascination for birds of paradise, studying zoology and geology at Cambridge and later studying social anthropology — these have been well-documented in his various memoirs.
            Much of his early work with the BBC does not survive owing to the limitations of technology and the cost of film reel during the 1950s. His career in the nascent medium of the television and with movie cameras placed him at the vanguard of technological advancements in the medium. Till date, pioneering visual reproduction techniques have been often used in natural history movie productions much before they have made their way to fiction movie productions.
            When we think of natural history movie productions, we think of the BBC’s natural history unit in Bristol. David Attenborough never worked for that unit. He was born in the greater London area and other than the period when his father was working at Leicester, he has maintained residence in the greater London area. Desmond Hawkins, a young producer in the BBC’s west region, started producing a series of programmes on natural history for the radio. He wanted to move to the television department and suggested starting a natural history unit in Bristol. Attenborough was invited to join the department but declined preferring to stay in London with the family he had just started. Thus began the sequence of long-distance collaboration of the BBC’s natural history unit and which continues to this day with its team of producers and film makers working across the globe but knowing that they will find a haven for their footage at Bristol. Even though the BBC has a licence fee to achieve some kind of balance in financial sheets, the pressures that a public service broadcaster faces has forced many of these filmmakers to find other outlets for their productions. American streaming services such as Netflix and Apple TV+ have taken on some such content to satiate the craving for natural history that exists across the globe but the sustained support and nurturing that the BBC provides is perhaps unique in the history of moving pictures.
            Natural history film making and watching may seem repetitive. Yet, with advancements in technology, the art of making and the details which one can watch keep changing all the time. Has the focus of Attenborough’s film making also changed with time? Surely it has. In the 1950s, one saw much more of him on the screen. He was there in the forest, on top of the tree, hidden in the bushes, with animals crawling over him. The 1950s were when the UK was still experiencing a loss of its colonies. But colonial trajectories and colonial projects and mindsets were very much enmeshed in the population of the UK. The journeys that Attenborough made in the 1950s were often to former colonies—to British occupied Guyana rather than French, Spanish, Dutch or Portuguese colonised Guiana, to Papua New Guinea rather than Indonesian Papua. His 1950s Zoo Quest series was, as the title, implied, about animals and zoos. Zoos or animals in captivity were far removed from animals in their natural habitat as portrayed in natural history film making. The Zoo Quest series was about collecting animals. One may even say stealing animals. This brings to attention the idea of using animals as museum collectibles, as an object to be stared at. Since the 1970s when climate change and environmentalism started to become significant issues globally, the idea of the zoo has changed drastically in some places whereas in some settings, it has remained similar to the idea of the menagerie of ancient times. Reading his 2002 Life on Air: Memoirs of a Broadcaster (available both as a book to be read as well as in audiobook format read by Attenborough) may make the modern reader appalled and cringe at such blatant continuation of the colonial project. However, one must realise that to see is to be aware. When one thinks of scientific experimentation on animals which disappeared from public spectacle after the 1670s and was hidden behind the laboratory door or the rise of industrial meat farming and abattoirs in the nineteenth century which concealed some animals from public view, one realises that it has coincided with the change in human relationship to other species.
            David Attenborough’s most important legacy is to make people aware of the natural world. Without awareness of the variety of life on earth, we would have been less compelled to look at the larger picture of the perils of climate change. It is easy to think of one’s immediate surroundings as the be-all and end-all such as when the 45^th POTUS scorned at the idea of global warming because of a particularly frosty American east coast winter even though that year was the hottest year on earth recorded till then. To overcome such scepticism, often propounded by political leaders because of a combination of ignorance and vested interests and who have mass followings, the images are necessary to bring greater awareness. Images not only of sooty skies above industrial landscapes but also of the beauty of our planet, of the variegated clownfish, the almost-extinct brightly coloured corals, of the savannas and of the birds of paradise in the rainforests, and the Antarctic sea lions. In order to save the planet, we need to be empathetic to it and its beauty.
            Attenborough’s shift to raising environmental awareness, combining academia and accessibility, happened sometime in the late 1990s. Before that, in the 1970s, shortly after completing a postgraduate course in social anthropology, Attenborough also presented programmes about people and cultures, rather than on just animals. His A Blank on the Map (1971) about people in New Guinea was one such programme. A more accessible production of this kind is the 10-minute BBC radio episode titled ‘Adam’s Face’, Life Stories (2009). His first programme to deal exclusively with the human effect on the natural world was State of the Planet in the year 2000. It may be that the programme should have been made twenty years earlier. Late to bring this to the scene he may have been, but he has been at it ever since. Natural history film making is now much more collaborative and is a much larger team effort than it was in the 1960s when it was just Attenborough and a few of his colleagues. Attenborough is often now the writer of his shows and sometimes he contributes with only his comforting voice as the narrator. His on-screen appearance is limited to a sequence or two and is a minuscule portion of the total recording that took place. Yet he is there to bring home the message. The 2020 David Attenborough: A Life on our Planet had him shooting in the abandoned ruins of Chernobyl.
            He shot a few programmes in India in 1960. Since then, he has returned to India to shoot various programmes. He has been awarded with honours in India as well. Biju Patnaik, in the half century after independence, had been associated with the annual Kalinga Prize for the Popularisation of Science. After awards to Julian Huxley in 1953 and Konrad Lorenz in 1969, David Attenborough was awarded this UNESCO prize in 1981. More recently, shortly after the Covid-19 pandemic began and most of the world went into lockdown, the Indira Gandhi prize, which was set up shortly after the death of Indira Gandhi, was awarded to Attenborough. The trustees perhaps had the occasion to watch some of his productions in the lockdown. The Year Earth Changed (2021), about the restorative effects of the lockdown, had him just as the narrator. He may have been late in alerting his viewers to the biggest threat to this planet but perhaps his viewers should not be late in acknowledging the joy of awareness that is brought into the lives of millions of TV viewers by David Attenborough.

Russian version of जुते दे दो पैसे ले लो

From Mikhail Sholokhov, Quiet Flows the Don, tr. Robert Daglish (Moscow: Raduga, 1988), vol. 1, p. 100

 

Koloda Dua—original Cossack folk song which inspired Pete Seeger’s ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’

From Mikhail Sholokhov, Quiet Flows the Don, tr. Robert Daglish (Moscow: Raduga, 1988), vol. 1, p. 27

‘Money, money, money, it’s a rich man’s world’

Annie Lowrey, ‘Could index funds be “worse than Marxism”?’ The Atlantic, April 5, 2021

Technotopia and planning way ahead of the future

Australian Broadcasting Corporation Future Tense podcast, Artificial Cities, January 2021