Why boycotts are complicated

Starting from the Swadeshi boycott of 1905 to when I grew up in Left-ruled West Bengal, boycotting the West is an often-done activity in Kolkata. The Iraq War post 9/11 led to one such phase. The Left Front parties itself left the UPA coalition over the India-USA nuclear deal in 2008.

I heard an anecdote that a professor who was a sycophantic supporter of the Left (who changed his colours post regime-change, as sycophants do), once refused to buy a bottle of packaged water even though his kid was thirsty because the packaged water bottle bore the mark of one of the two American soft drink majors. Like all anecdotes, I am not sure of its veracity but it could be true, and it leads to important questions.

A professor of IIT Kanpur, in 2008, once told me that boycotting is often not a choice. He said that he had a choice of either riding a bicycle through the dusty and dangerous (for bicyclists) roads of Kanpur or driving a car. Even if he really believed that public transport should be much better and bicycles should be prioritised over cars, he drove a car simply because it was the more sensible thing to do.

I recently read this sarcastic article (Jeremy Ettinghausen, ‘This unAmerican life: can you really divest yourself of everything from the US?,’ The Guardian, 19 April 2025) and realised that boycotting is easier said than done. Nationalism is problematic (as Rabindranath depicted in Ghare Baire). India’s 1991 opening up of the economy is criticised by critics of neo-liberalism whereas its proponents argue that closing borders leads to expensive worse-than-cheaper products.

Creating a self-sufficient national production and consumption pattern is no longer possible and hasn’t been for a few centuries.

X is for...

 Adam Green, 'X is for...,' The Public Domain Review, 12 June 2019

Jobs and higher education

            Ever since the 1970s, when the post-WW2 job growth started to slow down, there has always been a debate as to whether university courses should be job-oriented. There are two standard arguments—while, businesses argue that universities should train students so that they are ready to enter the work force, some academics argue that the job of universities is not to do the job that businesses should do, i.e. train students in the specific processes required to do one job but rather train them generally so that they can pursue genuine academic interests and with a bit of tweaking and training, they can be ready to perform a wide variety of jobs.

            At least half a century has gone by since this debate started. It is pertinent to note that those academics who argue for general academic training as opposed to training specifically geared towards jobs are academics, i.e. meaningfully employed. A vast majority of students are either unemployed or under-employed.

            The comedian Stewart Lee once wrote that while he was a student at Oxford studying English, the then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was on a visit to Oxford and on meeting a student, asked her what she was studying. On hearing that she was studying Norse literature, the neo-liberal Prime Minister is supposed to have replied that it was a luxury.

            While studying the arts or social sciences or the natural sciences may not seem like a luxury given the hard work that a serious student can put in, the number of arts or social science or natural science graduates whose jobs have nothing to do what they studied at university is far greater than those who used their university education for academic ends.

            Should universities change tack? Instead of studying literature, should one be studying technical writing or copywriting or editing or public relations or mass communication or journalism? Instead of history, should one be studying market research? Instead of philosophy, should the subject that is taught be public relations or human resource management? Should physics and chemistry be abandoned in favour of engineering or biochemistry? Zoology and physiology for medicine or veterinarian training or training as a lab technician? Anthropology and sociology for market research?

            Academics may be aghast at my suggestions. Yet, generations of students pass through the arts or social sciences or the natural sciences at universities where there is no structured one on one career counselling and no proper campus placement. Each and every student is not accounted for by a career counsellor. Academics are happy to turn a blind eye to this. They have a paid, respectable job with a good work-life balance. They are like the old bishop in Oscar Wilde’s short story ‘The Young King’, where the bishop in a cathedral tells the young king ‘The burden of this world is too great for one man to bear, and the world's sorrow too heavy for one heart to suffer’ and is swiftly reprimanded by the young king who tells the bishop ‘Sayest thou that in this house?’ While stories such as ‘The Young King’ paint an optimistic view of the world and are a dangerous and foolish precedent to follow in this world if it is not seen against pragmatism, newspaper (and social media) opinion columns are as good a place to preach as the pulpit (and stories).

            ‘Gross enrolment ratio’ is a term often found in documents analysing the state of education. An increasing ratio is tomtomed by politicians as an indicator of the good that they have unleashed upon the world. In Shakespeare’s Tempest, Caliban curses Prospero and says ‘red plague rid you/ For learning me your language!’ WB Yeats, in his poem, ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’ remarks that ‘An intellectual hatred is the worst’. Increasing education without adequate employment is undeniably a curse. Doctorate applicants for the post of sweepers are not an unheard-of phenomenon in India. Underemployment is far worse than unemployment as it wastes the time of students who could have utilised those years as an earner. Additionally, it embitters their heart as they feel they have been led down the wrong path and gives rise to a kind of intellectual hatred for jobs which they consider beneath them.

            Something’s got to give. In a world where we have overpopulation and a scarcity of jobs, businesses are not going to spend money training someone for a year when there is someone else with the necessary skills who has applied for the job. In this neo-liberal world post the more socialist tendencies immediately following the two world wars, businesses have not changed their policies in fifty years. The education system has to change. The only issue is who will be courageous enough to root out the entire system rather than making piecemeal changes such as introducing vocational skills and skilling courses in higher education, when all such courses are seen as subsidiary or additional minor courses and both students and teachers see them as distractions from conventional coursework.

            A corollary issue is the poor quality of school education which renders most higher education futile irrespective of what the course is or what is actually being taught. Again, academics may see it as a broad generalisation but in their heart of hearts both school teachers as well as teachers in higher education know when they invigilate exams and hopefully try to prevent mass cheating and give students the bare minimum pass marks in the hope that if the students are failed in the exam in one year, the following year there will be additional exam scripts to correct, they know that much of what they teach is futile.

            In order to improve the job prospects of students, school education must be strengthened. This is an issue on which there is no debate. Everyone agrees that it must be done. Throwing money at the problem won’t make it go away but at least it will improve the situation. In India, money on education as a percentage of GDP has never been thrown enough. Education has never been the priority of any government given that more pressing needs such as food, housing, electricity, roads and water have gotten priority. Graft, the top-most attraction of a career in politics, has robbed the Indian GDP of several percentage points which could otherwise have been diverted towards social good. Economic lackeys of politicians often argue that money is money, be it black or white, and what matters is the circulation of money, conveniently overlooking the avenues in which that money is spent.

            Caught among a planet barely able to sustain the number of people breathing its air; businesses not choosing to hire general graduates without the necessary skills given the large surplus in qualified candidates and always finding someone to do their job; academics who inhabit the proverbial ivory tower; and politicians who seize not only the day but also the throat of the people whom they represent by depriving them of social justice, opportunities and facilities; youngsters thrown into the world and forced into the education system truly have a rough time.

            What about luxuries such as general arts or social science or natural science courses? They may be treated as luxuries, for the highly motivated student from school who can use that education to pursue an academic career, or who knowingly chooses to survive as a poor scholar who will sacrifice a respectable post-university career for the unknown travails of academia. Let luxury courses be confined to a few elite academic institutions. Let those belonging to the socio-economic bottom choose to join such courses fully aware of the career path rather than signing up for them because they are the only ones available by default and available more broadly.

            Who will teach the specific industry-oriented courses? Academics have to keep up with an ever-changing syllabus. They have had the privilege of a good education and have been lucky enough to bag a job. Let them tweak and re-orient themselves to teach more job-oriented courses rather than asking students to re-orient themselves after graduation. As for the luxury courses, those academics who are fortunate enough to teach in elite institutions may continue teaching such courses in the hope of a chimerical future where such teaching leads to productive research.

            Let us end the fraud that is higher education as it exists. It is a mirage which traps most of the travellers along the desert ruins of time. The right to education should co-exist with the right to respectable employment. If politicians in our kleptocracy can’t save enough money to throw at school education, let them have the wisdom to modify higher education to make it productive.

            The poet Dylan Thomas urged his dying father to rage against dying. It is time for academics to rage against the dying of academia and its fading into obsolescence. Dylan Thomas urged his father to burn, rave and curse. I hope I have accomplished all three in this piece.

Pause, think, explore

             The philosopher Martin Heidenberg’s reputation was tarnished for his association with Nazism. However, one of the concepts which he popularised was the concept of being ‘thrown into the world’. Among the many aspects of the world that we are thrown into, one is acquiring an education. Given the vast inequalities in society, education remains a privilege which few enjoy to its fullest. Therein lies a great contradiction in how to approach education. Consider it a fundamental right and distribute it like food grains to the hungry, irrespective of whether the food is palatable or not? Or let young adults choose whether they want to pursue education or take their time to figure out what they want?

            As a teacher in a mid-ranking undergraduate college in Kolkata, I roam past the empty classrooms and corridors. The experience is not unique across the vast education landscape of India. I hear young schoolboys discussing in my swimming pool changing room that ten percent of their class turns up on Saturdays. I hear computer science professors in the top-ranked state university in India discussing the ten percent attendance in the fourth year of undergraduate studies. I read online posts made by students of one of the top-ranked private engineering institutes in India that since students who study there did not make it to the IITs and that they pay hefty course fees, the institute takes a lenient view of student attendance. As an examiner of undergraduate answer scripts, I often serve as the head examiner of exams in which eighty percent of the students fail to pass, which would not have been the case had these students actually turned up and listened to what the teacher was saying. As an invigilator, I am often surprised at the end of my invigilation period when I see that the attendance sheet is only half full.

            What causes this disinterest in studies? When I was an undergraduate student at the top-ranked English department in India, attendance was more than eighty percent in all classes. What ticked for my classmates back then which students fail to find in their classes nowadays?

            Galileo’s idea of inertia may be useful as a metaphor over here. Some of my work colleagues who are new parents talk about the excitement that their children felt on initially going to school but they felt disenchanted soon after. As colleagues who are also parents, they speak about the anguish that they feel over their children’s educational progress, and that the career trajectory that they foresee for themselves in their school years is not how it turns out later in life.

            Being thrown into the world, we are thrown into the educational system and thereafter the inertia of motion continues till we complete our studies and start looking for a job. This inexorable motion of the educational process frowns upon pauses and breaks. University admissions often accept applications from students who have graduated within the two preceding years. Gap years are considered a sign of waywardness. In the employment circuit, we are often asked to explain our career breaks and it is often seen as one more reason to reject an applicant.

            The Finnish public school education system since the 1990s has been well-lauded (and taken out of its context and tried to be copied in India, most egregiously by extremely expensive private schools, thereby rendering it nonsensical). The Irish gap year system since the mid-1990s has been less well-lauded and copied across the world. In Ireland, there is a gap year between what is class ten and class eleven in India. In my opinion, there should at least be two gap years, one between class ten and eleven, and one between class twelve and choosing to apply for higher education.

            If we look at the ‘Education Statistics at a Glance’ report which used to be brought out by the Indian ministry of education (when it was called the HRD ministry), we will realise that the gross enrolment ratio does not decline gradually throughout. There are sharp drop-offs after class ten and after class twelve. The school meal programme ends after class eight. Some students and families decide they have had enough. Given the mismatch in skills required for jobs and the education imparted in schools and universities, unemployment and more importantly under-employment (working in jobs which require a far lower skill-level than the ones which people possess) are rife in India. Official statistics about how happy the population is and how low unemployment is tell a story which the story tellers echo but few read or listen and fewer believe in.

            The new education policy envisages a dropping in and joining in mechanism with an academic bank of credit. Yet, the admission policies of universities often do not even encourage many years of gaps, let alone having got their heads around the new policy.

            What could a student do in a gap year? Is it an incentive to roll back the gross enrolment ratio? Quantity over quality may be the story of modern India’s growth trajectory.  In gap years, the privileged and the self-motivated can learn various skills and explore many aspects without the pressure of being assessed. For the less privileged, it may mean the lack of access to a safe space outside the dangers, if any, of the home. On the other hand, if there is a high rate of absenteeism, despite the school space, it may mean that it is not enough to attract the student. Peer groups often dictate our life choices. Juvenile criminals are often those who spend time outside the school. Hanging out with such groups, instead of being in school, pre-disposes one to pick up their ill habits.

            Despite the 1968 Kothari’s commission’s six percent GDP spending on education never seeing the light of day even after more than half a century passing by, a little more spending would ensure the relevance of the school in the gap year and retaining the school’s association with the students. Teachers usually know a few things beyond their subjects. Learning to ride a bicycle, learning to swim, learning to cook, learning to sew, learning music, theatre, painting, sports, dance, taking one’s own sweet time to actually re-read the textbooks of earlier classes and learn the concepts in greater detail than when one barely managed to pass by finding out the quickest route to ace past the standard questions – all these activities can be performed without hiring extra teachers, if teachers are allowed to come up with their own programmes which they can teach students in the gap year and students have the opportunity to choose to learn all this at either their school or at an accredited non-governmental organisation which may be reimbursed for imparting the skills. It may go a long way in training and providing a sense of direction to young minds. One of the pitfalls of a heavily centralised model is that it leaves little room for individual endeavour. The Irish transition year system is voluntary, though supposedly ninety-nine percent schools offer it and eighty percent students opt for it. With the commodification of education happening worldwide, the Irish system has degenerated and deviated from its original plan. The gap year activities have also been seen by parents and students as activities to bump up the CV rather than learn about oneself and the world.

            In India, a gap year may prove to young minds that the world is not their oyster. Their aspirations and their skills may meet earlier than they do so now. They may also find some breathing space in the world that we are thrown into and get rid of some of the heartbreak they find themselves in later on in life when they rue the educational path that they embarked on many years ago.

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.

               

 

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 – 

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

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.

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.

Studying Natural History at the secondary level

 Mary Colwell, ‘Life Lessons: Why a Natural History GCSE is being introduced,’ BBC Wildlife (22 April, 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.

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

An analysis of the depiction of overcoming school educational challenges among weak students in Nil Battey Sannata and Dhh

 

Introduction

            This brief article attempts to analyse the depiction of overcoming school educational challenges among weak students in two recent Indian movies, namely Nil Battey Sannata (2016, now available on streaming services such as Amazon Prime Video and Jio Cinema) and Dhh (2017, now available on streaming services such as Netflix). Whereas the first is a Hindi film directed by Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari, the second is a Gujarati film directed by Manish Saini. Both these films were the debut feature films of these directors. Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari worked at an Indian branch of the US advertising agency Leo Burnett, and she claims that the story of the film was inspired by the real-life stories she heard while producing a commercial for the popular TV game show Kaun Banega Crorepati. Manish Saini, on the other hand, was a student at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and according to him, the idea for the film was inspired by his experience at a magic show in Ahmedabad during those days when he noticed some young boys reacting very excitedly to the magician. Whereas the Hindi film was successful enough to warrant a Tamil remake in the same year, the Gujarati film won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Gujarati. Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari and her spouse and former colleague, Nitish Tiwari, have gone on to have a subsequent career in Bollywood. Manish Saini, on the other hand, has not made any feature films thereafter.

 

Plot summary

            A brief summary of the plots of the two movies is perhaps necessary for those who have not watched the movies. In Nil Battey Sannata, a young woman, Chanda works as a domestic cleaner cum cook (or as is termed in Hindi, a bai) and also works odd jobs in a factory to supplement her income. She is either widowed or divorced. It is not made evident in the film. Her life revolves around dreams for her daughter. Her daughter Apeksha, however, is more world-weary and refuses to dream for a better life. She is cynical and does not believe in social mobility. She assumes that she too will have to work as a bai when she grows up. The movie begins with her studying in class 10 and struggling with all subjects but especially with mathematics. Her mother is shocked to hear that Apeksha has no big dreams and is satisfied with her lot in life. Chanda desperately wants her daughter to succeed and as one of her employers tells her, it is either kismat (luck) or mehnat (hard work) which allows for social mobility. Since poor people are out of kismat anyway, all that they are left with is hard work. However, her daughter refuses to work hard because she is cynical and demotivated. In order to motivate her, Chanda herself joins Apeksha’s school as a student in class 10. Chanda was a class 10 dropout herself before she began working as a bai. Realising the effort her mother was making to dream of a better future for her, Apeksha manages to study hard, understand mathematics and pass her class 10 examinations. The film ends with her appearing for an IAS interview, the dream job her mother had envisaged.

            Dhh is about three boys of middle-class background who are backbenchers in school and who do not have much interest in studies. The three boys are not homogeneous in character. One of the boys, Kapil, is average in studies, one, Chirag, poor and another, Bajrang, very poor. They hang out together and as a result the boy who is average in studies also starts to perform poorer than usual. Being friends and hanging out together make them a group which is punished together by their teachers. They go to watch a magic show and then realise that the only way they can pass their exams is if something miraculous such as being granted magic powers happen. They write letters to the magician. They request the grandfather of one of the boys, Chirag, to take them to meet the magician but the grandfather refuses using some excuse or the other. One day they receive a letter from the magician along with a small wooden toy. The magician tells them that if they recite their text books to the toy and they take the toy with them to their examination halls, the toy will tell them the answers to the questions. The boys are encouraged by this seeming short-cut and they spend hours reciting their text books to this toy. One of the boys mentions to the other two that this toy will help them in all subjects except mathematics as reciting the text book will not prove a useful method to get the answers to the questions in their mathematics examination. He mentions that it is one subject which the students need to study on their own. Later on, the boys discover that their letters never reached the magician nor did the magician write back to them. Rather, the grandfather in cahoots with the local postman, received their letters and sent them the letter and the toy. The grandfather’s logic was that if the boys believed they could pass, then they would work hard to make their belief come true and all those hours of reciting the text book to the toy helped them memorise the text book and it helped them in their examinations. Whereas Kapil who was never very bad in studies comes second in class, Chirag, who was average in studies, comes third but Bajrang who was very weak in studies manages to pass and is the most overjoyed.

 

Plot analysis

            What both the movies highlight is that with encouragement and motivation even the weakest of students can manage to at least pass examinations. Whereas both movies are well-made and inspirational, they do indirectly highlight certain issues affecting the education system. The most important issue that they indirectly draw attention to is that education is made synonymous with examinations. The goal of the education system is to pass examinations and score well in examinations. The learning outcome is not highlighted. In Nil Battey Sannata, emphasis is laid on memorising mathematical formulae. Chanda, the mother, makes rhymes to memorise mathematical formulae and her daughter also benefits from those rhymes or mnemonics to aid memorisation. Mathematical formulae, in the movie, become something to be memorised and applied. The practical use of such knowledge or the relevance or irrelevance of trigonometry to the lives of citizens in general is not made an issue in the movie. In Dhh, memorisation and quiz-question type assessment systems are highlighted. The viewer does not get to see how memorising their study material helps those students except for passing examinations and education is seen as a case of scoring high marks and outscoring rivals. The competitive nature of the examination system is indirectly highlighted through the movie.

 

Indian education system

            The Indian education system is often criticised for encouraging rote learning. At the same time, this rote learning is said to benefit Indian students in subjects such as mathematics and computer engineering. The most popular computer applications are made in the US and the largest number of foreign workers who work in the computer engineering industry in the US are from India. This perhaps proves that the Indian education system is not totally without merit in advanced modern educational fields such as computer engineering. All said and done, those leaving Indian shores for computer engineering jobs abroad probably reflect the cream of the Indian computer engineering education system or the Indian education system as a whole. Rote learning in fields such as the humanities, where there is perhaps less focus on memorisation and reproduction at the higher education level and where open-book examinations are not much of an issue at that level, leads to a decline in critical thinking where students independently assess matter based on their wide reading. Rote learning encourages learning only what is necessary. Wide reading encourages reading completely irrelevant matter because no field of studies is an island in itself. Ultimately, all forms of human knowledge are inter-connected.

            How to align this idealistic view of education with the ground realities of breaking free past the initial barriers of the examination system? These two movies provide different creative takes on overcoming such challenges. If one thinks of overcoming hand-to-mouth survival situations, an idealistic view of livelihoods and food intake is neither desirable nor practical. However, in a situation where a student is struggling to pass and has lost interest in studying, an idealistic view of education may or may not be practical. What the two movies demonstrate is that what changes the situation is a different sense of motivation. In Nil Battey Sannata, it is empathy for her mother which motivates Apeksha to study. In Dhh, the motivation is provided by the hope that they can overcome the barrier of passing examinations. None of these motivational factors is brought about by a change of pedagogy or a change of the assessment system. Rather, the motivation is external to the education system and is personal in nature. The intrinsic deficits of the education system, if any, which de-motivate the students in the first place, remain. The system does not change. The students have found a way to work their way through the system. The fault is ascribed to the students rather than to the system. If some students can work their way through the system, other students also need to find a way through it. Education is then seen as a set of exercises which needs to be completed, a game which has to be played irrespective of whether one wants to play it or not. In Nil Battey Sannata, there is a reward at the end of all the games—the job of an IAS officer. In Dhh, the immediate game is all that matters as far as the plot of the movie is concerned.

 

Preventing school drop out

            The latest Indian Ministry of Education’s Education Statistics at a Glance is from 2018[1] and the latest data in that report is from the financial year 2015-16 in some cases and 2014-15 in other cases. So, there is an approximate six-year and sometimes seven-year time-lag in the data available in January 2021. The report states that the Gross Enrolment Ratio is 92.81% at the upper primary level in class 6, 80.01% at the secondary level in class 9, and 56.16% at the higher secondary level in class 11.[2] Thus, a large number of students are out of school.

            The reasons for leaving school are not always financial. Students drop out of school for other reasons such as disinterest in studies because of being unable to follow lessons, problems in going to schools physically, repeatedly failing in school examinations, mental health issues brought about by factors other than the ones mentioned above, and social stigma against education and which is especially applicable to girls, among other reasons.[3]

            All these students who drop out of school spend most of their daytime with either family members or with other students who have dropped out of school or are involved in some kind of work.  The dropped-out students who spend most of their daytime with other dropped-out students are in a dangerous area of juvenile existence where there is no proper guidance and there is a large amount of association with those left behind by society. This group is especially vulnerable to the worst forms of occupation, thought-processes and activities that exist in society.[4] Thus, it is important to prevent drop-outs at the school level in order to create a better society.

            The Gross Enrolment Ratio in higher education in India is around 25%. While one may argue that higher education is not necessary for all professions and in the deeply hierarchical society in which we live and given the lack of number of jobs available to most graduates, higher education for 100% of the population is not desirable as it leads to highly-qualified graduates doing jobs which require a much lower level of educational qualification.[5] This is true not only for government jobs in substantive posts in the lowest scales of pay where the pay is much higher for such jobs as compared to other such jobs in the private unorganised sector but also of jobs in general in the private unorganised sector where it is likely that even postgraduates are employed in sectors where basic literacy is all that matters.

            While dropping out of the education system after completing school may be defended given the nature of our society, being in school and completing school education is essential not only because it may improve the nature of jobs which one may get in life but also because the human mind is considered more vulnerable till the age of reaching adulthood than other age groups. Therefore, a school is one of the safest places for children to be in till reaching adulthood. Schools can also be vulnerable to children if they are bullied or abused in school but more often than not schools provide a safer refuge for children as compared to being outside both a school and one’s home. It is therefore important to retain children in school and ensure that they complete at least school education.

            The two movies discussed earlier portray attempts by the children to remain in school. Especially in the case of Nil Battey Sannata where the student is from a much lower economic class than the middle-class students in Dhh, the student’s mother, Chanda, and one of her employers, discuss what will happen if Apeksha fails to clear her class 10 examinations. Both the elderly women realise that the girl might discontinue her studies and not complete her secondary level education if that happens. They foresee a bleak future for the student if she fails at that hurdle. Apeksha is cynical and thinks that the limits of a human’s potential are circumscribed by the guardian’s class, status and profession. It is likely that if Apeksha failed, she too would hang out with other female students who dropped out of school. She would either be married off at an early age or she would have to take up jobs working as a domestic help as her mother. Completing her school education would provide Apeksha with not only better job prospects but would also boost her confidence considerably and make her less cynical about life.

            Nil Battey Sannata also depicts adult education where Chanda, Apeksha’s mother, also gets re-admitted in class 10 and tries to complete her secondary level education and pass her secondary examination. The movie does not provide any hint as to how that may help Chanda except that it works as a motivational factor for Apeksha to complete her education. The movie project’s Chanda’s adult education as a step in Apeksha’s education. Chanda is not educating herself in order to improve her own life but rather to improve the life of her daughter. The movie does not hint as to whether Chanda’s quest for her own education will improve her own job prospects. She was working as a domestic help who cleans and cooks in other people’s households as well as working odd jobs in small factories or working as a dishwasher in roadside eateries. Given the trajectory of her career so far and her age, she may very well continue in such careers. Whether she will be able to put her secondary level education to use to improve her career is not hinted at in the movie.

            In Dhh, the student who is weakest at studies, Bajrang, belongs to a family where his father is illiterate. The movie shows Bajrang fraudulently obtaining his father’s thumb imprint on his report card. If Bajrang fails at his examinations, it may have been that his father would have taken him out of the education system. Given Bajrang’s young age and his precarious academic abilities, had he been taken out of the education system, he may very well have regressed back to a state of illiteracy or extremely poor reading and numerical abilities. As it is, the quality of primary education in India is dire. The non-government organisation Pratham (established in 1996) has been publishing an Annual Status of Education Report since 2005 which carries surveys about the reading and numerical abilities of primary school children. There is an alarmingly significant percentage of students who have progressed to higher classes but who are not able to read or perform numerical tasks which are considered achievable by students in much lower standards. Bajrang’s hypothetical regression to illiteracy may have not only hampered his job prospects but had he hung out with other school drop-outs, it would have made his peer group a group of other children and young adults who have been left behind by society’s progress and have been left to fend for themselves using whatever means possible. Thus, it was imperative for Bajrang to remain in school and complete his school education to improve both his job prospects as well as remain in a more disciplined milieu during his childhood years.

 

The way ahead

            School drop-out rates have to be reduced. Repeatedly failing in school examinations is unlikely to decrease school drop-out rates. Failing once in a class may be acceptable but failing twice in the same class is a dire situation. It points to students having completely lost pace with the teaching methodology. How to prevent that? How to motivate students to keep pace with what is being taught? The two movies discussed here present previously less motivated children re-motivating themselves whereas the teaching methodology and assessment system remains intact. Another solution is perhaps for these two external factors to change to re-motivate students who fail to keep pace with the pedagogical system. The two movies highlight efforts on part of the students rather than efforts on part of the administrators of the educational system or the teachers. Taare Zameen Par (2007) highlighted the effort on the part of teachers for re-motivating students. However, Nil Battey Sannata and Dhh on the one hand, and Taare Zameen Par on the other hand, highlight individual attempts at remedying the situation. There is a lack of systemic changes involved, which perhaps accurately reflects the lack of systemic changes in the overall pedagogical system in India and in most other parts of the world. Syllabi change, technology and infrastructure change but the focus on examinations and rote learning, and the sense of detachment and disaffection that a large section of students feel for the matter being taught to them keeps the system more or less the same in its pedagogical technique. Experimental schools exist in some countries where hands-on learning and a more engaged pedagogical approach is available to students but those schools and students are far removed from the disadvantaged systems of schools and students depicted in Nil Battey Sannata and Dhh.

            The National Education Commission of India in the mid-1960s headed by Daulat Singh Kothari, the then chairperson of the University Grants Commission, had recommended that India spend 6% of its GDP on education. Fifty-five years have gone by but India has not managed to spend more than 4.5% of its GDP on education ever. Education holds less priority for successive governments of India. A proportionate 30% increase in the education budget is likely to improve the education scenario for India. However, money is not the only factor thwarting the Indian education system.

            The Indian education system does not encourage shared problem solving within the classroom. Learning from peers is not actively encouraged. In Nil Battey Sannata, Chanda and later Apeksha learn mathematics less from the school teacher and more from one of the other students in class 10 who works as a car-mechanic after school-hours. However, both Chanda and Apeksha have to learn from this boy outside the classroom. Taking help from him within the classroom while doing assignments would be considered cheating. Peer learning is actively discouraged within the classroom in Indian education. Group learning is unknown. Group discussion is a fancy keyword for rote assessment where one-upmanship is appreciated rather than the idea of learning together. In Dhh, peer learning also takes place not only outside the classroom but also outside the school premises. The school premises functions more as an examination centre. The actual learning takes place in the students’ individual houses and sometimes the students practise learning together on the rooftop of one of the students’ houses. The inhospitality of the Indian education system to peer learning is indicated in both the movies.

            Neither of these two movies gets a scope to highlight how the matter the students learn in school is utilised by the students. Relating the content to their lives is one of the ways in which interest in education is sustained and students motivate themselves. The movies shed no light on this as the students motivate themselves based on their idea of passing examinations rather than learning the matter. Since each student relates to some or other portion of the matter in his or her own way, the education system requires active participation from students so that other students, the teachers and most importantly a student realises how the matter is important to the him or her. In order to facilitate this, there is need for active discussion among the class. Class sizes need to be small and the teacher-student ratio needs to be small to make this work in practice. Money goes a long way in solving this problem.             Instead of frequent formal assessment and other rote work, more time should be left for the actual learning. Frequent formal assessment, rather than measuring whether students are keeping pace with the pedagogical system, ensures that the focus of the system is on these assessments rather than focussing on the matter and on other forms of learning together and mental development.

            These are some of the ways in which one may analyse the depiction of overcoming school educational challenges among weak students in these two movies.

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[1] Educational Statistics at a Glance (2018), https://www.education.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/statistics-new/ESAG-2018.pdf. Accessed 9 January 2021.

[2] Ibid., pp. 49-52.

[3] Some surveys have been conducted in this area. See Arun N.R. Kishore and K.S. Shaji, ‘School Dropouts: Examining the Space of Reasons,’ Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine 34(4) (2012), pp. 318-323, https://dx.doi.org/10.4103%2F0253-7176.108201 and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3662127. Accessed 9 January 2021.

[4] ‘Cops “study” dropouts to curb crime,’ The Times of India, New Delhi edition, 16 November 2016, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/Cops-study-dropouts-to-curb-crime/articleshow/55447728.cms. Accessed 9 January 2021.

[5] For example, see ‘Over 93,000 candidates, including 3,700 PhD holders apply for peon job in UP,’ Economic Times, 30 August 2018, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/over-93000-candidates-including-3700-phd-holders-apply-for-peon-job-in-up/articleshow/65604396.cms. Accessed 9 January 2021.