1
Mohandas Pai
Mohandas Pai, Ex-Financial CEO of Infosys, and Director Founder of Manipal Education,
gave a talk that was moving, thought provoking and also a little worrisome in the
implications of its futuristic vision. It is true that in India, 52% of the population depend on
16% of the GDP and 48% on the remaining 84%, and that the gap between the have’s and the
have not’s is shameful, but one may ask whether a world largely driven by artificial
intelligence, will be the correct antidote to that? After his talk, one was left wondering if
within futuristic spaces, robots driven by artificial intelligence were indeed going to produce
Sistine Chapels or Santhal Couples in the style of Michael Angelo and Abanindranath
Tagore! Human genius, originality, creativity and the visceral aspects of experience that
allowed the creativity to flow and aided the refashioning of Life through Art would be a
costly casualty if Artificial Intelligence completely took over our lives! However, he did
mention towards the end during a question answer session, that creativity could not really be
automated!
Mohandas Pai began by paying an accolade to Bengal and to what was previously known as
Hindu College (1817) and then Presidency College (1855). He said that ‘for many of us
outside Bengal, Presidency College stands for the romance of education’, ‘a tradition of great
ideas’ and that it had indeed ‘created modern India’. He correctly emphasized that a nation’s
greatness depends on the greatness of its universities because ideas are what make a nation
great. He posited that America’s greatness is based on her outstanding universities. Thus
university education is very important, and in a quickly changing world, especially made so
by the digital revolution, our education policies needed to take cognizance of that and
modulate themselves according to it.
He said that the nation must invest in its young people and the best form of this investment
was a high quality education which had adapted itself to a digitally revolutionized world. He
said, ‘education and innovation will change the world’ as it has indeed has ‘changed the
world’. He also said that India was growing into a ‘knowledge economy’. Another thread in
his praise of Bengal was that of all the 1.5 million software engineers in Karnataka, 150,000
were Bengali! He also expressed concern over the ‘brain drain’ in Bengal and said that few
should stay back to build West Bengal.
It was a moving and sincere talk and one could see that Pai was intensely committed to the
idea of helping young people move forward with effective education that made use of the
advantages generated by the digital education. It was also obvious that he thought of the
majority and education schemes that would benefit those students who did not hail from
privileged backgrounds. His commitment to student empowerment or child empowerment
within global contexts where automation was slowly swallowing up jobs was very apparent.
2
He eloquently said, ‘no child should go without either food or education’. He mentioned the Akshay Patra, the Midday Meal program started by him and with centers all over India, where 16 lakh children were getting midday meals every day now. He firmly declared that by 2030, fifty lakh children would be fed. As Wikipedia informs us Pai has himself donated generously to this foundation. Pai certainly belongs in the league of persons who like Mahasweta Devi, Mohammed Yunus and many have demonstrated a keen interest in the suffering of other people and has taken steps towards amelioration of their lot and consequently have helped to move the nation forward. Mr Pai is certainly an inspired speaker.
Pai is very good with figures and statistics. His talk was full of them. He mentioned India’s GDP and said that 52% of India was dependent on 16% of it, and the rest of the 48% on the remaining 84%. He mentioned that it was fruitless to speak of India like it was one nation only. In reality there was no ‘one India’ but 29 Indias. He said that Bihar had 9% urbanization whereas Tamil Nadu had almost 40%. Education in Bengal was at 19%, and in Tamil Nadu it is 40%. All persons between 18-23, went to college. He stated that in the South generally, higher education was generally at about 30%.
Speaking of human civilization as a whole, Pai spoke of the evolution of education in terms of three historic modules. He entitled them: Education 1.2, Education 2.2 and Education 3.2, which is ideal module suited to contemporary times the final one we are in now or should aim towards being. He referred to Education 1.2 as being the Gurukul system of the ancient world, to which culture the Academies of the West belonged to. These were communities where there were few students and one teacher who imparted education usually through oral transmission, and it was extremely elitist in its focus as well. Education was the prerogative of only a few. There were debates and discussions and schedules were relaxed. Students were not trained to particularly ‘do’ anything with this education.
The next stage of education which was Education 2.2, was after the industrial revolution. The The industrial revolution changed many things, altering the feudal organization of society, creating a middle class, especially a class of merchants with new demands for education and printed matter. Needless to say some of these merchants were quite wealthy.
Within these new demands enrolment of the many became an important agenda. It resembled the Assembly Line principle, whereby each student was pretty much like the other one and one was usually trained to ‘do’ something. One teacher taught a class. The previous principle of a teacher teaching a class remained except that now one teacher taught many. One had to write an examination and go out into the world and work. There wasn’t much guarantee of quality. Yet society still went forward. Some intellectuals remained whose responsibility it was to think for the community, or the society or the country or Europe, which was for many centuries the preeminent reference for most things. Regarding the fact that a lot of this education did not have high quality, he quoted Amartya Sen as saying that it was still that a student went through four years of a poor education, than not to have any education at all.
By the time we come to Education 3.2, we are dealing with a world that has gone through the internet revolution. All the information one needs is just the click of a mouse away. However,
3
the question of resources remains. How easily will a child in a rural area of india have access to a computer? That then remains one of the implications of Pai’s talk. India will have to provide online access to children of rural areas, so that children may self-teach themselves. Regarding the Humanities he said, one finds the lectures of the best teachers online. So if we are going to make education non elitist and accessible to all then the computer is the only answer.
India was producing so many twenty five million children every year. 5 million died. Jobs for 15 million needed to be created, whereas in reality only 5 million jobs were created. So this was giving rise to many kinds of local unrest, like the Gujarat uprising etc. so the future was going to be rife with social tensions. States were cutting back on general employment by introducing state quotas. So within this very grim scenario, where were our children going to go? So we needed to give them this very cutting edge education. We had to give them the best that could be given from the digital revolution. And that was to more or less do away with the system of formal education that had prevailed so far. Teachers were to become mentors. They should be there to provide guidelines, not teach in the old fashioned way. Education should now become ‘virtual’. Children constituted the future and therefore in context of a world where more and more babies were being born every year, countries were not being able to create enough jobs, our children should be given a cutting edge education which would allow them to survive in the kind of world that 2030 was going to see. The U.N.O. has identified 2030 as the watershed area for the achieving certain goals of what it calls ‘sustainable development’ related to adequate education and health care for all the peoples of the world. Perhaps, this is why Mr. Pai used 2030 as a valuable parameter of future reference.
Mohandas Pai urges attention to the all the latest scientific technology and innovations that were driving the global market. Cellular batteries could now drive cars. One could remote control one’s cars. The phenomenal development of Artificial Intelligence was enabling robots to do a great deal of the work that was previously done by human beings. Hence job opportunities were dramatically shrinking. Adidas, had withdrawn its factories from China and had moved them to Germany where robots manufactured shoes. America too, he said was gradually winding up its factories in China, and bringing them back to America. He mentioned alternative energy, solar energy that was increasingly becoming extremely important with many investments being made on solar energy. He said that this was causing huge losses to the petrol driven automobile industry, within which industry one of six persons had a job. Cellular batteries could now drive cars through remote control. The development of scientific technology and the development of alternate sources of fuel had hit the automobile industry very hard and the job market had truly shrunk. Therefore where were our children going to find jobs?
I liked Pai’s talk for the painstaking and through attention to the realities of the current global situation; his cognizance and attention paid to the latest developments in Science and Technology that had truly affected the flow of global capital, employment opportunities and the future of all young people in the world. I liked Pai’s talk for his genuine investment in the future of those Indian children who were not fortunate enough to be born in families where wealth would see them through. What indeed was the future of such students and what would be the right education for them? The country and all of us who are educators need to think on these issues.
Mr Pai’s talk however seemed to bypass the fact that education is often a visceral and sensuous experience. In Orality and Literacy Walter J Ong argues or posits that sound predates vision and is therefore more primal than vision. Hence the significance of words. Therefore whether the words of the mother or those of the teacher, the sound of the words have an impact on the child that help to form the child’s sensibility for better or for worse. It is true that whether in India or elsewhere, the best education has always tended to be elitist even if we think in terms of class privileges and the facilitation caused by money. Therefore Mr Pai is correct in pointing out that those without these privileges may access the highest quality teaching through the internet and through search engines like Google.
His attention or his focus is Higher Education as it should be within the contexts of a Global Education Summit for the 200 Year Presidency Bicentennial, but he seems to not pay enough attention to the extremely significant stage of primary education which cannot be implemented without an actual teacher, an actual person who speaks and demonstrates on a black board.
During the question answer session students from the Life Sciences and Economics questioned him on whether the way out within contexts of India was for each state to go in for greater and greater state reservation. His answer was somewhat flip. He said to the student, ‘My dear chap you should be on the side of those who do not require reservation of any sort!’.
A student from Life Sciences narrated an incident of where the student went armed with information about his disease to the doctor but the doctor had wryly told him that the internet could not give him an MBBS! Pai agreed but also pointed out oncologists abroad often fed their diagnosis of a particular case to Watson, a pattern recognition device who would give him/her its diagnosis within 22 seconds. Pai also said that surgeons needed to learn robotic surgery, where robots could help them make incisions on the bodies of patients and the entire process of the operation be far less problematic than it was now. Pai did not however mention anything about cost. Operations involving robots would certainly cost astronomical amounts. His talk and even his question/answer session had certain glaring lacunae in insufficient attention paid to important factors within situations outlined by him.
Another student from Economics said that he had access to all the information that the internet could provide but he still preferred to come to Presidency because of the quality education he would get here. So what would Mr Pai have to say to that? Mr Pai agreed that place does make a difference, but henceforth class room spaces should be mentor mentee interactive areas where attention was paid to ‘problem solving’ not monologic teaching but ‘dialogue’.
A professor from the department of Performing Arts asked him whether it was not true that there was a ‘drama and a charge’ in the ‘interpersonal’ space of teacher student relationships,magical symbiosis obtained through contact with a gifted teacher, and Pai seemed to agree to that too. He said that he was very worried that the ‘interpersonal’ seemed to gradually become a casualty as young people, engineers, he mentioned, could easily part from their spouses because they felt they had enough ‘reason’ to. A student I spoke to later said to me, ‘one must re-think why we moved away from traditional modes in the first place and while the argument endorsing greater access is logically sound, one must not ignore the essence of interpersonal training’.
Pai did point out in the end that he spoke mainly from the point of technology and its impact on society. He said that jobs that were routine, and that included jobs in engineering, could be automated. Hence such occupations were under threat. However, we still needed poets, dreamers and philosophers. Their task, their ‘creativity’ could never come under the sway of a machine.
Pai concluded by saying that ‘curiosity’, ‘creativity’ and ‘innovation’ must come together for the greater good of the world.
Mohandas Pai
Mohandas Pai, Ex-Financial CEO of Infosys, and Director Founder of Manipal Education,
gave a talk that was moving, thought provoking and also a little worrisome in the
implications of its futuristic vision. It is true that in India, 52% of the population depend on
16% of the GDP and 48% on the remaining 84%, and that the gap between the have’s and the
have not’s is shameful, but one may ask whether a world largely driven by artificial
intelligence, will be the correct antidote to that? After his talk, one was left wondering if
within futuristic spaces, robots driven by artificial intelligence were indeed going to produce
Sistine Chapels or Santhal Couples in the style of Michael Angelo and Abanindranath
Tagore! Human genius, originality, creativity and the visceral aspects of experience that
allowed the creativity to flow and aided the refashioning of Life through Art would be a
costly casualty if Artificial Intelligence completely took over our lives! However, he did
mention towards the end during a question answer session, that creativity could not really be
automated!
Mohandas Pai began by paying an accolade to Bengal and to what was previously known as
Hindu College (1817) and then Presidency College (1855). He said that ‘for many of us
outside Bengal, Presidency College stands for the romance of education’, ‘a tradition of great
ideas’ and that it had indeed ‘created modern India’. He correctly emphasized that a nation’s
greatness depends on the greatness of its universities because ideas are what make a nation
great. He posited that America’s greatness is based on her outstanding universities. Thus
university education is very important, and in a quickly changing world, especially made so
by the digital revolution, our education policies needed to take cognizance of that and
modulate themselves according to it.
He said that the nation must invest in its young people and the best form of this investment
was a high quality education which had adapted itself to a digitally revolutionized world. He
said, ‘education and innovation will change the world’ as it has indeed has ‘changed the
world’. He also said that India was growing into a ‘knowledge economy’. Another thread in
his praise of Bengal was that of all the 1.5 million software engineers in Karnataka, 150,000
were Bengali! He also expressed concern over the ‘brain drain’ in Bengal and said that few
should stay back to build West Bengal.
It was a moving and sincere talk and one could see that Pai was intensely committed to the
idea of helping young people move forward with effective education that made use of the
advantages generated by the digital education. It was also obvious that he thought of the
majority and education schemes that would benefit those students who did not hail from
privileged backgrounds. His commitment to student empowerment or child empowerment
within global contexts where automation was slowly swallowing up jobs was very apparent.
2
He eloquently said, ‘no child should go without either food or education’. He mentioned the Akshay Patra, the Midday Meal program started by him and with centers all over India, where 16 lakh children were getting midday meals every day now. He firmly declared that by 2030, fifty lakh children would be fed. As Wikipedia informs us Pai has himself donated generously to this foundation. Pai certainly belongs in the league of persons who like Mahasweta Devi, Mohammed Yunus and many have demonstrated a keen interest in the suffering of other people and has taken steps towards amelioration of their lot and consequently have helped to move the nation forward. Mr Pai is certainly an inspired speaker.
Pai is very good with figures and statistics. His talk was full of them. He mentioned India’s GDP and said that 52% of India was dependent on 16% of it, and the rest of the 48% on the remaining 84%. He mentioned that it was fruitless to speak of India like it was one nation only. In reality there was no ‘one India’ but 29 Indias. He said that Bihar had 9% urbanization whereas Tamil Nadu had almost 40%. Education in Bengal was at 19%, and in Tamil Nadu it is 40%. All persons between 18-23, went to college. He stated that in the South generally, higher education was generally at about 30%.
Speaking of human civilization as a whole, Pai spoke of the evolution of education in terms of three historic modules. He entitled them: Education 1.2, Education 2.2 and Education 3.2, which is ideal module suited to contemporary times the final one we are in now or should aim towards being. He referred to Education 1.2 as being the Gurukul system of the ancient world, to which culture the Academies of the West belonged to. These were communities where there were few students and one teacher who imparted education usually through oral transmission, and it was extremely elitist in its focus as well. Education was the prerogative of only a few. There were debates and discussions and schedules were relaxed. Students were not trained to particularly ‘do’ anything with this education.
The next stage of education which was Education 2.2, was after the industrial revolution. The The industrial revolution changed many things, altering the feudal organization of society, creating a middle class, especially a class of merchants with new demands for education and printed matter. Needless to say some of these merchants were quite wealthy.
Within these new demands enrolment of the many became an important agenda. It resembled the Assembly Line principle, whereby each student was pretty much like the other one and one was usually trained to ‘do’ something. One teacher taught a class. The previous principle of a teacher teaching a class remained except that now one teacher taught many. One had to write an examination and go out into the world and work. There wasn’t much guarantee of quality. Yet society still went forward. Some intellectuals remained whose responsibility it was to think for the community, or the society or the country or Europe, which was for many centuries the preeminent reference for most things. Regarding the fact that a lot of this education did not have high quality, he quoted Amartya Sen as saying that it was still that a student went through four years of a poor education, than not to have any education at all.
By the time we come to Education 3.2, we are dealing with a world that has gone through the internet revolution. All the information one needs is just the click of a mouse away. However,
3
the question of resources remains. How easily will a child in a rural area of india have access to a computer? That then remains one of the implications of Pai’s talk. India will have to provide online access to children of rural areas, so that children may self-teach themselves. Regarding the Humanities he said, one finds the lectures of the best teachers online. So if we are going to make education non elitist and accessible to all then the computer is the only answer.
India was producing so many twenty five million children every year. 5 million died. Jobs for 15 million needed to be created, whereas in reality only 5 million jobs were created. So this was giving rise to many kinds of local unrest, like the Gujarat uprising etc. so the future was going to be rife with social tensions. States were cutting back on general employment by introducing state quotas. So within this very grim scenario, where were our children going to go? So we needed to give them this very cutting edge education. We had to give them the best that could be given from the digital revolution. And that was to more or less do away with the system of formal education that had prevailed so far. Teachers were to become mentors. They should be there to provide guidelines, not teach in the old fashioned way. Education should now become ‘virtual’. Children constituted the future and therefore in context of a world where more and more babies were being born every year, countries were not being able to create enough jobs, our children should be given a cutting edge education which would allow them to survive in the kind of world that 2030 was going to see. The U.N.O. has identified 2030 as the watershed area for the achieving certain goals of what it calls ‘sustainable development’ related to adequate education and health care for all the peoples of the world. Perhaps, this is why Mr. Pai used 2030 as a valuable parameter of future reference.
Mohandas Pai urges attention to the all the latest scientific technology and innovations that were driving the global market. Cellular batteries could now drive cars. One could remote control one’s cars. The phenomenal development of Artificial Intelligence was enabling robots to do a great deal of the work that was previously done by human beings. Hence job opportunities were dramatically shrinking. Adidas, had withdrawn its factories from China and had moved them to Germany where robots manufactured shoes. America too, he said was gradually winding up its factories in China, and bringing them back to America. He mentioned alternative energy, solar energy that was increasingly becoming extremely important with many investments being made on solar energy. He said that this was causing huge losses to the petrol driven automobile industry, within which industry one of six persons had a job. Cellular batteries could now drive cars through remote control. The development of scientific technology and the development of alternate sources of fuel had hit the automobile industry very hard and the job market had truly shrunk. Therefore where were our children going to find jobs?
I liked Pai’s talk for the painstaking and through attention to the realities of the current global situation; his cognizance and attention paid to the latest developments in Science and Technology that had truly affected the flow of global capital, employment opportunities and the future of all young people in the world. I liked Pai’s talk for his genuine investment in the future of those Indian children who were not fortunate enough to be born in families where wealth would see them through. What indeed was the future of such students and what would be the right education for them? The country and all of us who are educators need to think on these issues.
Mr Pai’s talk however seemed to bypass the fact that education is often a visceral and sensuous experience. In Orality and Literacy Walter J Ong argues or posits that sound predates vision and is therefore more primal than vision. Hence the significance of words. Therefore whether the words of the mother or those of the teacher, the sound of the words have an impact on the child that help to form the child’s sensibility for better or for worse. It is true that whether in India or elsewhere, the best education has always tended to be elitist even if we think in terms of class privileges and the facilitation caused by money. Therefore Mr Pai is correct in pointing out that those without these privileges may access the highest quality teaching through the internet and through search engines like Google.
His attention or his focus is Higher Education as it should be within the contexts of a Global Education Summit for the 200 Year Presidency Bicentennial, but he seems to not pay enough attention to the extremely significant stage of primary education which cannot be implemented without an actual teacher, an actual person who speaks and demonstrates on a black board.
During the question answer session students from the Life Sciences and Economics questioned him on whether the way out within contexts of India was for each state to go in for greater and greater state reservation. His answer was somewhat flip. He said to the student, ‘My dear chap you should be on the side of those who do not require reservation of any sort!’.
A student from Life Sciences narrated an incident of where the student went armed with information about his disease to the doctor but the doctor had wryly told him that the internet could not give him an MBBS! Pai agreed but also pointed out oncologists abroad often fed their diagnosis of a particular case to Watson, a pattern recognition device who would give him/her its diagnosis within 22 seconds. Pai also said that surgeons needed to learn robotic surgery, where robots could help them make incisions on the bodies of patients and the entire process of the operation be far less problematic than it was now. Pai did not however mention anything about cost. Operations involving robots would certainly cost astronomical amounts. His talk and even his question/answer session had certain glaring lacunae in insufficient attention paid to important factors within situations outlined by him.
Another student from Economics said that he had access to all the information that the internet could provide but he still preferred to come to Presidency because of the quality education he would get here. So what would Mr Pai have to say to that? Mr Pai agreed that place does make a difference, but henceforth class room spaces should be mentor mentee interactive areas where attention was paid to ‘problem solving’ not monologic teaching but ‘dialogue’.
A professor from the department of Performing Arts asked him whether it was not true that there was a ‘drama and a charge’ in the ‘interpersonal’ space of teacher student relationships,magical symbiosis obtained through contact with a gifted teacher, and Pai seemed to agree to that too. He said that he was very worried that the ‘interpersonal’ seemed to gradually become a casualty as young people, engineers, he mentioned, could easily part from their spouses because they felt they had enough ‘reason’ to. A student I spoke to later said to me, ‘one must re-think why we moved away from traditional modes in the first place and while the argument endorsing greater access is logically sound, one must not ignore the essence of interpersonal training’.
Pai did point out in the end that he spoke mainly from the point of technology and its impact on society. He said that jobs that were routine, and that included jobs in engineering, could be automated. Hence such occupations were under threat. However, we still needed poets, dreamers and philosophers. Their task, their ‘creativity’ could never come under the sway of a machine.
Pai concluded by saying that ‘curiosity’, ‘creativity’ and ‘innovation’ must come together for the greater good of the world.
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