Professor Percival, Mathematics Professor, Presidency College

This is by no means an exhaustive translation of all there is on Percival. I just chose this bit for its anecdotal richness

One hardly saw Professor Percival ever laugh in class. Sometimes, while teaching Shakespearean Comedy, a glimmer of a smile would appear. His attentive students would  right away mark that passage as  one that had elicited a hint of a smile from the Professor! 

Professor Percival once went on a two week holiday to Darjeeling. He took a supply of books with him. However, he had to come back only after spending twelve days, there. The reason for the unscheduled return was that he ran out of books. He had not calculated right how many books he might be able to read when he didn’t have his normal teaching responsibilities!

Presidency College and Rabindranath: Rabindra Parishad, Bankim Sharat Committee (62)

Even if it was for a day, Rabindranath was a student of this college. Although it hasn’t been possible to recover the exact date, it was probably a day in either 1877 or 1878. At the Calcutta University Convocation, held on the grounds of Presidency College in February 1937, the poet himself referred to the occasion:

In the early years of my life, my brief apprentice in the august halls of Learning, were spent in its bottom most rungs.  Later on in my youth, at the behest of my elders, I ventured into the First Class of Presidency College. This one day did not lead to a second one. The minute my classmates saw me, there was such an outbreak of laughter that I was fully convinced that there was a basic mismatch between them and I. 

However, although his formal link with the college was only one day, later on in his life, the poet visited the college a significant number of times, and delivered  lectures. The first time was on the 17^th of September, 1917, on the invitation of the Chaatra Sansad  (translation?). This lecture was published in the second volume of the college magazine in the fourth year of its publication.  The next time was just before his journey to Peru in 1924, on the eve of Peru’s 100 years of independence. This lecture delivered on September 10, was held at the Physics Lecture Theatre, was later published in Samhati, 1301, Bhadra, and in Atmashakti in its 1301, Ashwin number.  It was also partially included in the fourteenth volume (pages 1004—5) of the Rabindra Rachanavali (Complete Works) that was brought out during the time of his 100^th birth anniversary. [Most likely this is the Viswa Bharati edition of the Collected Works/Rachanavali, that is being referred to]

Page 63--65

About Presidency College...

Translated from:

Presidency College-r Itibrittwa. Author: Biswanath Das. Published by Thema (Kolkata), 2011.

I started translating rather arbitrarily, but pounced upon some nuggets. 

Dr. Rajendra Prasad (155)

At the opening ceremony of the centenary celebrations of  Hindoo College/Presidency College, Dr. Rajendra Prasad, President of India, spoke in Bengali. He said, ‘It is my firm belief that if one were to write the history of Bengal in the last hundred years and on the great personalities who helped to shape it, it would be nothing else, but the history of Presidency College’.  With great humility he confessed that whatever service he had been able to render the nation so far, was due to his internship in this august institution, where he had not only been exposed to its great ideals, but had studied with some of the most gifted of teachers, and had had the opportunity of mingling with some of the most outstanding of peers.

(page 135)

At one point, the Education Minister of Bengal, Ajijul Haq, was supposed to visit Presidency College.  he teachers awaited his arrival. However, Professor Prafulla Chandra Ghosh, started out for home at his usual time. When there was some consternation among his colleagues over his unwillingness to wait beyond his usual time of departure, he broke out with irritation, ‘I don’t really care to be formally introduced to someone who is after all an ex-student of this college!’

Peary Charan Sarkar (49)

This idealist and exemplary student of Hindu College could have easily obtained a high governmental posting had he wished. However, he chose to become a teacher and consequently embraced a life of constrained means. From the position of Head Master at Kolutollah Branch School (later named Hare School), he joined Presidency College as Assistant Professor (pl. check exact nomenclature) in 1864. Later in 1874, he was appointed as Assistant Professor (Lecturer?) in the Department of English. During those days, a teacher could teach anything. There was no steadfast rule that a particular teacher had to teach a particular subject, only. It all depended on whether the teacher had the required competence to teach a specific subject. Peary Charan’s general sweetness of temper, gentleness of conduct and deep commitment to students, succeeded in winning them over completely. His early demise in 1875 caused his students to be deeply grief stricken. 

Peary Charan’s First, Second, Third and Fourth Book of Reading were considered fundamental to the teaching of English at schools all over India.

It is not widely known that Peary Charan donated 70,000 rupees, which constituted his entire life earnings, to his dear friend Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, to help build a school for upper caste Hindu widows. He also set up a girls’ school at his own residence in Chorbagan

The need to preserve the archaeological and historical relics of India...

Professor Nayanjot Lahiri at the Global Education Summit at Presidency University, January 2017.



Professor Nayanjot Lahiri began by stating that she was very happy to be part of this global summit where experts from a variety of disciplines and from within and without India, had gathered to reflect on the challenges to higher education, today. She said that she had always worked with the ‘material relics’ of  India’s heritage and it gave her deep pleasure to speak  about this at Presidency which was itself a heritage institution. Professor Lahiri said that her lecture would not be on the teaching and research of the ‘material relics’ of India, which had been her academic focus for the last thirty five years. Rather she would speak on questions of how and why this heritage needed to be preserved and the role higher education could play in this...

It was Professor Lahiri’s opinion that as the U.G.C. had mandated that Environmental Education be made compulsory at both school and college levels, awareness of India’s heritage and the need to preserve it, should be advocated to students from the very beginning. Unless this was done we would only have a ‘present’ and a ‘future’ but no meaningful ‘past’,  In England, in parts of Europe, in Canada, in Australia, she said, building awareness of one’s heritage was part of the public education policy. She felt that heritage issues needed to come out of its confinement in governmental and bureaucratic circles and reach the public domain, involve the public in significant ways and achieve levels of effective advocacy through circles of higher education.  

Professor Lahiri said that as 1947 was a political watershed involving some of the worst ‘blood baths’ that History had witnessed,  it was also a watershed moment for the future of India’s ‘material relics’ or heritage in stone, architecture and other antiquities.    At the time of partition concerned authorities had to deal with a number of  the issues related not only to the partitioning of the treasures of the past, but also how traces/remains of the past, its historic sites and venues would be portrayed in a nation that just come out of the shadows of colonialism.

She raised the issue of the site of the Battle of Plassey (1757) first and the controversy over the representation of the site in post-independence India, as either one of victory for the British or one in which the British exploitative move of colonialism first registered itself in a definitive way.  Professor Lahiri said that the battle itself had been an insignificant one, but the British military success ensured that the British presence in Bengal henceforth was the most important one. As opinion against representing the site as one of victory for the British built up, the plaques commemorating the site as one were removed. Hence as it becomes obvious from Professor Lahiri’s lecture, as new models of historiography came up, and the history of the nation was rewritten at the junctures of colonialism and post colonialism, the narratives around historic sites and their official representation, underwent changes and modifications.

Another instance of significant change in how ‘relic’ landscapes were reordered and rearranged post Partition revolves around the maintenance of British graveyards in India. Through a 1949 legislation the British Parliament decided that henceforth it would only maintain those graveyards in India, which were most significant. The others should ‘revert to nature’ in a ‘dignified and decent manner’. Therefore, as in this instance, British ‘fiscal logic’ determined the face of India’s heritage maintenance. Professor Lahiri pointed out that of a certain British cemetery on the University of Delhi campus, only a gate remains. 

Yet another instance of the rewriting of heritage landscapes and profiles in India,  is the 1960’s Government of India decision to remove the statues of British viceroys near  India Gate in Delhi. In like manner, a statue of King George V was henceforth relegated to Coronation Park where there were other statues of eminent British personalities who had lived in India.   

Islamic heritage sites were also deeply affected, particularly in North India, details of which are to be obtained in the Archaeological Survey of India files. The Moti Masjid of Mehrauli and its marble minars were torn down and later reconstructed. Shah Alam’s grave and the sandstone jalis on it were also damaged.

Museum collections were also deeply impacted but due to a certain mutual respect and consideration that prevailed during these prolonged negotiations, a great measure of fairness and propriety was maintained. This is why Professor Lahiri maintained, why Delhi Museum had such a rich collection. However this process of museum partitioning no matter how well intentioned, had ironic and paradoxical pitfalls. The committee that was set up for this task was headed by Sir Mortimer Wheeler. A study of the correspondence during this time reveals anxiety that the arithmetic of the division be properly adhered to.  Yet, this adherence to arithmetic sometimes compromised the ‘integrity of the object’ under consideration. A case in point is a magnificent Mohenjo-Daro necklace made up of jade beads, gold disks and semi-precious stones were divided down the middle. Hence, Pakistan has one half and India, the other. The same is true of a copper and carnelian girdle. Professor Lahiri stated that she would be interested to find out how students hearing about this so many years after Independence, would respond.

However, India government policies regarding such issues eventually changed. In the 1960’s there was some talk of removing the inscriptions on the Mutiny Memorial which had been erected by the British to commemorate the recapture of Delhi during the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. This memorial spoke in great detail about the mutiny and referred to the Indians who had resisted the British as ‘the enemy’.   A petition was sent up by the Delhi Metropolitan Council which advocated changing or removing such inscriptions in which Indians were referred to as ‘the enemy’. This appeal somehow reached the desk of the Prime Minister and she wrote back to the Metropolitan Council saying,

‘I have seen pictures of the Memorial as well as of the texts. I feel they should be left as it is’.

She further added that this would tell the world how ‘hard and long the battle for independence had been’. She advised the Committee that alternative inscriptions should be written which would tell the story from the Indian point of view. Hence this is a memorial which has twin narratives where the story is told from a dual point of view. Indira Gandhi’s attitude was thus a well thought out way of dealing with the issue of colonialism and the restructuring India’s colonial past and history.

Providing a full context to government policies regarding  India’s ‘material relics’ in the  post Partition period,  Nayanjot Lahiri  went on to say that in 1959  protectionist laws were created due to Jawaharlal Nehru’s own commitment to preserving this heritage.   The laws provided for a ‘security net’ around heritage monuments and sites, whereby 100 metres was ‘prohibited zone’ and 200 metres was treated as the ‘regulatory zone’.

As considerations for development were uppermost in the most immediate decades following independence, heritage issues were compromised when the conflict centered on promoting economic development versus the protection of sites. A case in point was the building of a massive dam over the Krishna River in 1959. The building of this dam entailed that a large part of ancient Nagarjunkonda would be permanently lost.  Nehru’s dilemma is reflected in the following words that he wrote at that time where he says that the fact that Nagarjunkonda would be ‘lost for ever’ under ‘the new lake’ had ‘distressed’ him a ‘great deal’.  

A parallel instance mentioned by Professor Lahiri later on in her talk was the case of the Mathura Oil Refinery versus the Taj Mahal, which surfaced during Indira Gandhi’s first tenure as Prime Minister. In 1968 it was decided that an oil refinery would be set up in Mathura since there was a demand for petrol in the North West. No consideration was made for the fact that Agra was 40 kilometres away and Bharatpur, 60 kilometres. Indira Gandhi was deeply sensitive to global environmental issues being one of the few political leaders who attended the Stockholm United Nations Conference (1972) on global environmental issues. This conference had given her a prestige as a leader who was committed to the environment. However as an instance of how economic development took greater priority is her approval of the Mathura Refinery Plan.  In 1973, Indira Gandhi gave this proposal her approval.

A huge pollution outcry gradually broke out. The Archaeological Survey of India had expressed concern as early as 1974. It eventually reached an international platform. She set up a committee to come up with recommendations so that the Taj would not be impacted by the refinery. However sulphur dioxide and other pollutants from the refinery started affecting the Taj. In 1984 a public petition was made leading to a celebrated environmental jurisprudence case and the 1996 historic Supreme Court judgment through which the Refinery had to be shut down. This was an iconic moment and Mrs Gandhi must have known the implications of the Mathura Refinery’s presence so close to the Taj, yet, in the tussle between economic development and preservation of the environment or heritage, it is ‘economic development’ that had won.

A case where Indira Gandhi had however effectively intervened for a heritage site was also in 1974, when she visited the Elephanta Caves in Maharashtra. She noticed empty coconut shells lying around, broken toilet seats and flushes that did not work in the toilets. She wrote to the Maharashtra government that rather than keep the Caves open to tourist traffic they should be ‘closed down’ if they could not be maintained properly because they would leave a poor impression in the minds of the tourists.

Professor Lahiri said that dirtiness at historic sites was due to a lack of a ‘watch and ward’ policy. She had noticed similar squalor and neglect at the Pancheshwar Caves in the Junagadh district of Gujarat, which was ostensibly protected by the State Department of Archaeology. The caves had been transformed to rubbish dumps due to a lack of attention.

That an artefact or a site or a building is declared ‘heritage’ does not in any way ensure its life in India, she said.  For instance, during the Pitripaksha festival of the Vishnupada temple at Gaya, security forces hang their clothes on rare artefacts that are housed in Gaya Museum.

Professor Lahiri then mentioned another case where the Chief Minister of Haryana had tried to get the historic site of Kokhrakot, which had been identified by the ASI as having an ‘antiquity that went back to Harappan times and continued to medieval times’, denotified at the time when Manmohan Singh had been Prime Minister of India. Despite the fact that it was a ‘protected site’ many buildings had sprung up in the area and demolition notices that had been sent to building owners had been ignored. The Chief Minister then wrote to the Ministry of Culture asking for their intervention in favour of de-notification.  Manmohan Singh was also Minster of Cultural Affairs at this time. He wrote to the Chief Minister saying that Kokhrakot had ‘great historical importance’ and that the ‘site had been mentioned in the in the Mahabharata’. Hence it would ‘not be proper to denotify’.

Professor Lahiri told the audience that the Comptroller and Auditor General Reports reflected concern for India’s heritage and the Report of 2011 had recorded that a batch of oil paintings at the Asiatic Society had been left unattended for 18 years.  The Report of 2013 was very exhaustive in outlining ‘heritage’ sites in India. In Bengal these sites included the Hazar Duari Palace Museum, the Asiatic Society, the National Library, the Victoria Memorial Hall and the Calcutta Museum. However, information in these reports hardly reached the public domain and therefore remained unused. She asserted that the Centre for Science and Environment regularly publishes a ‘state of environment’ Report. Nayanjot Lahiri’s recommendation was that there should also be a ‘State of Heritage’ Report. The central government gives a lot of money for reports—hence this money should be used. These reports help to frame policies. Hence they are important. However Professor Lahiri said that even Centres of Policy Research did not evince much interest in heritage reports or have much to say about them.

The next point that was emphasized by Nayanjot Lahiri was that in terms of attention paid to natural heritage and monument heritage, it was natural heritage that gained a lot more attention. This was due to groundswell emphasis and also due to N.G.O. culture. In this arena issues did not go uncontested. This is what led to the 1991 Supreme Court judgment that Environmental Education had to be made compulsory in both Secondary and Higher Secondary Education. The Court said,

In a democratic polity dissemination of information is the foundation of the system

Hence the U.G.C. mandated Environmental education at both the school and college levels.  It was hoped that through this education would learn about what was at stake in terms of the world’s natural heritage.

Professor Lahiri stated as was mentioned in the early part of this report that England had taken a very proactive role in integrating Heritage Studies within public education curricula. Such integrated approaches to learning vis a vis heritage was also actively present in Bulgaria, Australia, Canada and Africa. With the emphasis on active and integrated learning in modern education theory, awareness of heritage could easily be part of this ‘integrated’ learning because this is where attitudes get ‘modified’. Hence a student who develops awareness of heritage may one day be able to make a difference when she/he goes into Public service. She felt that communities needed to be involved, whether urban or rural, district level repositories be created of heritage artefacts,  and that state and community liaisons would make a difference of the future of India’s ‘material relics’. Nayanjot Lahiri mentioned how Yaseen Pathan, a retired clerk from a school, made a signal contribution in rescuing terracotta temples in Patra. The ‘Save Bombay Committee’ formed in 1970, also played a very significant role in saving buildings of India’s colonial heritage.

In the question answer session an Assistant Professor from Physics mentioned whether some difference may not be achieved by increasing the entrance fees at many of these historic sites. Milind Banerjee of History mentioned that in field work at Coochbehar and Tripura he had seen that community level participation worked very well in the preservation of heritage. Dr Salim Javed of History said that the A.S.I itself made inexcusable errors in placards that were placed in front of tombs. At Mehrauli he said, in a particular tomb Mohammed Quli was identified as Agam Khan’s son, when in actuality he had been his servant. Dr. Shomshankar Roy asked whether historians and teachers of history could not make a difference in bringing about a higher level of awareness among the general populace. A student from Sociology asked what needed to be  done when a site held contentious implications.

To these questions and observations Nayanjot Lahiri replied that one should immediately write to the A.S.I. when errors of a glaring nature were detected. She said that we should have reached that level of confidence in our democracy where we could talk openly about sites that could awaken controversy. She mentioned that in England historians wrote both for academia and also for a general reading public who were very interested in heritage issues.

 

The pressure on heritage remains. That a site or an arefact is declared ‘heritage’ does not in any way guarantee its safety or security. An example cited by Professor Lahiri is the case of Gaya Museum where during the Pitripaksha festival of the Vishnupada temple, secyrtug firces hang uptheir clothes on important relics. Professor lahiri reinforced her point with a slide.

After a visit to the elephanta caves in 1974, Indira Gandhi was very displeased to see the sad state of dirtiness and disarray in the temple areas. In a letter she wrote the Maharashtra government after this visit she spoke of the ‘coconut shells’ , ‘dirty toilets’ with ‘broken seats’ and advised that unless such sites were properly looked after, they should be closed down. She pointed out that all this would create a very poor impression in the minds of the tourists’. She felt it was better to ‘close them down’.

  

Michael Hutt, Professor of Hindi at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) delivered a lecture on how learning languages was one way of showing the other person that one respected his/her culture. In this Global Education Summit at Presidency University last  year, the question of the ideal education  for a world as complex as ours, came up repeatedly. Various scholars spoke on the need for learning languages as a move towards bringing greater global cohesion and mutual understanding...

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Michael Hutt
Michael Hutt, Hindi and Nepali professor from SOAS gave an interesting and detailed talk on how languages could be used for building better understanding in the world. He said at the very outset that he would start with one of the questions that SOAS had framed as it stepped into its Centenary year. The question was, „Should we all speak the same language?‟ Hutt‟s answer was a resounding „no‟.
It would be a good idea to begin a summary of Hutt‟s talk by mentioning the autobiographical details he mentioned at the very end of his talk. Hutt told the audience that in 1977, he had had boarded an Air India flight from London to New Delhi, with the intention that he would build his skills in Hindi, of which he had the most basic knowledge. He had wanted to know how Hindi speakers thought about the world in their language. He further added that that action set a course to his life, and he finally became professor of Hindi and Nepali at SOAS, getting both his undergraduate and doctoral degree from this institution. Hutt probably wished to imply that a love of a particular language, by extension the culture of which it was a part, helped him to forge a sustained career for himself.
Hutt quoted facts and figures and used slides to strengthen and back his arguments. He informed the audience that the total number of languages in the world numbered 7105, but many were endangered and many were dying at an accelerated speed. Of this Europe spoke only 4% of the world‟s languages, the Asia Pacific region spoke 50%, and Africa, 30%.
He mentioned a B.B.C. program, aired a couple of years back and entitled „The Death of Language‟, in which many of these concerns over dead and dying languages were voiced. This program had posited that by the next few decades a third of the world‟s languages would be lost. Hutt informed us that the most widely spoken languages were Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, Spanish and English. He admitted that the British were the most monolingual of peoples, and they probably lived with some kind of assurance that sooner or later everybody would end up speaking their language. Hutt humorously added that one of the worst shocks that one could give a diehard British mono-linguist was to say that everyone in the world now had to learn Chinese, because it was the widest spoken language. It was true he added, that many non-Chinese were now learning Chinese because of a growing global ascendancy of Chinese.
Hutt mentioned that although languages were dying the world was still a complex place linguistically. A country like Papua New Guinea for instance, had great linguistic complexity based on its numerous indigenous languages and the language of the colonizers. India too was intricate in linguistic terms. A country like the U.K. was linguistically complex today because of immigration. Baroness Amos had also mentioned that indigenous languages like Bengali and Gujarati were taught within the United Kingdom school system if there was a student constituency in that particular school district area.
Professor Hutt admitted that market forces did determine which languages stayed and which went. They certainly demanded the rise of particular languages, for instance, English. Globalization demands fast and efficient communication, and if learning a language means that the benefits of globalization may be obtained, then for many people the indigenous
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language may be given up. In other cases, as in the case of both Hindi and Bengali in the Northern and Eastern parts of India, the state or the nation has a great deal to do with the promotion of the language by declaring a certain language the national language or the state language. In a multilingual country such official policy does guarantee the rise of particular languages. The ascendancy of Swahili in East Africa was also for the same reason.
Hutt is emphatic on the point that the way to build greater global understanding, spread cultural awareness and move people away from narrow particularism, is through the avenue of language. Learning the other‟s language is one way of showing respect and in effect, saying ,„I want to know where you come from‟.
For a majority of the world‟s peoples and even theoreticians and linguists, there is no need to be overly concerned about the death of certain languages. In their opinion all languages are basically the same. Language is instinct and all people have an instinct for grammar and organization of experience through language. As Noam Chomsky had once famously said, to a Martian scientist, all earthlings would seem to speak different dialects of one major language.
However Guy Deutscher in through the Language Looking Glass, posits that although certain fundamental aspects of language, certain aspects of grammar, are innate human tendencies, other aspects of language, would come under „culture‟. According to Deutscher, all that is not „instinct‟ is culture. Instinct leads to concepts and culture to „label‟s. Yet culture seems to be making inroads into nature all the time.
Deutscher posits in this book that when you lose a language you lose an entire culture and Hutt echoes Deutscher. Michael Hutt also mentions John Locke‟s Essay on Human Understanding (1619). Locke had posited that all languages organize reality differently and thus each language is unique in this respect. Hutt also quotes Jakobson as having said that languages differ on what they must say, not on what they may say. People always find names for things they must speak about.
A very interesting part of Hutt‟s lecture was his exploration of the synonymous but phonetically different terms for tea—„cha‟ or „tha‟. He said that this example would definitely resonate well in Kolkata. He said that if one were to lay down a rule that only one form of the two widely used forms, was to prevail, histories of culture, trade and colonial encounters, would be lost.
Hutt elaborated his points by saying that tea gardens spread from Assam through Vietnam to China. The chinese started drinking tea from 2700 B.C.E. the practive then spread to Japan in 800 C.E. and then to Europe 900 years later.
He said that „cha‟ has Semitic roots and „Tha‟, Chinese. Depending on various patterns of trade and commerce and colonization different countries adopted different names for tea depending on their point of entry into these intersecting circuits. East Africa which had trading relationships with India uses „cha‟, whereas South Africa uses „tea‟, which derived from „tha‟ is used in Europe and the U.S.A. While all of Europe uses „tea‟ or a variant of
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„tha‟, Portugal uses „cha‟. The Dutch introduced who were the major traders in the Malay Archipelago area, introduced „tea‟ or „tha‟ to Java, Indonesia and Malaya. The trajectories of words are thus laid with reams and reams of cultural history, mutation and transformation.
Manabi, a student of second year Physics Honours humorously said during the time of question answers, that in Bengal „cha‟ and „tha‟ were both used because Bengalis were very used to saying that they wanted both „cha‟ and „ta‟ when they were asking for tea in a casual manner. Michael Hutt had replied, that he had chosen the reference to tea because he knew that it would resonate particularly well in Bengal.
Michael Hutt posited that in a country like Zaire or India, knowing and using more than one language would never present a surprise for anyone. He quoted the example of the number of languages spoken by a Tibetan child in Nepal. The child would speak Tibetan with his parents, Mewati with shop keepers, Nepali with friends, watch Hindi films over the week end and learn English in school.
Hutt asked, wouldn‟t a very precious part of the world‟s literatures be lost if there were no more translations? If one stopped learning languages then translations of literature would stop.
He mentions the case of a 1936 Nepali poet named Laxmi Prasad Dev Kota , who wrote Muna Madan, a moralizing fable in a sing song metre, different from the existing aristocratic traditions of Nepali literature, more derived from folk literature. Hutt said there had been couple of translations of the poem into English, including his own. He quoted four lines from the poem where the poet is asking whether it isn‟t better to eat plain lentils with a clean and happy heart than to have bags of gold obtained through foul means? Hutt reads out the two or three translations that have been made of these lines including his own. He concludes that they sound best when read in Nepali. The point that Hutt seems to be making is that a great deal of the phonetic richness and specificity and particularity of those lines would be lost if the language was lost.
Michael Hutt had mentioned at the very outset that SOAS had embarked on a project of documenting endangered languages, entitled Endangered Languages Documentation Project (ELDP). This was done on the basis of a grant of $20 million provided by Arcadia in 2001. Till date the Project had funded the documentation of 350 endangered languages. The ELAR or Endangered Language Archive contains digital documentation of 400 languages, and has been created on the basis of 900 hours of videography and 800 hours of audio recording. To the criticism by the public at large that this project is „unsustainable global babble‟, Dr. Mandana Seyfeddinipur, Director of the ELDP replies, that husband and wife don‟t often speak the „same language‟. Also most civil wars in world history have been fought between people who spoke the same language.
He mentioned that a contemporary African writer had criticized the practice of certain African writers of using African words in their novels. He called it „politicized provincialism‟. Professor Hutt‟s reference brings to mind the case with Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong O, who in his famous essay, „Decolonizing the Mind‟ (1986) had posited that one
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form of resistance to imperializing or colonizing cultures, was to fight them on the front of language. Hence while writing the novel in English he would use words from Gikuyu, his native language. His position had been radically different from that of Chinua Achebe, Nigerian writer in the 60‟s and 70‟s of the preceding century who had declared in a 1962 talk, „I have been given this language and I intend to use it‟. Achebe was referring to the use of English in his novels. This talk was later published as an essay entitled “The African Writer and the English Language” (1964).
Regarding language competence in English presumably, Professor Hutt mentioned that an uneducated person would have a vocabulary range of 3000-5000 words, a university student would recognize 40,000 words, a university professor would have a range of 50000 to 70000 words and the O.E.D. contains 300, 000 words. He could not thus emphasize enough the importance of languages and knowledge of words. He felt that learning other languages and concurrently other cultures, revitalised the mind.
Once again Michael Hutt reiterated that language was the key to building greater global understanding among peoples. This was Baroness Amos‟s position too. Prabal Dasgupta also emphasized the need to respect languages of tribal and marginalized groups.
To a question from a student as to whether learning Latin and Greek terminology in Science demanded language competence, he replied that regarding terminology such competence was not that important or significant.
.

Baroness Amos


Baroness Valerie Amos delivered an outstanding talk that encompassed some of the issues
that persistently came up in the Global Summit Talks. The issues of quality education for all,
quality enhancement at the level of Higher Education, respecting cultural diversity, working
towards greater global understanding through recognizing difference and accepting that there
was need to understand the other’s ‘difference’, and work towards a climate of greater and
greater tolerance. Her talk too veered in the direction of where Higher Education should go
and what the responsibilities of universities should be. She pointed out that the greatest
knowledge output as in the cases of recent scientific inventions and discoveries happened
through international collaborations.

She emphasized the difference, the uniqueness that SOAS has compared to other universities
within the U.K. and the global implications of a university that was strongly committed to the
idea of cultural difference, to the principle of nurturing cultural diversity and respect for the
many cultural and linguistic traditions in the world. The educational philosophy driving
SOAS was to give the many ‘minority’ cultures and languages of the world an international
forum and sanction. It was believed that this would build the way for greater global
understanding through ‘critical engagement’ with the cultural traditions, languages and
literatures of others. She said it was extremely important to know the languages and
literatures of other nations, their myths and cultural philosophies. She asserted that knowing
languages greatly aided international cooperation and understanding. She did not however,
minimize the challenges of the process, and pointed out that greater understanding of the
other could only come from understanding one’s location very well. She also posited that at
SOAS everyone was a ‘minority’.

She emphasized the role of languages in building international understanding and cooperation
and also collaboration. She spoke of the need of learning the culture, the myths and the
literature of nations and communities other than one’s own in order to develop a sense of how
other communities/races/selves/beings related to the world. She emphasized the need and
importance of Area Studies.

Charles Bailyn had also spoken of the need for training in languages as part of an integrated
Arts and Sciences undergraduate program.
She referred to an incident during her tenure as Under Secretary General of Humanitarian
Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator (2010—2015) when there was a crisis in West
Africa, where the U.N. failed because it did not ‘take on board’ the cultural uniqueness of the
region and its principles of family and community.
She said that at SOAS there were students from ninety different communities, and the faculty
engaged actively with students who hailed from a highly diverse cultural range.
Baroness Amos said that Presidency University and SOAS could make very creative and productive use of their memorandum of understanding since both universities was based on the fact that both universities had very embedded traditions in the cultures of South East Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
Regarding the goals of sustainable development that the U.N.O has outlined which includes among its main agenda the eradication of poverty, provision of adequate health care and viable opportunities for education, she said that any measures taken by the U.N.O could only become effective if the U.N. engaged with people at the local level through an understanding of community dynamics.
She emphasized Presidency University and SOAS partnerships in building quality Higher Education several times.
She mentioned that SOAS has many Indian students, although the university is losing students from England or rather, not getting enough students. She mentioned that some graduates from SOAS like Subramaniam (not sure), a Sanskrit scholar, had gone on to become leaders in Indian society. For instance Subramanium had been one of the first Vice Chancellors of Lucknow University.
She mentioned how the first Vice Chancellors of SOAS, Sir Roth and Sir Turner had been avid India scholars. Turner’s Dictionary of Comparative Aryan languages is still used today by scholars in the field. Mary Boyce’s work on Zoroastrianism was a highly acclaimed one and in the Centennial program of SOAS held at New Delhi last year, Zoroastrianism was the principal theme.
Baroness Amos emphasized how importantly India featured in current research at SOAS. She mentioned Francesca Osini from the South Asia Institute who had worked on multilingual locals in Northern India. She mentioned antoehr scholar who had worked on infrastructure development in South East Asia and had included a study on Indian roads. She mentioned the work of Bhavani Shankar on food, nutrition and agriculture in South East Asia. At the same time that this Summit was going on, she mentioned the book on the ‘Roots of Yoga’ jointly written by Mallison and Singleton and being launched at Jaipur.
Among three world famous Indians who were currently engaged with SOAS in London were Professor Amartya Sen, Professor Romila Thapar and Mr. Shiv Shankar Mukherjee.
After Baroness Amos concluded the Vice Chancellor of Presidency University, Professor Anuradha Lohia, warmly acclaimed her talk and spoke of how the Baroness’s lecture had touched upon some of her own key concerns. Professor Lohia, a molecular biologist by training, spoke of how her job as Vice Chancellor had opened her eyes to the importance and richness of the Humanities and Social Sciences, and how important it was to fund quality research in these areas.
During the question answer session, Agnibha, a student from Physics Major asked a highly relevant question. Agnibha asked whether SOAS was engaged in collaborations with African Universities, and what therefore was the quality of SOAS presence in Africa?
The Baroness’s reply provided a rich fund of information. She said that in 2000 C.E., the U.N. took a drive to improve primary education in Africa as the link between education and development became very apparent to U.N. policy makers. Hence, Higher Education took a back seat and good universities that had existed at Ghana, Uganda and Kenya declined because of lack of resources.
She said that SOAS had links with universities in North Africa, as in Egypt. She also stated that SOAS was going to increase its scholarships in Africa.
She said that in the modern world we have to look at the picture where in the field of Higher Education there is competition between countries, within the country and within the universities, road maps for Higher Education had to be laid carefully.
She emphasized that with the strong links that existed between Africa, the Middle East and South East Asia, care should be taken to preserve the good and worthwhile universities in these countries. She spoke on the need for understanding the ‘connectedness’ of Africa, South East Asia and the Middle East.
Sandipan Mitra, ex--student of Sociology, next asked whether it was possible for parity to be there between the general move for standardization and privatization in Higher Education in India, and the notion of excellence?
To this question the Baroness replied that SOAS was very proud of its ‘difference’ from other institutions of higher learning in England, and remained steadfast in it. When it spoke to the Government it emphasized the need for this ‘different’ curriculum for the overall development and well-being of the nation. When she spoke to the government she tried to make them understand the importance of interdisciplinary studies at SOAS.
Baroness Amos said that we give importance to Area Studies and Law, but also to Art and Languages.
Overall, the Baroness said that reflection on the histories of Presidency and SOAS would provide many texts on the complexity of the story of Higher Education, its challenges and how much capacity each institution has had for ‘change’. ‘Change’, she said, ‘is at the heart of who we are’.
Presidency and SOAS both need to ‘push the boundaries of knowledge’ so that there is ‘critical engagement with the other’ as a very important seam of higher educational philosophy. Both universities need to commit themselves to understanding what universities in the modern world are all about or what a ‘modern university’ is all about.

My summary of Nobel Laureate Mohammed Yunus's lecture at the Global Education Summit at Presidency University on January 10, 2017..


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Mohammed Yunus
Mohammed Yunus gave an incredibly inspirational talk at the end of which the entire audience at the Derozio Hall at Presidency University stood up to give him an ovation. It was well deserved. Professor Yunus has a personality that is rich and humane; he speaks from the heart. His commitment to the poor and needy of the world, particularly poor women who don’t get loans from banks, was unquestionable, lending each word he spoke a magnificent resonance. It was obvious to the audience that this man truly cared for those in need, and according to this writer, this wonderful humanity cast certain radiance around him.
Professor Yunus began by thanking the Vice Chancellor for inviting him to Presidency. He said there was no young person, male or female, in the two parts of Bengal (West Bengal and Bangladesh), who did not know the name of Presidency. He said that he had grown up hearing this name since it was especially associated with the great luminaries of Bengal.
He then went on to say that today the bank he started, is very big and has branches all over the world. However, when he started the work for it he had no grand plan, nor did he spend an incredible amount of effort on it. He referred to the famine of Bangladesh in 1974, as the starting point. He said that Bangladesh went downhill economically, after its independence in 1971. He said that he came back to Bangladesh from America, after it gained independence. He became a professor at Chittagong University, which was then a new one and set amidst very beautiful surroundings. He was happy teaching Economics, which is what he loved to do.
However when the famine hit the country in 1974, he felt very disillusioned with his own life and with the subject that he had invested so much time and effort in learning, because there were people who were suffering around him intensely, and he could do nothing about it. He entered a mode of ‘self-accusation’ that led him to ‘disown’ what he had learnt and ‘disown’ what he did. His restlessness made him go out into the villages that surrounded Chittagong University, wondering if he could even help one person then he would consider it worthwhile. The plight of Bangladesh’s 80000 villages was very bleak and distressing.
His repeated visits to the villages made him aware of how pervasive the phenomenon of loan sharking was in the villages of Bangladesh. The loan sharks lent out small sums of money and then proceeded to strangle the person who had borrowed money from him. He felt intensely humiliated that he could do nothing about this practice. He said that he now realizes that this is a pervasive phenomenon all over the world—there are loan sharks everywhere.
Professor Yunus said that he felt he had to do something. He wondered to himself as to why he didn’t lend the money out himself? He went on to say that he did not do this after having read many books, nor was it a research proposal. He felt his was just a response to the situation. He felt that he had to touch the lives of the people who were suffering so calamitously. And the effect was a good one. People were happy and he was happy too because he was being able to help people. This is what he had wanted to do.
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He went on to say that he had no plan to open a bank. Yet these efforts at lending money that he made in 1976, eventually led to the opening of the Gramin Bank in 1983.
He said he has been locked in a perpetual fight with the banking system since then. He has told banks in Bangladesh that they are supposed to lend money to those who need it. Yet, they loan it out to those who already have a great deal of money. He has told the banks that they are destroying the lives of the people by not giving them loans. When banks say that such people are not ‘bank worthy’ he rebuts them by saying that they are not ‘people worthy’. He said that today they work in every single village of Bangladesh. There are one million borrowers and 90% of them are women.
Initially the work involved him in trouble with the men of the village. They said that Yunus was flouting religious norm by wanting to lend money to women. Whereupon Professor Yunus told them that their prophet had taken his first employment with a business woman and then eventually married her. On the lighter side Professor Yunus added that he told the men that in case they needed businesswomen brides, they could come to him! He said that it had been important to avoid religious tangles because they tend to make situations extremely murky.
Professor Yunus said that he always sent his female students to speak to the women of the village, and at one point they were so scared of his trying to cajole them to take money, that the minute his party entered the village, they would promptly run to the other side. However, he did not give up hope. He was a stubborn man and believed in his goal which was to create some economic lift for villagers who were desperately struggling against poverty.
He told his volunteers that the next time these women tell you that they don’t want the money; don’t believe them .Know that that is not their voice. The very day she is born, a girl grows up with the message that she is unwelcome. She lives a life like she doesn’t exist and now we are creating trouble for her by wanting to give her money. However, he told his students their job was to keep going. He fought with banks calling them out because they didn’t lend money to women. He thus made it a point that half his borrowers would only be women.
He reiterated that he knew nothing about banking. And he was happy that he didn’t. It allowed him to think and be creative. Professor Yunus’s advice was that if one doesn’t like something one must ‘jump it’. He said proudly that they now had a two billion dollar credit and 90 million borrowers, including in the U.S.A. where they had repeatedly told him that his system would not succeed. In 2008 he sent someone from Bangladesh who hadn’t ever been to the U.S. However he had been a bank manager. This person set up a branch of Gramin Bank at Jackson Heights and it is working fine. The Professor said that they now have 19 branches all over the U.S. and 8 in New York City, only.
He said that they lend money to those women there who may not have the right papers, who may not have the requisite legal status, but who want to survive. The whole Gramin Bank system he said is based on trust. He said that the women he loans money out to (perhaps speaking of Bangladesh in this context or may be others too), are often illiterate, yet, the bank
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ensures that the children are not. This must be mainly Bangladesh that he is speaking of. Professor Yunus said that if these people were poor it was not their fault. It was not right to say that they were lazy. Civil society had not given them what was their right, either.
Professor Yunus went on to say that when the well-educated children of these women came up to him and said that there were no jobs in Bangladesh, he tells them jobs are an ‘obsolete’ idea which we should have left behind in the last century. He said did the cave man look for jobs? He said human beings were problem solvers, go getters and entrepreneurs—therefore it was this side of their nature that should be encouraged to develop. Human beings push frontiers and should be encouraged to do so. He tells them he said, that tell yourself that you are not a ‘job seeker’ but a ‘job creator’. ‘You are a complete human being’ and need not be at ‘the mercy of anyone’.
He feels that human beings are put in that derogatory position where they go around feeling dejected that they do not have jobs. He tells these young persons that your mother is part of Gramin Bank. It is her bank. So why don’t you go and help her with her business? He recapitulates how it is when the women first receive these loans of 30—35 dollars. They cannot believe that someone will give them that money. It is a trust that they therefore never break. These village women would then set up a business with her farm produce, goats, chickens and stays in business for 20 years.
In the beginning there were 5-10 proposals or applications from these children of original Gramin Bank loan takers. Professor Yunus said that a new fund was created for this new purpose and it was called Social Business Fund, so that it didn’t get mired in the rules of Gramin Bank. In Bangladesh now, 12000 young people are running business, and in 2017 there were 2000 applications. He tells them that they will be the ‘active’ partner whereas he will only be the ‘financial’ partner. If things succeed the young person gets the benefits, if it fails then it is our business that has failed.
He said that within the ‘capitalist system’, ‘wrong thinking had pulled us into the wrong direction’. Unemployment did not only exist in India and Bangladesh but was all over the world. He said that in Spain today unemployment is 48%, in Italy 40%, and in South Italy, 65%. He said with true commiseration what it must be for a young person to be without employment. He feels that the unlimited capacity of young people should be wasted through the fact of unemployment.
Professor Yunus said that the entire system needed to be re-hauled. Banking laws needed to be reframed so that poor people got some benefits out of it. He had told the Government of India that they should give ‘banking licenses’ to all N.G.O’s that were involved in microcredit. He said that he would soon be visiting a microcredit bank/N.G.O. in Bangalore that had benefitted from such a government loan.
Education needed to be re-hauled so that young people realized that along with ‘job’, ‘entrepreneurship’ was just as valuable. He said that he hated charity solutions. Instead he would make it an enterprise or business enterprise situation. For medical care he started health insurance. He told the village people that if you pay $4, I will cover your health
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annually. He said that he then started a Pathology Lab, a Pharmacy and he was able to cover all his costs. He said his goal was not to earn money but to generate income.
When people said to him that this was not ‘business’ because it was not geared towards profit he said, that yes, money making or profit was important, but if he gained greater happiness in making other people happy then that could not be discounted as ‘profit’.
Trying to solve the lack of electricity in Bangladesh villages he introduced solar power and named it Gramin Shakti. People generally used kerosene. He told people that you give me the money you spend on kerosene and I will give you the solar cell. If it fails we will go back to using kerosene and you won’t have to give me any money back. It took him 18 years to convince the people, but now his company sell 1000 solar cells a year. 2 million houses use solar energy and business in it is very good and lot of young people are engaged in this business and solar energy cells are popular all over Bangladesh.
So over and over again, Professor Yunus urged social business. In response to a question he said, your N.G.O’s are usually local and regional. Ours are all national. When Bangladesh became independent it was a crisis that you have never known here. Our urgent need was to feed and clothe all the people of the country because the government itself was trying to find its feet. There were 1 crore of us in Kolkata when the war happened; we went back right after independence and plunged into this activity of maintaining the country on a day to day basis.
He further added that the capitalist system must go because statistics today proved that 99% of the world’s wealth was owned by 1% of the world; Wall Mart in America owned more wealth than the bottom 50% of America. All the wealth in the world was concentrated in about 6 countries. He said that this system either had to change or be restructured because it would definitely crash.
He said that his goals were three: A) Zero Poverty by 2030 B) Zero Unemployment by 2040 and C) Zero carbon emission by 2050.
To a reporter from Ananda Bazar who said that while ‘micro credit eases the situation’ it does not ‘eradicate or remove poverty’. She asked whether a PhD holder should take up ‘chicken rearing’ because he could not find a job? Professor Yunus replied that the PhD holder should open a ‘chicken farm’ because he would get a large loan from us. Our motto is that we stand by anyone who comes to us and we ensure that no one fails and if they do then it is ‘our failure’.
Professor Yunus received a standing ovation.

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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.
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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,
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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.