Antidisestablishmentarianism...

If systems are religious and become ritualistic and limnal, do not benefit the parish of learners, such systems must die; contributions and associations to such schools must stop; system must be deemployed if a complete cold reboot is not possible because the architecture resists such reboot designs. Church is but a metaphor in this post for any establishment. I have been witness to one such and was given a cold bath yesterday...

I've always known one cannot fly with turkeys; but, the moment of epiphany is when the realisation dawns that those around you are turkeys. At least, those ruling the roost are turkeys, Orwellian pigs and dogs that would piss on the blueprint when it is not conducive to their egoistic parasitism and predatorial social climbing instincts. You take a decision then: DO NOT fly with turkeys anymore.!

A system that is non-inclusive either at ideological or at practical level is what fuels factions, divisions, partitions; especially when that system harbours cheap ideas of reparations of perceived harms of the past, now that those ruling the roost for the day come to believe they have the power to abuse, however temporarily, to score a pyrrhic victory.

A system that does not want to encourage a pan-systemic fabric in the interests of all stakeholders, but only attempts to foster one in order to protect its interest is myopic. It only wants to include others at their own terms. Such a system is not interested in the long term development of a culture, but works to ensure that the power centre stays with the founders. Such a system is controlled periodically or cyclically by short-sighted minds that wants to ensure their relevance and is its own cancer.

We are living in such times under such systems from local to global, national to universal, notional to empirical. We are living in such matrices as need to be either overthrown or shirked. I was witness to one such very recently and one such that I WAS glad to be a part of and contribute to in the past; a system that is no more open to improvements but is mired in its own bog of physiological growth into bureaucracy that does not anymore aim to foster the growth of its ultimate, purported recipients: learners!

The founding fathers and mothers have long deserted in foresight, surrogate suppliants cyclically lord over ensuring the inorganic degeneration. The gods of rationale and wisdom too would soon desert them. Newer parallel systems would perhaps overtake. Pity to what could have been!

The Challenge Before Us Today...

What we need to teach the children today is the difference between reality and the ideal.

The ideal is to be sought after, striven for, even worked towards; however, it is also essential to show the children the need and importance of accepting reality (at its face value) and learn to live with it, in it.

There is nothing wrong in wanting everything and desiring to do that which only appeals to us. Though, the reality does not pan out that way; to accept their unwillingness to come to terms with the needs of reality and not wanting to do what they do not like to do, in the short or longer run, would eventually lead to delusions; to become unable to live life as it is and at its own terms; to be left behind; to become escapist and ultimately, as failures.

Failure in what sense: in a practical sense. Sometimes, thus, the visionaries of a system must accept that we need to thrust upon children what they may not like, but must learn to do, precisely because they do not know the need to be reality-compliant. To do is more important than to dislike. Else, the future is fragile!

The Need to develop Critical Thinking in our School Educational system

I often wonder...

Our system is so wonderful in producing the best of rank holders and learners until their secondary education. After that, what happens to the magic? Does the pixie dust of learning wear off? Where do our students fail when they go out on to the graduated wide big bad world of reality and employment? Why do they fail in GDs inspite of subject knowledge? Is there a gap in their subject knowledge constructs? This is when I stumbled upon two terms:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Desirable Difficulties

Now what are these? They sound too complicated for an untrained mind or a simple passenger in the train of education - be it student, parent, teacher or just people!

Wikipedia describes Cognitive Psychology thus:

'Cognitive psychology is the study of mental processes such as "attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and thinking." Much of the work derived from cognitive psychology has been integrated into various other modern disciplines of psychological study, including educational psychology, social psychology, personality psychology, abnormal psychology, developmental psychology and economics.'

As for Desirable Difficulties, it is nothing actually new to our culture of education. We always had it. The pre-90s or pre-80s learners had a benchmark for the level of difficulty at which their learning took place. This challenged them, rather than forced them, to push their thresholds of learning. Even during the pre-dominantly State Board regulated curricula, without CCE etc, our boundaries and frontiers of learning were challenged and we strove, gamely. This toughened us. May be it was a swim, survive or sink situation. However, it toughened the guts in us. This has changed today. We are on a soft system that as one of the Neil Simon characters says in one of his plays, "Even baby powder hurts!"

May be the 90s and new millennium parents have complicated the lives of the 90s and new millennium learners by simplifying it in the name of reduction of workload, bagload, bookload etc. Basically, they have pampered their kids. So when the school or the teachers grumble in response to claims and accusations of corporal punishment by students or their parents even for the perceived casual contact of fingertips on a student, they usually claim: "Didn't we go through harsher predicament when we were in school? Our teachers beat us with scales, did we grumble to our parents? How many days have we been made to kneel in shorts or skirts, our knees in direct contact with the stone flooring in the hot sun out in the open? Have we ever complained to our parents, making them rush to school to meet the teachers? Have we not been pinched to bleeding for not submitting a homework or coming late to school or talking to our benchmates during a lecture or made to stand up on a bench or stand out of the class in the corridor? Did our parents ever know or even if they knew, had they ever taken cudgels at the PTA?"

Well, all these are fine and dandy. Parents say, "We went through all these or less... or perhaps more, yes! But does that mean our kids should go through these? It is perhaps precisely because we had gone through these horrible punishments, we must ensure a punishment-free, stress-free learning atmosphere for our children!" True, but at what cost? By making everything accessible on a platter, without having to tan their skin, we are only making their lives worse! Too much unnecessary emotional twang at the drop of a hat is shown by modern parents. That shows they are fragile and they are moulding their next gen fragile emotionally. This is where we go back to what the Cognitive Psychologists call as Desirable Difficulties. One area this is gaining tremendous application relevance is educational psychology.

What is Desirable Difficulty? A cognitive psychologist calls it as difficult conceptual learning for an easier long-term recall. What probably in a software engineer's parlance would be difficult encrypting for a better access of programming! Ok... simply put, you increase the level of difficulty during the initial learning process through challenging circumstance, albeit within the reach of the learner, so that the concept is well-entrenched in the mind of the learner; this in turn leads to better recall and better application. This means learning for life-time. 

What this does is to force the learner to think, query, question, interpret, infer, deduce conclusions of their own. This necessitates an active engagement in the teaching-learning process. Herein comes the problem. Are most of our teachers ready for this? In my limited experience of a decade-long association with the school educational system, the teaching community (well, the majority of them!) start with a lot of energy and infectious enthusiasm and ideals. Somewhere down the line they become indifferent. I am not going into a microscopic analysis of this issue. I am not even going into any sort of analysis, for that digresses us from the current issue! Instead, we need to look at what are its fall-outs.

The teacher becomes indifferent. Doesn't anymore prepare for classes. Takes the syllabus, the lessons and the process of teaching for granted. In the worst case, when a teacher who doesn't deserve to teach a higher class simply because they have not taught and haven't consciously prepared themselves for this eventuality (but nevertheless have always been dreaming of moving from intern to temp to PRT to TGT to PGT!) end up going into a higher class, they think it is humility to accept to the students "I do not know". Honesty and integrity is all fine; but it doesn't save anyone's backside or self-esteem in the eyes of the student community if they do not go back to their drawing table, learn what they humbly confessed as lack of knowledge and get back and show they are a teacher worth taking seriously. And so the penny drops. Many an indifferent teacher become mass murderers of students' impetus and excitement to learn. Thus bad teachers breed indifferent students breed cynical and stoical citizens of the morrow! The solution lies in the hands of the teacher. To actively pursue teaching in a challenging manner. If they do not want to, then they better quit the profession; because, you are killing the future of the nation and you do not care about it. This kind of teacher is worse than a genocidal maniac.

Having been introduced to Critical Thinking, I took to it like fish to water even though I do not know the first thing about swimming or have gills! It is purely my self-respect. I consider myself a vertebrate and am proud of it. It helps me to gauge my students, prepare to provoke them into thinking on their own, on the feet, in the class, even if the lesson is an old one I have been teaching for a decade thanks to no change of syllabus from the board. What I always think is this: the syllabus is the same, the lesson is the same, but the batch of student is not! This makes me seek that student who carries searching questions or doubts (however silly it may be to us!) in their eyes, encourage them to express it, so I learn something new.

While I try to educate them, I try to forge levels of difficulty in approaching the answers. Not impossible, but certainly requires effort from the student. In the process the student makes the problem and the learning their own! This is the secret behind Desirable Difficulty. It works. It is beautiful. If you are a teacher, you must try it. Good for you, good for student community, good for your ego, good to feel years later when they acknowledge you on social media as their TEACHER!

A very touching and relevant article on Teachers and their professional needs

The following is the opening few paras of the article found in the link below:

Vijaya teaches in a school that has one other teacher and 65 students. Every one of her days is a whirl. When you have so many children around, uncontrollable spirits take over. In the classroom and outside, you lurch from minor to major crisis and flow from small to big joys, while trying to keep it going. She loves all this, she loves her job. But she feels isolated.

The other teacher is cordial with her. While they run the school together well, they never really converse. In the school they have no time, every minute taken up by the demanding tempo. And with an hour’s commute back home, they are both in a hurry to leave as the school ends.

Her educational background is in the humanities. Even now, after 15 years of teaching, she struggles in teaching math, which she has to, in the primary classes. When she became a teacher as a 23-year-old, everything was a struggle. She remembers being intimidated. Her school’s head-teacher was an aloof man, the school had two other teachers. Each of them was caught in the whirl of the school. She knew she needed help from an experienced teacher, but there was no opportunity. The two other teachers would try, but it would all be in the passing. She survived by her tenacity, and learning on her own. Many others survive this phase by becoming indifferent forever...

To read further, log in here at Live Mint: Teaching in Isolation

The Supreme Salary - Teacher's Day Observations

Dear Teacher by choice, default or auto-correct...

While on this Teacher's Day I salute your 'yeoman' service to the society, I have a wish to make. I would rather see you 'a freeman' who makes 'the difference' between the cultural growth of human civilisation and the stolid march of a utilitarian society and stand for the former than the latter. I have a few paeans to sing, not before I have etched my observations.

Teachers should take up employment or profess only out of personal conviction, not due to financial considerations. This is not to say that teachers should not seek prosperity or social status. After all, they are human beings with feelings too. The two can be inclusive - personal conviction and prosperity, I mean; but financial considerations must be subservient to personal conviction.

What is this personal conviction? It is to touch lives, to impart not just language or technical knowledge as Einstein observed, but humaneness and empathy as well. What does this personal conviction stem from? It stems from a deep-rooted need to create human beings who grow to understand the unfettered urge to give more than take. Is this happening today? No.

The majority of today's teaching fraternity is insecure, anxious and scared.

Insecure because they fear the loss of integrity that some of them fail to realise they do not possess since they took up a teaching 'job'. They fear to be questioned because they do not have answers acceptable to the younger generation that seeks honest, simple and lucid answers. This is because the world of the teacher's youth and the world of today's young generation are different. Teachers cannot provide answers and caveat from their time and space to another spatio-temporal reality whose world is wider, more complex and more cluttered. Most teachers realize this, but fail to accept it, unwilling to let go of outdated habits in which they seek comfort zones and refuge.

Today's reality just cannot be wished away by yesterday's practices. This status quo is best exemplified by two stereotypical day-to-day realpolitik of family structure: young teens or adolescents who see the redundancy in certain beliefs and practices of their parents and swear in youth not to become like their parents, but to be an understanding adult to their children when they eventually grow up. They seldom succeed, rarely retain their vow. Time does it to them. The reality of everyday world bites hard. The next analogy is not dissimilar, but somewhat different: that of the caterpillar-daughter-in-law's transformation into the stereotype of an ugly butterfly-mother-in-law she swore not to become.

The teachers - those who chose to become, that is -  end up falling into the trap they saw some of their anxious forbears in, which they swore not to fall into, if at all they became teachers. Where does this anxiety arise from?

The anxiety, as I see it, is a result of their aspirations to provide a provocative and energising transfer of knowledge (at the beginning of their careers) in conflict with the system's need to complete "set" objectives. This "said" objective can be to produce 'the best results' or 'the need to be competitive in enrollment' in a dog-house system or simply 'the compulsion' to complete syllabi.  It all has become number crunching war. Whatever the latter is, it is a compromise. The system may be at fault, but what of the teachers themselves? Such people must not take up teaching, or if they have, must pronto give up, and had rather served in a brick kiln even as Howard Roark did. It is not idealism that I am professing, but a salvo against those who want to marry financial success with ideological achievement. It just does not work out both ways.

The life of a teacher is fraught with more challenges, adventures, risks and dangers than that of Odysseus on his travails. The teachers knew this as they took it up. This might sound idealistic, but such an uncompromising stance is the only way forward for the teaching fraternity, to resist the subversive investment culture in education these days. This, though fraught with personal perils, is the only option left to revert an educational system that is entrapped in the fangs of a bunch of fascist monkeys also known as the tribe of educationists, most of whom have 'invested' their finances in the pursuit of creating their respective visions of 'glasshouse' intelligence that is filled with 'snowflake world'! You shake it, it is all flaky and silvery, in an exciting flux, romantic to look at from outside. Once the confetti inside settle down, the spectacle is vapid, inane, banal, mundane and as spiritually devoid as Eliot's wasteland. These investment educationists (like investment bankers) are the Eliotean hollowmen who gnaw at our social fabric today like the rats in the attic. Teachers worth their salt need to and must, out of self-belief and spinal self-respect, shake off this anxiety of 'the objective of the system.' They have to be bold as warriors and choose their battles carefully to fight.

Now, what are they scared of?  Loss of job?  Loss of financial security - an essential motivation to lead life? Loss of self-esteem? Financial security and job are no doubt interrelated and understandable; but more important are the erosion of pedagogic faith and learner-centric values.  If jobs are lost, so long as one retains their self-esteem, earning is still possible. Tucked somewhere in this struggle is also 'the circle of societal expectations' we have created around ourselves. It is not a suraksha chakkar, but a cage we build around ourselves. Why does one really, even if we are social animals that cannot exist in isolation, have to be bound by others' expectations of how we must live?  There is greater dignity in so-called cheap labour, if integrity in oneself as a human being worthy of higher mental notion is retained.  At that level of existence, there is no dignity of labour as the class-conscious society sees it... but only the pride of dignity that one is still capable of earning without sacrificing one's soul.

Here, let us talk about 'loss of self-esteem.'  This is something not without, but within.  One has a soul that is 'not for sale.'  It should never be sold.  Or even temporarily pledged or pawned.  The only difference between the other vertebrates and human beings is this soul-awareness. This is more so true of artists. By artists, I choose to include the teachers as well.  Are they not performers on a daily class-room stage?  A boring performance is often the difference between a monotonous class and stimulating atmosphere.  It is this stimulating atmosphere that leads to learning.  Otherwise, we will end up with a classroom full of students who have teachers chasing them in circles (not exactly the kind of cultural revolution we desire in education!), pleading the students to return their boardmarkers.  So, this soul-awareness!

Every person has a price, no doubt. Some are priceless, others priced less. Which one, I ask the teaching fraternity - every single one of you who may stumble on this rant - do you want to be remembered as? Even if the Don Corleones of investment education ask you to name the price, make it unaffordable. Good teachers are a rare breed and should not sell themselves cheaply (I do not mean financially alone here!) to organised exploitation of knowledge transfer. Good teachers do not hesitate to work and go the extra country mile to help students beyond the confines of structures. A good teacher is spinal to the creation of a good citizen. So, anyone worth harbouring aspirations of themselves as good teachers must retain their self-respect and take pride in saying that 'I do not take the easy way out at work.' I do not use previous years' notes, I do not rely on existing material to regurgitate in front of x no. of students... There are Mephistos everywhere. Do you want to be Dr. Faustus? And cringe and grovel on the day of reckoning? Or do you?  Wouldn't you rather be that teacher who inspired a generation of fearless individuals who stand up on top of their tables, quoting Whitman?

Throw the dead teacher in you, focus only on imparting provocative knowledge, help discover the seeker, not typecast functional automatons who only build or design or drive or cook or stitch or 'teach.' There are many ways to skin a cat, but you can't escape the pain. The society will wince, cry, caterwaul, even claw back painfully at times; but without pain, no real gain.  The Pain is the teachers', but the gain ultimately is the society's. They will recognise and remember. In most cases post-career or even posthumously. At times, miraculously within the service period and automatically financial rewards would take care of themselves. That financial reward is sweetest that comes unexpected. However, yes, they will recognise and remember. Ultimately that is the Supreme Salary!

Sincerely
a Learner.

Oh Captain, My Captain!

Teachers are a rare breed of people. Sounds cliche? Well... never mind! They are. If anyone has embraced the idea - leave the tag 'profession' - of themselves as a teacher, then they should go all out like a one-person T20 army: Should give a rousing start, sustain the interest in the middle, be willing to rotate strike for another, dedicated - even if yet not in a state on a given day (because people can have off days!) - colleague, slog it out towards the end, come back, bowl tight both at the power plays, in the middle overs (when the field of students begin to relax), and at the death, as well as keep wickets ! Preparation before class, energy and provocative transactions (provocative not in a noisy sense, but intellectual stimulation) through class, post-transaction inputs till the exam-day! For this to happen, they must constantly evolve, keep themselves in the learning loop by reading from far and wide, be able to connect their learning to their teaching, be open to accept knowledge. They must not whine to work citing mundane reasons or just be content to complete syllabus, have the authority to challenge wrong notions or ideas or understanding of another colleague aggressively, proactively, even if at times it hurts the other ONLY BECAUSE the other is a sloth to learn or egoistic to accept truths, and be humble to make corrections when another superior mind corrects them. BUT... only from another superior mind. How do we identify that? Well, intuitively a teacher would, even if dishonest enough to accept, identify another, superior mind. Unfortunately, we do not have such quality people. You see, why I call them a rare breed of people. They do not and must not necessarily come to work because that money is needed at home. For that, there are other more honourable, virtuous professions! They should not sulk to work. They should not project their minimal attempts at syllabus completion as work done. You are expected to do that. Going beyond that is your job. If one can't live up to these requirements, they must get out of the profession and let more willing minds to enter the arena. If one can't constantly be willing to challenge one's intellectual complacency, they must not become teachers. All other things do not matter. Unfortunately, today's education environment is full of incompetent people who are not willing to accept they do not know and do not want to learn and are happy to pose as teachers. Today's teaching profession to a major extent is only posturing. How can it stay divine? No wonder, students attend tuition. It is an absolute matter of shame to find out that one's students attend extra tuition. It means there is a fault line in our work. We are not going that extra length! I've been lucky to not have students of mine (not necessarily my school, but of those I have taught) go for outside tuitions. Thank you, God!

The Angst and Anguish of an English-patient

We Indians know not the art of war neither information dissemination that the west has mastered through their media... nor for that matter the craft of propaganda that socialist states quite successfully undertake!

I was watching CCTV today and this thought arose in me. I thought this too would pass like a lot of thoughts that have struck me recently, gently nibbling at my sides like an acupressure foot-massage in a pond full of hordes of little fish, asking me to post a blog.

I had successfully resisted those. I had decided a while back, not to abuse the blogspace by posting frequently random thoughts about random things. I have stuck to it, with the vehemence of a leech on a skin... but no! This one would not pass! So I gave into it as it started gnawing at me like a restless rat on a tin roof over a dingy attic. Hence this post. A while back I had this post on my Facebook about why we don't need Slumdog Millionaire and how it is not a great movie and all those who praise its Oscar-worthiness are lickers of white backsides because this is the latest tool of exploitation of Mother India by the Colonials. A great many gen-xers of the school I teach at rose up in arms in a Sepoy Mutiny against this anti-British stance of mine. I stood like the steadfast tin soldier then, as I stand now. Search me! What I explain below is God's own truth as witnessed by me and heard by me.

Since yesterday, the CCTV has been televising CCTV 2009 National English Speaking Competition. It must have been already a long-drawn process typical of any National level competition, which must have started at germane levels, at Colleges where hordes of people participate at the intra-college and -University level challenges and have arrived where they are.

23 participants are being pitted against 3 challengers and judged by a 9-member Jury about the English speaking quotient of each of them. THREE of them - after a three-day ordeal (the last day being tomorrow - 14th Nov, 2009) - would go through to a Grand finals. What is the competition about? Speaking English. What is the message it holds for us? A lot actually. At the moment we pride ourselves with our BPOs and Call Centres being the cash crops of our country's foreign revenue harvesting. Soon, this would vanish if what I witnessed was true.

A quiet little revolution has taken place. A lot of Chinese are starting to speak English. With an accent that would be much much more acceptable among the Western countries who want to transact with Asia - India or China or Japan or South Korea! With an accent that the English native speakers as well as the European english speaking businessmen would be comfortable. Add to it, the Chinese spoken English grammar may turn out a zillion times better because most Chinese go to language schools where English is taught by native English speakers. The grammar as well as the accent and the command is bound to be better in comparison to ours.

We had earlier in the recent past seen or read how the Chinese were being coached in English to serve the visitors during the Beijing Olympics. Further additions to this point: by its sheer volume and numbers, we all know China is bigger in population than India; in terms of the percentage of youth population, China is equal if not higher than India, if Indian statisticians and demographers are to be believed when they say that in 2020 or whenever India would have the highest youth population in the world!

The projection is: in three to five years time, when these college and university attending youth of China pass out and graduate to the world of business, China will have more English speakers in the world than even United States, which is the single largest English speaking nation and contains the most number of English speakers in the world. What will happen to our BPOs and Call Centers? How much of Green Bills would migrate home then?

I remember the times when I was in the IT sector, working as an in-house translator first, then as in-house full-time language consultant for German, then after as a free-lance consultant, when at the best of times a translator could spin more than a lakh of rupees in a week's time. That was the height of the IT boom when Indian IT industry was preferred in the West due mainly to our ability to do transactions not just in English, but good English. Even the European market - inspite of the lingual-cultural barriers and difficulties would come to our doorstep as a preferred business partner than China - though both our labour charges were cheap equally - simply because of our English abilities. The way school education is headed these days when, leave alone the students, teachers cannot communicate properly in English shows how badly communication suffers.

Communication is not just about content, it is more. It is the art of speaking a language, the art of structuring thoughts in a language through which the thoughts are presented, the art of having command over a language and presenting it in an effective manner. The Chinese are starting to master it, we are losing it - much like Arunachal Pradesh. The Pakistanis are (according to some of my young friends who have debated at the international levels, where the Pakistanis have a longer and stronger traditional and respected presence) mastering it and we are losing it - much like Kashmir!

What do we do? We are having internal skirmishes over haves and havenots. We breed petty politics and politicians and deliberately keep the population illiterate. We cannot say China is fully literate or totally prosperous; nor that it lacks corruption or internal political hassles; but... what they do not do is shoot movies that show our badness or our slums or our past glories alone! what they do not do is sell our souls to foreigners - who once ruled us - who shoot our undesired side and pitch it at Oscars. How many films or documentaries are made about the other side of China. All of us have the other side, but do we have to project that to claim material glory?

We have this biggest joke called Prasar Bharathi - they are celebrating 50 years of existence, the first 20 years of which it never reached the masses. When it is now reaching the masses, we know its quality. Supposedly, Doordarshan is beamed in 30 different languages, but look at its digital quality. Look at the packaging of programs. As an avid watcher, I can vouch for the heterogeneity of Doordarshan's content. Its content variety far outstrips any 10 of the private cable and satellite channels put together. Sadly, though, DD lacks in quality packaging. The latter these days is very important. It is just not what you give, but how it is given!

I am unaware of the following fact. Like the BBC or DW-TV or TV5 or ABC or VOA, do we have any television network that is beamed primarly targetting the countries we should be targetting and packaging a politically correct picture of India? Please let me know. I am as Adam as before the toad did its job!

Coming back... it becomes doubly our duty to take up communication seriously. It is quadruply important that the current tweens and teens and gen-x learn communication tools properly and master the common language of the world so that we do not lose out on progress. After all, speech is the one unique ability that humans possess; having been subject to 400-odd years of English-rule, we cannot afford to squander that advantage because our northerly and Dravidian politicians do not want to make the effort to learn Angrezi. Crazy, isn't it? Of course, when we reach out to our own masses, let us speak their language, both in spirit and letter, but we have to push ourselves to extremes to polish our communication. After all, true challenge lies in going beyond the basics and mastering the aesthetics. Would we? Do we have the grit to rise above our self-excavated rubble?

A small winding up info. There is this international competition for schools called World schools Debating Championships (hereafter WSDC) that is held annually in some city of the world or other, where teams representing countries, with participant-representatives drawn from schools of the respective countries, brandishing their Debating abilities and debating in English over a range of topics that bother the world at large on areas social, political, cultural, economic and artistic. As a curtain raiser to that, they have a mini-WSDC, which is a sort of whetstone for aspirant teams, novices and debutants to the field. This year it was held recently in October-November, as a prelude to the forthcoming WSDC at Doha, Qatar in February 2010.

Know what? China would be a debutant at Qatar2010. They participated in the mini-WSDC and wound up 4th in a field of 10 teams that contained some of the strongest debating teams in English such as New Zealand, US or Chile! As a rejoinder, after what I saw on CCTV... this is a strong foreboding. If you care to, and you receive this channel I am referring to, follow the CCTV English Speaking Competition if you happen to chance upon it.

JAI HIND!

Digging into my favourites....

I wasn't really intending to do this. But, my daughter set it off. In my previous post I had confessed to going moist-eyed - to put it mildly - after watching Taare Zameen Par. This post has been prompted by hearing that wonderful voice of Shankar Mahadevan in the title song. While the world is going ga-ga over Shaan's Bum Bum Bole, I think the title song takes the cake. So soulful. I guess it has to do with the movie itself. Very soulful. And I have met or spoken to hundreds literally now. Not one has not confessed to unabashedly going "lump-in-the-throat" to "cried-on-every-frame" at some level or other. While I was on that, I mulled over the other "made me moist-eyed" movies. And surprise surprise... some among them were teacher related movies. It has nothing to do with the fact that I am one. But take a look at the list of my favs in that genre: Dead Poets Society must rate on the top of the heap; i.e. until Taare came along! Then the movie of Poitier's based on Brathwaite's apocryphal (to me) novel - To Sir With Love. What a masterpiece creation that novel is! The movie was in my opinion so true to original. Of course, alongside ranks its Bollywood kin Sir featuring Naseeruddin Shah. I remember the day vividly - it was not too often I went for Hindi movies then. But this was one of them. Back in the 80s? I remember seeing it in VeeCumCee Emerald that used to be part of the proud edifice called Safire Complex - never mind the "what later became sleaze joint" popular VeeCumCee (which later virtually became the We Cum, See! joint for quickies and prostitution!) Blue Diamond. There have been several fantastic english movies that have boarded the Blue Diamond bus. But... when you hit the bottom, it gets really bottomer.... Anyway, before I get nostalgic and start contemplating a hubristic eulogy to Safire Complex on which stands weed growth and rubble on Mount Road now, let me cut it off! But...

The following are my education or children related favs: Taare Zameen Par, Dead Poets' Society, To Sir With Love, Sir (surprisingly Kamal's remake "Nammavar" doesn't kick me at all!), the Promethean Pink Floyd video Another Brick in the Wall and lastly but not in that order, Pearl Jam's JEREMY!

Now while we are on movie trip, let me also put down my Top Ten Tamil Comedies. I am not meme-ing anyone on this or anything else. But you can respond with your own Top-10s! Welcome. Here goes:

1) Kaadhalikka Neramillai

2) Ninaivil Nindraval

3) Anbee Vaa

4) Uttaravindri Ulle Vaa

5) Ullaththai Alli Thaa

6) Michael Madana Kamaraajan

7) Singaaravelan

8) Magaraasan & Kaadhalaa Kadhalaa

9) Pancha Thantiram

10) Thenali

I guess I do some kind of compensatory justice to my not including Nammavar in my list earlier. 5 (6) out of 10 (11) in the list you would see are Kamal movies. Well, goes without saying, with his sense of timing and eye for comic nuances, obviously Kamal comedies are off the rack better than anyone else's this side of Sridhar's movies. I am sure, top of 7 out of 10 people's all time tamil comedy list would contain #1 - Kaadalikka Neramillai. Of course there are other movies of yore which are so special for their comic moments - Thiruvilayaadal, Ooty Varai Uravu, several Chandrababu and Nagesh as well as NSK movies, Thillaana Mohanaambal... even the much later Ramarajan's Karagaatakaaran (inspired obviously and modelled on Thillaaana - similar to Sangamam. Three other movies I would like to add to my list, if I had a Top-12 would be Sabaash Meena, Kalyaanam Panniyum Brahmachari & Sabaabathi (bringing up the Baker's Dozen). One may also mention stuff like Aan Paavam and Nethi Adi by Pandiya Rajan and Indru Poi Naalai Vaa by Bhagyaraaj, but they wouldn't somehow get into my Top-10 for reasons I can't explain!

Anyway... so much for Tamil movie nostalgia. I shall stop here. The rest is laughter!

400 Blows

We are back to school. Not in the literal sense, but yes... the amount of rows that've been happening, or perhaps the media has chosen to focus on... it makes one touch upon the efficacy of education.

First, Headlines Today (or was it CNN-IBN?) ran a story on Educated Illiterates or Literate but Uneducated - about how kids at school these days are being dumbed through dumping of information in the name of knowledge so that they get educated, acquire degrees and hit the job market as successful whatevers! But do they really know their math or the three Rs effectively? In the research poll they showed... some of the so called forward states such as Tamil Nadu (ranked 4th) were not so literate inspite of being educated and the traditional boon-dog Bihar was *surprise surprise* one of the top most literate state. What does this show?

And then we had the girls college in Chandigarh in news (is still!). A teacher slapped a girl for using mobile phone in the class. The former defended it is within the spirit and letter of educational institutional law. The girls protested saying they were not anymore in school, but are adults since they are in college. Any logic in that? And the girls won the struggle and used the media to talk about all this even while saying the media blew the issue up and it was essentially an intra-college affair that must have been settled so! What sense??

Of course, we had a Professor in Ujjain being killed by Students! Whither education??? Latest news... the perpetrators have surrendered in police station, meaning which we can deduce they have found someone to bail them out. And 21 more involved people arrested. Does it matter? Did it matter in the case of Stanes or Jessica or umpteen others? This country requires more than 400 Blows.

Then it was the turn of Meerut. Appalling news when we learnt that the University exam papers were routed by the VC of Charan Singh College (or whatever) to be corrected by unqualified, young 5th and 7th grade school students. The students of the college of course protested. But the protest drew shit. And the TV showed three girls (aptly and conveniently) named 3 musketeers jumping the tall iron gates of the VC's house and demolishing and destroying anything in their path ending up with bashing the VC's scooter to smithereens before being taken into custody. It melt my heart with warmth to see one of the girls - Monica - shouting "today his property, tomorrow him!" What love between the educators and the educated!

So where does this all lead to? Shout your piece in the comments!

Oh by the way, did I tell you? There was this other news about an Indian Muslim going to US for MBA via UK, detained at Heathrow!!!

And that still leaves two more education-related incidents to discuss: 1) a minority muslim institution in Kerala - Kozhikode to be precise - refusing the students to celebrate a festival that has been traditionally considered pan-Kerala secular event. Suddenly, in the name of religious sentiments the students of a Muslim college cannot celebrate ONAM in their campus. Stuff and non-sense. 2) BJP warming up to electoral manifestoes for the future - VANDE MATARAM must be sung mandatorily in all schools, colleges and institutions including places of worship, irrespective of religious beliefs! A very honorable motto!! After all, it used to be front runner for our national anthem and perhaps if the Bongs had taken the Prime ministership back then, VM would be sharing podium with JGM for being the National Anthem and India would have been the only country to have two anthems being played. What an aural experience it would have been to hear them at sports championships if we won! Of course, to think what would have happened at the recent SAF Games where we returned with 118 Gold Medals is another conjecture!!!

Question is: If this is a secular country, then irrespective of religious beliefs, one must uphold the principal tenets of the country and sing national song. But the Muslims see it other way. For them it is against religious principles. Again! My question is, if the religious sentiments are so water-tight and more important to the minorities (whatever be their religion), then should they seriously not consider migrating to a climate where the religious tenets are primary and welcomed than manipulating the Minority card expecting the majority to keep bending down and keep getting bumped on the head? The day this country becomes minority Hindu state like how TN has been made completely minority Brahmin state... they will be happy. But there is no guarantee that the non-Hindu minority turned majority would stop ill-treating majority turned minority Hindu. Am neither for nor against, but this be the truth... as is vindicated in the perpetual anti-Brahmin sentiment. Talk of secularism is just another VoteBank jargon. And we are suckers, all us voters!

Fresh from a production of FINAL SOLUTIONS by Mahesh Dattani, it stirs up in me both nationalistic feelings as well as rational based arguments. But since they go also beyond the confines of educational focus, we take these things in a separate post!

Until later!

Postman Nevermore Knocks Twice.... - HEY MY 50TH POST

"Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life," said William Hazlitt.

I don't know how much the current generation of teens and youth out there remembers, poetry or not. After all, this is an age of Memory Chips and 100+ giga inexpensive hard-drives. So save as much as you can. Even dedicated drives for downloaded DivX movies. Ek Dum!

When I was a kid, there used to be this scheme run by the government to encourage savings at a young age, called Sanchayika, whereby your schools used to run a sort of Savings Bank and each child could credit to his/her account even 5 paisa - each day or whenever possible. And we were proud owners of pass books. When I quit school, from 7th std until 10th, I had saved 32 rupees painstakingly over 4 years and to receive it as hard cash!!! Rs. 32/- in 1981. How much is it worth now?

Well now, am not talking of that savings.

Save to Memory. The watch word of the day.

And thus computer does make Hoarders and Packrats of us all!

So, everything is available on the World Wide Web. There is no need to write notes, buy bazaar guides, burn midnight oil at the 11th hour. Visit one of the many essay and guide sites dot com and search and save.

In absolute contrast to the Nazi burning of the books where the watch word was "Search and Destroy", now we are witness to the age of Search and Save. In either case, we spare the world of paper. Thus Nazis and We are both contributive in our own ways to Save Trees, Conserve Ecology and all that jazz!

As an extension, we spend more and more time on the WWW. As a natural extension we start living out our lives in front of the Computer more than in real-time. Leaving aside the fact that we now consume more hydel energy instead of Bagasse, communication, exchange of messages, emails, opinion sharing all happen in this P2P world of give and take. I am going out there one of these days and go on a Friends of IPO (IPO Bachao Andolan) a-la Medha Patkar. May be I'll go on fast and get Saif 'Cyrus' Khan to endorse and probably have his movie banned at our own Q IS DEAD MOVIES!

I read the other day that postmen who used to go door to door to deliver post and parcels, of late have also started carrying stamps, money order forms et al so that now they are mobile post offices of the minidor sort. Yes, now that courier deliverers have taken over going door to door to deliver posts and packets and parcels, IPO-men have to move on. IPO ya BPO - ay, there's the rub! So anyway, these poor souls have no raison d'etre anymore. Even worse, no one writes to the postmen anymore. And the Postman Doesn't Even Knock Once.

Blame it all on the blog!

I must be getting past that age when I can't consider myself eligible anymore to be in the youth age-group. The newspapers who write about theatre in Chennai have done away with the youth tag on me. There are real youths (I mean 18 and 19) getting into theatre. My early theatre days was like the English cricket team of about until 5 years back. The average age of a theatre youth would be mid-20s. Chennai Theatre scenario isn't so anymore, it resembles the youth world of American tennis (15s and 16s), although the English Cricket team seems to be cruising on the mid-20s aver-age mode as ever (else how do you account for Shaun Udal!). So, forget me. Move on to real youth.

The youth seems to have its own ways, as it always have been through the ages. Except, we are entering or have already entered an absolutely new hi-fi age where high infidelity and low fidelity rates in relationships are the norms. But we are not talking that either. We are talking about the habits of keeping unearthly hours.

I normally fuzz out at 11.45 the latest in the night. Times were I used to crawl home at 2.20 and 3.10 am on my Titan Dial with an array of smells in my breath, enough to make the Fragnipanis and Baldinis of the world go dizzy with envy. Not any more. I cop out at 11.45 PERIOD

And the next morning I get up early (which is about 6ish) to check my mails (lest there are heavy downloads on my mail, since I belong to the primitive civilisation of Dial-up users) and surf the net for info I seek for any writing projects of mine. And what do I find? The comments to posts on some of the blogs I visit as well as the posts themselves bear the stamp of Interstate 1.00 am-ish to 3.00 am-ish. I got piqued and asked couple of my young gen acquaintances in theatre.

Well, apparently around 2.00 am is the time of maximum DivX Downloads since the broadband is relatively faster then. So while a six-hour download starts its life, the surfers all commune at the bloggers park and start posting and commenting.

It's Darkness in the Junge, Listen to the Night!

Wow! Who would have thought that a country that two decades back was pronounced as backward and developing and conservative as it went to sleep by 9 pm to wake up and start its day at 4.30 am to the sounds of cows named Radha and Lakshmi swinging their heads as they chaffed at the fresh grass, would today go to sleep at 4 and 5 am!! Who would have thought that a country divided by the plates that unite Vindhyas underground would get together in the night. After all this is the country that got its Freedom at Midnight!!!

And then there is Call Centre! So what's so unique about Call Centre life anymore. I scoff at all these yuppie Call Centre folks when these days they come and strut about their night life. I hear you Chetan, we are in sync. The whole nation is anyway awake and that is a whole new world, brave or not. We have started working and communicating and now even conversing to Western Time Zones.

What happened to the good old real-time meetings among friends and common-interest groups? What happened to all those days of arguments and debates and exchange of ideas and trading of opinions and formation of hypotheses over coffees and pakoras at Debate and Poetry and Literary Clubs? Everything happens on-line.

Coffee is Passe and Latte is In!

Even neighbours seem to communicate either through phones or emails. I mean, the traditional description of a neighbour is a person who lives next door. And even if Indians don't anymore live in wall-sharing street-houses, we all live in neighbouring flats. How can two neighbours who share the same floor of the same block of the same apartment complex not open the door in real-time and walk across to each other's interior to say something?

This incident happened to my brother, am not joking. My brother had gone to his headhunter at Bangalore to attend his overseas interview calls as he was poaching for a job to get back to US after a couple of year's break. Obvious, it was a call center. And he was attending interviews. According to records and some sidewinding done by his B'lore companpy, he was supposed to be attending an interview call from Nebraska or wherever. They do it regular if you didn't know. That's how Indian placement guys operate. You give them a CV they forward another to their headhunting clients... further doctored needless to say. In the first place, most of the job-seekers themselves partially doctor their CVs to reflect the latest in CSHARPs or DOTNETS or whatever, and show the most recent employment as until the other day even if they were not employed until the other decade!

So, coming back... suddenly the guy at the other end, apparently his prospective employer, interviewing him gets a bit fishy and decides to probe. Actually you're sitting in India right? Haaarrummmph! Well... things kind of work out! The thing in my brother's favour was that at least he was not putting up accent or disproving he's Indian who used to be Murugan or whatever turned Mark or whatever! And then he happens to adjourn to a near-by eating joint! Wonder of wonders... he runs into someone with whom he starts chatting to while time away... and that guy narrates the story of how he was sitting in a Bangalore Call Centre and happened to interview a guy who's supposed to be in Nebby or someplace... No joking, this happened a bit recently! So... we've reached a stage in the drainpipe where two guys sit in the same Indian town and behave like both are in another western country and interviewing each other! I SALUTE THE CONTEMPORARY FIBRE OPTIC INDIAN PREDICAMENT! What shall I say?!? That was just an example what we are leading ourselves into.

The cutting edge age of bytes mega and giga

We are witnessing - and some out there are being part as well of - a generation that has become unable to structure their thoughts seriously enough that they have started speaking in monosyllabic "Hey" or bi-syllabic "Howdy" (now that comes from Frontier Westerns originally) or "Hey You" or even better "Sup?" or "Wussup dude" irrespective of the gender of the addressee or addressant or whatever s/he is! And we have become inept in communicating spontaneously not because of our lack of language tool, but because we are losing touch with reality. We need to constantly update ourselves about what's up in the world of current affairs or movies or music or books only because the next time we visit any blog we need to be able to participate and leave comments so as not to make a total turd of ourselves. Who cares? No one even knows whether you visited or not. As the used to say in the Frontier West days... "If you don't leave yore corral, yore hoss don't leave no trail, sabe?" But we have also become info-exhibitionists that we feel impelled to impress others with our knowledge that was probably acquired as a result of nethunting for info on Wiki or Rottentomatoes or NYT or Salon.com or wherever just a couple of minutes back after reading other's comments. And so the bangwagon of insecure generation rolls on!

Was it Robert Frost who said, "Poetry is what gets lost in translation"? If that, and as a natural extension this current gen is Poetry as it is getting lost in translation from real-time to blog-time, then am I witnessing Poetry in Motion? With too much of verbal diarrhea, it is probably a bit too loose motion. And they now even have a new terminology based on blogging that should anytime get into the dictionary.

BLOGGER CANDIDATE. That's how TIME described a certain IRAQ War veteran who returned home and was spurred by a politician friend of his to run for the Democrats in the election. The candidate spoke about all things that never would mean anything in realtime to the voters. And he got outdone by a traditional Senator candidate from the same county because he knew the reality. That's what it is. Blogger Candidate. Too much of attitude and too little REAL info. How much of info that is being exchanged on the blog really is useful? "Well, it gets people to know each other better... these little little exchange of opinions". So what're you going to do? Is this a sort of about to be married candidates prospecting each other? Beat it!

Arre... wah wah... new to Blogging? Welcome to Blog World (or like I leave as my housewarming comment, W2BW).

Stand Art - Standard Art - ART

I am faced with the following existential angst. How do I realise my visions of the kind of art and theatre I want to do in the current geographical set-up I live in? Would I have done justice to myself if I don't satisfy my needs as an artist? Should I pander to public tastes and commercial desires? Every artist's conundrum, this.

Anyway, these are the questions that specifically threaten me from my work.

What do you do when the existing vocabulary is not enough to express your vision?

Do you create vocabulary within the existing confines of grammar, what ever be the art, the tradition, the milieu?

How private does this vocabulary remain?

Does it / can it serve others of similar dilemma and angst, and hence become a public vocabulary?

If it goes on to do that, how much of the intensity remains in me the next time I use this vocabulary? Is it still mine any more?

Who draws the cutting standards to ratify, attest or authorise this derived vocabulary? Do we even - anarchically speaking - need an authorisation from others?

Some of the people who I would like to meet and ask these questions:

Wynton Marsalis, John Coltrane, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Adam Gilchrist, Wolfgang Mozart, Christian Morgenstern, Marius von Meyenburg, Quentin Tarantino, Sarah Kane, George Lucas, John Williams, Ustad Allaudin Khan & Jesus Christ!

Am I mad? Feel free!