First Report on Claude Alvares lecture at IIT-M

Earlier I had forwarded an invitation for the lecture of Dr. Claude Alvares with this group. It was good to see a full room for the meeting and the lecture was well received looking at the student response after the lecture was over. The response was even better from the young professors. Here is an initial report / summary thanks to Mrs. Chitra Nagesh.

Report on Dr. Claude Alvares’ lecture on Multiversity
given at the Humanities Department, IIT-M on the 18th March 2008

From the minute, he walked in; Dr. Claude had set the mood for his talk – informal and refreshing but never missing a chance to add a sharp and earthy remark at times. He kept a hot afternoon session lively. (No mean feat, certainly!) .

He reminisced about his earlier visit to the city and mentioned about his work on Shri. C. V. Seshadri. He expressed his admiration and respect for the scholar’s work at the grassroot among the local people.

Dr. Claude shared his experiences of his work in the various committees in a light hearted vein, but the underlying concern for the absence of honesty and integrity in today’s business ventures was obvious. In a way, it hinted what direction his lecture would take- call to the youth to move away from the earlier generation’s views, leanings and approaches.

The tribulations of his sons in an effort to be ‘educated’ were brought out with a good dose of humour but a subtle attack was directed towards the teachers and professors.

However, it is what he did to ensure burden free and voluntary learning for his children that is behind the emerging of Multiversity. How his sons went on to seek knowledge that they desired and turned out to be successful in the material sense and otherwise is another story altogether.

The arguments that he put forth for decolonising education may not be new to some of the persons in the audience. Then it is his depth of conviction and sense of commitment that breathed fire into those ideas. When he questioned the audience how a 300 year old society can teach sociology, philosophy or political science to a 5000year old civilisation or how a problem in our local community can have a ready American solution without mincing words and with passion, the impact must have been felt at an individual level.

He felt that the present curricula bring out a soul destroying course. It saddens him that academicians and educators have not paid attention to the tremendous potential in terms of our knowledge systems be it political science, philosophy or even psychology. According to Dr. Claude, students are treated like buckets to be filled and the present learning courses do not allow learning in the real sense of the word but just encourage cramming of mere information.

When serious questions were posed to him during the interactive session particularly by some students, one can hope at least for an independent thought process which eventually will lead to changes( positive ones, of course).

Visited the Science Train at Egmore Station today

Thanks to a friend from the Goethe Institute, visited the Science Train in Egmore today. This train a joint Indi-German work has been designed with the purpose of spreading the message of pure sciences and encourage people to learn the same. In all about 12 bogies (10 actually considering one was fully for advertisement of sponsorers and one was an 'activity' area) of the exhibits (consisting of about 10 panels in each compartment with about two video based communication and one interactive gizmos in each) consisting of the following topics exhibited major achievements of Germany in these spheres along side with information on education and research organizations on those subjects: Nuclear Science, Nano-science, Biotechnology related (2 bogies), neuro-sciences and understanding biological sensory behaviour, one on astronomy (well the first one on energy starts with the big bang, but largely to do with nuclear energy), one on sustainable development, one on integrated systems (I suppose on multi-discplinary sciences) and one promoting the sponsorers and key organizations involved. I have written the above out of memory and these may not be the names in which they are called by the organizers, surprisingly, the security was so tight that no one was permitted to carry any bag, book or pen or camera inside the train, rather strange and inexplicable. So, all that I have is the good old memory to rely upon!!

If one wanted to understand German accomplishments and possibility for research and learning and whatever is the latest in these areas, the exhibition would be great to visit! - it is scheduled to visit other parts of India for the next three months before it ends its journey in Delhi from where it started its journey. Having said all the good parts first, here are the not so good ones about the exhibition:

1. Highly dependent on intense technical textual presentation - I haven't seen an exhibition that is so much relying up on technical text based presentation compressed in such small space anywhere. The language put off many of the visitors, particularly students and with absolutely no crowd regulation (except the railway policeman who thought asking everyone to move on and not ponder to read any of the text was the best way to regulate crowd!!!) it was impossible for anyone to read the entire text even in a single compartment leave alone the entire train.

2. Lack of imagination in presenting the interactive parts - there seems to have been no serious though applied in customizing the interactive parts, there were about 1 in every compartment. They were not self-explanatory, they did not have the required volunteer to encourage and make people try things out and learn.

3. Very poor local organization: the crowd of school children that thronged the station were clearly not the intended audience of the exhibition. From the content it would have been final year high school or higher secondary students who will be the obvious targets. It is ironic as all of them will be sitting for their exams now. So, loads of lower class children happy to get a day off (a friend who visited independently during one such school students visit to this train commented that some of the students were happy to get a day away from their science classes!!!) and marched in the heat to view something they will hardly comprehend, with not much help, no great interactive learning possible, not adequate time. It is criminal to waste the best years of our students in such meaningless activity. I would have hoped that the kind of information in the train warranted a half day workshop among science students from colleges and higher secondary classes, that would have been more productive in terms of knowledge creation in them.

4. In an otherwise impressive exhibition, there were needlessly two panels kept on 'Indian Science legacy'. The panels were an insult to the legacy of science in India and in any other country would have been strongly objected. The two panels consisted of images of 5 items - the knowledge of pi in India, Aryabhatta (who alone was credited with a period), ayurveda (with images that looked familiarly like an massage centre advertisement), bronze statue found in Mohenja-daro and a para on knowledge of astro-physics with an image which I am unable to recollect.

The remaining part of the legacy were on 'green revolution', 'dairy', which the panel informed us 'went through a white revolution to become leading dairy producer of the world in the 1970s' and an image of a cotton mill with a write-up alongside that said something to the effect that , 'went on to achieve excellence in textile manufacturing' or some such. If these are part of the science legacy of India, either Germans have long since divorced their Indologists knowledge base or this was written by some imbecile from a government department in Delhi on a jobless afternoon using scissors and glue stick. I am surprised no one has protested to such poor representation so far, either self-respecting and knowledgeable Indians have not visited this train or people are so tired by the time they get to this particular compartment (which is the last) that they don't notice this goof-up at all.

5. Smaller details that were not worked out: the serpentine queues outside with scant respect for the students standing in the sun, the disposal plastic cups in which water was being distributed to the students (who will learn about sustainable development and green house gases, waste, etc. in one of the panels!), the needless hype of security with some of them dressed like cowboys and behaving rather rudely with some people, the allocation of less volunteers, no crowd management plans in place, asking people to leave their bags (if they came with one) outside in a pile for security reasons(!) is humiliation in my book...all these would not be an issue if there was more thought into the constitution, understanding of the purpose and clarity in targets - none was visible in the otherwise nice exhibition. I was told that the local organizing was done by the Tamilnadu Science Forum (TNSF), a left-wing science promotion movement based in Chennai. It was surprising that they had done such a sloppy work considering some of the quality of people I have encountered from this forum in other places.

The caption outside every compartment read, 'Ingenious India' and 'Germany - Land of Ideas' , apparently, both ingenuity and ideas were placed elsewhere when this exhibition was planned.

Photo Blog: imposing Kalamkari at the artisans exhibition

Found this massive Kalamkari painting at the artisans exhibition at Kalakshetra. No more words, look at the two photos, they don't do any justice to seeing this painting live.