Pampered sons of besotted parents

Three small vignettes showing how excessive parental love for sons can sometimes lead to absurd situations and do the boys more harm than good. Small wonder then that our daughters grow are far better equipped to face life than our spoilt and pampered sons. It is hard to understand why parents get so completely blinded with love for their sons, when one only needs to look around to see that girls are doing as well, if not better, and most often than not, it is the daughter, and not the son, who takes care of her parents in their old age.

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Assam Elections 2021: Time to regroup

[This might be the wrong moment to be talking about anything else besides the Covid pandemic, but since politics and our politicians are partly responsible for the desperate situation we are in at present, and since May 2 is not too far away when the results will be declared, all the more reason not to postpone this discussion any further.]

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Reorienting the current education system in Assam

This text should be read as a comprehensive proposal for revising the structure and content of the existing education system; can also be used as a basis document to start a discussion on the subject; please do not cite out of context and without due permission.

 

 

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IIT Guwahati and mathematics research

This is a piece I wrote for the Alumni meet of Ph.D. students of the Department of Mathematics of IIT Guwahati to be held in Sept. 2020. More than looking back at my time at IITG from 1995 to 2003, I also reflect on the purpose of research and what I believe is important for research in mathematics in the future. 

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International e-conference on Solidarity in a post-Covid world

The Solidarity e-Conference organised by Professor Mirna Džamonja from the 22nd to the 26th June 2020 was a platform where 'engaged intellectuals and cultural workers could give their personal vision of the world after Covid-19'. It was possibly the first such conference of its kind and was successful in bringing together more than forty experts from many different disciplines, many countries and many ideological inclinations to the same platform. The aim of the conference was There were musicians, artists, writers, lawyers, journalists, theatre directors and philosophers besides mathematicians and scientists, all of whom tried to grapple with the idea of the post-Covid world in their own ways. The central theme was global solidarity, which the conference assumed to be the only way forward in order to survive this crisis, and the conference was described as ‘an international video conference where selected leaders from the world of science, culture and civil society would meet and offer their vision of the world after the crisis’.

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Stolen translation

A story about how translators can sometimes be at the receiving end of unscrupulous authors if they are not careful...and my tribute to a fellow translator who was wronged but chose, gracefully, to do nothing about it.

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Charting the difference

Having spent the last seven years working with the Tangsa people living in the Margherita subdivision of the Tinsukia district of Assam and in the Changlang district of Arunachal Pradesh, I decided to spend a few days exploring possibilities with the Moran-Motok people living in the adjoining areas including Dibrugarh, Tinsukia, Kakopothar and Bordumsa. The Tangsa are basically hills people while the Morans and Motaks have lived in the plains of the Brahmaputra valley as long as they can remember. But there are many other striking differences between these two groups.

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Afghanistan revisited...

Ten years after my first visit to Afghanistan in 2004, there is nothing spectacular to report. The country limps forward, the bombs and the natural disasters notwithstanding. Whether the situation there is better today than it was ten years back is hard to say. 

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All within a weekend

The weekend I want to tell you about had many lovely ingredients:  we made this trip to Bremen mainly because  our annual Asamiya-get-together was scheduled to be held in Worpswede, the picturesque artists' village just outside Bremen. The idea sounded exciting, but I had no idea that it would turn out to be such an extraordinary outing in the end.

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An alternative to our present education system

Here are some observations about our education system and some suggestions for changing it in order to make it better-suited to serve the demands of imparting real education, in light on my personal account of 'why I left mathematics' which I have uploaded in another blog.

Being a product of the Indian system of education and having had the chance to see a few other systems in operation in other countries, I have spent a lot of time thinking about what it is about our own system that makes it fail in achieving its main objective – that of producing really ‘educated’ adults and adults who are really interested in and are really good at their jobs. I’m not saying that everything is bad or wrong with what is in place right now, it is just that it could be made better.

This is my first attempt to put my thoughts in this regard on paper. I will make many sweeping statements and generalisations below, also grossly over-simplify the picture at certain places, and talk only about certain things in preference to others (for example I will not talk about how to finance education). But I hope you will bear with me because my principal aim of writing this article is to point out where some of the problems lie, and to suggest possible remedies; that there are problems is clear, else we would not be in the sorry mess that we find ourselves today. Most of what I write is based on my personal experience of living in Assam and of being part of the education system prevalent in Assam although many of the issues are equally relevant elsewhere.

Little Geniuses who never make it big
We Assamese love having heroes – barely has a student stood first in his or her Matric or higher-secondary exam that the poor child is made out to be the next Einstein or the next Shakespeare. While praising a child’s excellent performance in school is a good thing there has to be some sense of proportion. Saying too much might put a big extra pressure on the child that can in some cases even wreck him or her. Parents have begun to put so much emphasis on acquisition of bookish knowledge, school exams, results and performance that many other things in life which are equally important, like instilling good values and inculcating good habits, lie neglected along the way [for example, what lesson does a child learn when Mama gets paid hired help to do his summer project for him] .

But much before the child is anywhere near finishing school, parents have already decided what their children will go on to do – they will either appear for the engineering entrance exams or the medical entrance. There are two other professions, perhaps three, that somehow might also pass muster – joining the law school or the civil services or becoming managers. But that is all. Nothing else is good enough. Now there must surely be something very badly wrong in a society where only engineers and managers, doctors and lawyers are valued but not poets, artists, musicians, even scientists.

This has serious consequences on two counts – first of all it creates a vacuum in our quest for real knowledge – in a system that values technical and management education over the social and pure sciences, that values a secure govt. job over individual enterprise, there is no emphasis given to research in the pure sciences – in physics, chemistry and mathematics -- as well as in the liberal arts and the humanities. Subjects like philosophy, sociology, anthropology, political science and education are called the ‘general’ stream. It has minimum currency. What we forget is philosophy is the toughest and most abstract discipline of all; what we do not seem to realise is that devaluing the subject ‘education’ is one of the reasons for this present crisis in our education system.

The emphasis of higher education is no longer on a rigorous study of a subject -- knowledge is packaged in market terms, classified as a commodity, students at a university are called customers – in trying to be modern and techno-savvy we seem to have thrown out the baby with the bath-water.

As consequence is that we have not only a waste of talent that could never be allowed to develop, but also a mismatch between what a person is good at doing or would like to do and what he spends his life doing or is expected to do. Imagine the wastage when a talented singer or a natural sportsperson has to sit all day counting notes as the teller in a bank counter! Or a young child who would rather do English or history is forced to study science and then go on to become an engineer. The result -- many of us are stuck in jobs that do not interest us and for which we have no special talent while other things like music or sport which perhaps mean a lot more to us are relegated to the status of hobbies at best, to be indulged in in one’s free time. Small wonder then that this country of more than one billion does so badly in the Olympics or in the world stage of art and music.

And imagine what it all means for the poor child who has just finished school. Perhaps it is the very ambitious parents who are most to blame for this situation. They have to help their child discover his or her own talents and help him or her to find a profession which will not only be thought to be respectable and financially secure but is also mentally satisfying and challenging for the child.

From the point of view of the students, the school teachers must take on the role of mentors and help their students decide, once they get to Class XI or XII whether they should get into a professional course, whether they should opt for higher studies (at a university) or they should join a vocational training school. It should only be a small fraction who should go to university and professional schools, not everybody. There should be provision for proper counselling, not just for students but also for their over-ambitious parents, at the school leaving stage. And each of the institutes of higher learning should have trained counsellors to help their students cope with the rigours of their courses as well as their doubts and concerns about life in general.

Colleges as Time-Pass...
And what about all those many students who do not make it into any of the technical schools, medical schools, law schools or business schools in the country despite their best attempts. They very unwillingly join one or the other college to do their graduation, even while hoping to give the entrance exams another shot the following year. Therefore their participation in the college studies is at best perfunctory. But the college system doesn’t offer very much to win their loyalty either.

Generally, students who have just finished their XII from a school system and have just entered a college are eager to use their new found freedom to experiment, to try out everything – they are full of energy, enthusiasm and expectation . Even more so those few who join the college system deliberately, as a matter of choice, over all the other professional schools. But what is in store for them? They are met by a system which is based on indifference, inertia and complete lack of direction. By having dull uninterested and uninspiring teachers in our colleges we not only waste the immense potential of those students but also maim them for life – turn them into copies of their teachers. I am not saying that all college teachers are equally dull, but the chances of their failing to live up to the expectations of the students are so high that this is nothing short of a real disaster and needs serious rethinking.

And a teacher could be forgiven for everything else if one could say that she at least knew her subject well. But that cannot be expected from someone who has been teaching the same courses year after year from the same frayed notes that they had written up ages ago when they had first started to teach. Small wonder then that college teachers wake up only to register their protest against any change in syllabus! And what does the system require college teachers to do in order to upgrade their ancient knowledge? They are required to attend Orientation courses or Refresher Courses from time to time. And college teachers are often seen showing some enthusiasm to do so. But if one thought that they do so because of their love for the subject, one is mistaken. Most of them do so because it is necessary to do so to get promotions. In my opinion this is the biggest tragedy in our education system –

I have always believed that colleges are redundant – there are no colleges in the Indian sense in most other places of the world. What can colleges do that cannot be done in universities? If the argument is that in a country like India many stop after graduation and hence the under-graduate level has to be handled separately, then it begs the question -- what do we want to do with so many graduates? Is it not better for only those who really want to pursue higher studies (or those who want to sit for competitive exams at a higher level) to do their graduation (and this lot should join the university straightaway and work their way through graduation, post-grad. etc).

Vocational skills rather than useless degrees
For the rest, there is no sense in spending 3 years of their lives getting a degree that helps them to become nothing more than clerks in govt. offices or receptionists. Would it not be better if their education at the post XII level was more focussed on the occupation they want to take up later? I am thinking of vocational colleges, ITIs and polytechnics where diploma courses can be offered for a vast range of occupations. In short, I am all for dismantling the colleges, and instead strengthening the universities at the one end and also setting up many more vocational colleges where quality theoretical and practical education is imparted to students, in professions of their choice.

Of course I also find the idea of having junior colleges for just those two years also a colossal waste of resources – the +2 stage must be clubbed with the high school stage and the PGT subject teachers should be put in charge so that they will then have a little more to do than at most 2 classes per day and no other worry in this universe! Once that is done we shall have a more streamlined system with three types of educational institutes – schools, vocational colleges and universities, with the latter two institutions taking charge of two non-overlapping student populations after the XII standard. Of course I am restricting myself here only of the general streams, and leaving out all discussion with respect to professional and technical institutes like engineering schools, medical schools, law schools etc.

Beyond classroom teaching
As I have said before, a necessary prerequisite for a college or university teacher to be able to teach well, is that he must know his or her subject well, and must be in touch with the recent developments with the subject. But that is not sufficient, for there are at least two components to being a good teacher. The first is the academic component where the teacher has to first be in a position to help and guide his or her students learn the subject (not just to pass examinations with good marks) but also to develop an abiding interest in the subject. The student needs to be told not just what the answers are but also how to go about finding answers, by reading books, by reading papers and journals, by searching the net, through discussion and other methods. Then there is the other half – the social component – a teacher must be able to help his or her students not just to learn the subject but also to become good human beings, to be able to shoulder responsibility, to learn the values of integrity, hard work and honesty. At the college and university level, students should become friends, and teachers should be accessible enough for students to want to open up and tell them their problems, both personal and work related.

The way in which we teach our students and the way in which institutes with huge intakes every year of young bright youngsters take care of them – educational institutes are supposed to be places where they learn their subjects true, but they are also places where the all-round development of these young minds have to take place, and they are given the freedom to ask questions, even unrelated to their immediate lessons. They need care, they need someone to listen to them, they need counselling, they need other platforms for debate and discussion as much as they need instruction. And for all this to happen one does not need extra people – all this should ideally happen within the teacher-student community. Teachers need to play a more organic role and extend their hands to come closer to their students in more real ways. They have to try to become their students’ friends. Some of my former colleagues have done this and have really made a great difference to their students, but I wish many more would follow.

Research only for career promotion?
So much on the subject of teaching, now on to research. It is a myth that someone who shows excellent results in college and university will necessarily turn out into an excellent teacher and researcher in the subject. It requires other skills than just being able to be a disciplined learner to be able to teach well, or to be able to get into serious research. Furthermore, a person who has just obtained his or her Ph.D. (under the guidance of a supervisor) needs a few years before he or she can find her feet, and become independent researchers. Only then should he or she start taking on Ph.D. students of their own. The post-doc stage in most universities of the world is meant to cater to exactly that period. But in India, if you get a Ph.D. today, tomorrow you can be eligible to guide students. What is even more surprising is that you are even expected to do so. As a result the quality of research and training suffers very badly.

I speak only about mathematics but it might be a more general phenomenon: I believe there is something wrong with the Indian higher education system because many university teachers (all having Ph.D.s and producing many more) in many Indian universities do not have very many clues what research is all about – and this I can say because I have been a researcher myself. In the Indian system, a lot of trash that passes as research is published only because of the immense pressure of showing results – the whole business of accumulating credits by college and university teachers (for applying for promotion and higher salaries) by publishing papers and attending or organising symposia is a good and necessary thing, but only if it is done in the right spirit and not reduced to the hollow but very expensive farce that it has become now – publish for the sake of publishing, the appearance of spurious and sub-standard journals where the motto is ‘you publish my paper, I will publish yours and both will be happy’, organising workshops and symposia that do not achieve anything... There are a handful institutes in India where excellent research is being done, but they have not been able to show the way to the rest.

In summary, I believe a few basic structural changes might make our education system more efficient, more student-friendly and more in keeping with the need of our times:

1. At the school level there should be a concerted effort from school teachers to figure out the natural talents and inclinations of their students. Parents and teachers must work together to make sure that the children land up pursuing a career that interests them and also doing what they are good at.
And society must regain its sense of proportion about how they react to someone being a topper (I remember my parents have received a marriage proposal for me just after our B.Sc. results were declared!).
2. Junior colleges should be done away with – the school-system should be revitalised so they all go upto the higher secondary level and the last four years of school (IX to XII) should be given a special status and put in charge of the PGT teachers. All children should be required to attend school till Cl. VIII (which corresponds to our universal education in any case).
3. All undergraduate-colleges should be disbanded. Instead a three-year undergraduate programme should be introduced additionally in all universities. Universities should be suitably strengthened to be able to take charge of undergraduate and postgraduate education. Admission to the under-graduate programme should be based strictly on aptitude and future prospects.
4. Besides the professional schools – technical, managerial, business, medicine, law etc. -- that are already in existence there is also a lot more to be done in areas like sports, music, art, architecture and drama.
Educational institutes at all levels have to recognise that students have other needs apart from the strictly academic – teachers and counsellors should be in place to help students cope with their bigger problems and worries too.
5. The most important new component is the creation of a number of vocational schools and training institutes where high-quality education and training is imparted. The existing Polytechniques and the ITIs are the closest approximations of this new genre of educational –cum-training institutes which should aim to take charge of the vast majority of youngsters who after their Class XII want to learn some skill or craft which will enable them to find a job at the end of it – plumbers, tailors, masons, mechanics, electricians, carpenters, gardeners, as well as beauticians, cooks, baby-sitters and house-maids; all the way up to and including fashion models, designers, chat-show hostesses and flight stewards.
The existing institutes which cater for this like the ITIs and the Polytechniques, as well as secretarial schools to train secretaries and clerks, nursing schools for nurses and carers also need to be seriously restructured and refurbished to make them attractive as well as competitive. These vocational courses (of varying duration depending on the subject) should lead to a diploma and give rigorous theoretical as well as hands-on training to their students to enable them to really learn all the necessary and relevant aspects of their jobs.
6. Decisions on educational teaching and research policy need to seriously reviewed and reconsidered. After all there is no point in persisting with systems (like that of collecting credits for promotion of college and university teachers) which everyone knows has been reduced to a farce with the collusion of and for the benefit of all those involved. Decisions that can be implemented only on paper and cannot be enforced in spirit cause greater damage and wastage in the long run than doing nothing at all.

I admit that what I am suggesting is almost a complete overhaul of the education system –my suggestions will be not easy to implement, and will be met with a lot of resistance and opposition from all quarters I know, but facing these unpleasant truths and effecting these changes seem to me to be the only way forward if our education system has to win back some of its prestige and respect before our own eyes and before that of the world community. I am not claiming for a moment that what I am offering here as an alternative is the best possible – I am sure there are improvements possible – by writing this article I only want to point out that it is high time we stopped pretending everything is all-right with our education system and started talking about some of the real problems that are staring us in our faces.

Before I end, there is one final thing which has to change before everything else and that is the change of mind-set of everyone involved – parents have to accept that their children have a right to choose what they want to pursue as a career, teachers have to realise that being a teacher is something more than just a job because the lives of every student who he or she teaches is affected by it, researchers have to accept that it is not quantity but quality that really matters and that it is not good enough to be clever enough just to be able to fool the system, and our politicians, educationists and policy-makers have to somehow send out a clear signal that they understand what it means for a person to be really educated and that they are serious about ensuring that that is what our education system is meant to do even if it means in order to get the system back on rail. My head will not be spared, I am sure for having said all this, but that is my problem; as long as reading this article provokes you in some way or the other, a beginning would have been made.



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Asamiya Get-together in Volkach

A short description of the recent Asamiya get-together that Stephan and I hosted in our home in Volkach on the weekend of the 31st July-1st August 2010.

After months of talking about it, weeks of preparation and quite a few dozens of e-mail messages and phone calls in all directions, 21 people converged to our house in Volkach (14 of them Asamiya, with their families/spouses/partners) in the last weekend of July for a first Asamiya get-together of sorts in this part of Germany. We were expecting quite a few more, but given that it was the very first time, and there was very little contact before, I think it was quite a success.



I want to begin by saying thank you once again to all those who came for coming, for the very kind words you had to say about the get-together and for sharing your photos with the rest of us, and, to share a bit of the fun with those who could not come, to make sure that next time we have a bigger gathering. A special thanks to Ellie Bou and Nirode da (the celebrated historian Dr. Nirode Barooah from Koeln) for coming and for bestowing dignity and grace to the whole event.



The four of us at Volkach (Hans, Magdalena, Stephan and I) felt very happy to have managed to keep to our rough plan and although it took some organising, it made us feel very satisfied and happy in the end. This was the first time we had as many as a dozen people at one time spending the night as guests in our house, and it was a really nice feeling. Thanks also for the larroos and pithas, the singing, music and dancing, the map with the flags, and for the friendliness that imbued everything with a sense of fun. The patch of parched grass in our garden reminds me constantly of the lovely bonfire we had going in our garden that night.



For those who did not come, a brief description: people started arriving around lunch time on Saturday and we started with a round of introductions around 4 p.m. that lasted till a little after dinner after which we all settled around a bonfire for some music and singing, ending with a Husuri and Bihu dance around 2 a.m. the next morning. On Sunday our guests did some sightseeing in and around Volkach. Some had to leave during the course of the day but those left met for lunch and again around dinner-time in our house for another round of talking and laughing ending again in the wee hours of the morning.


Most importantly, the weather was perfect all through Saturday and Sunday -- it started to rain from early on Monday morning but by then nobody was complaining. But the time we had together was just not enough -- wish we could have prolonged it for at least another day. I hope we can keep meeting informally like this, at least every 1-2 years. And there was a sort of informal agreement that the next meeting will be during the Autumn school break of 2011 in Mr. Yaso Mahanta's Dorfpark Hotel in a beautiful corner of Austria.

And you can be assured of amongst all other things, culinary delights like laroos and pithas made by Rita, music by Sushanta (trumpet) and Kakoli (violin) and some real authentic Husuri from Mr. Mahanta. And if Thunu can be persuaded to join Mr. Mahanta and Wolfgang can be persuaded to bring his guitar along, then you can be assured of a very long and enjoyable night...



For me personally, it was a huge occasion to come to terms with my personal home-sickness, and it made me feel happy again about being an Asomiya and at peace again with the big wide world. There is another reason for me to feel very happy -- when I had first started planning this meet, I found it hard to explain to Stephan how I was so sure that this would work, even though I did not know most of the people personally. But he went along, never-the-less, and helped in every single way he could. In the end, not only did everything work beautifully but in turn our guests were quite amazed at how hard Hans and Magdalena worked to make the whole thing a success and how well they gelled into the predominantly Asamiya atmosphere, given the fact that they were the only non-Asamiya couple in the gathering.

At the end of it all everyone left with a few more friends than they had before they arrived here, and to know that is a wonderfully good feeling.









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Mathematics Education Trust, Assam

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES:
Mathematics Education Trust, Assam (META) came into existence in June, 2004 at the initiative of a group of likeminded people engaged in promotion of mathematics education in the North-east region of the country. These individuals have been involved in various activities like Mathematics Training and Talent Search (MT&TS) Programme of NBHM, Mathematics Olympiad and other voluntary training programmes in this region for the last several years. The experience of these activities suggests that there is a conspicuous gap between the students of this region and the rest of the country in terms of the level of quality and maturity. Therefore, it is felt that unless some special attention is given externally and from a much lower level, there is hardly any hope for improvement of mathematics education in this region only through formal education.

As a result, the trust was formally formed with the following objectives:

1. To organize workshops, seminars and such other activities for improving the awareness and standard of mathematics education in this region.

2. To encourage young and committed school and college teachers to act as disseminators of the cause of quality mathematics education.

3. To develop educational aids and techniques relevant to the specific scenario prevalent in this region.

4. To support promising and needy students of mathematics by providing them financial assistance to pursue their studies.

5. To support and provide financial aid and expertise to other centres or institutions to take up activities and programmes in accordance with the stated objectives.

ORGANIZATION:
The core of the Trust is the Board of Trustees, currently having the following members as trustees:

Prof. Tarakeswar Choudhary, Presently Visiting Professor, Tezpur University, Tezpur, Assam.

Prof. Nanda Ram Das, Department of Mathematics, Gauhati University, Guwahati.

Dr. Meenaxi Barkataki-Ruscheweyh (formerly Bhattacharjee), Department of Mathematics, University of Wuerzburg, Germany.

Dr. Swaroop Nandan Bora, Department of Mathematics, IIT Guwahati, Guwahati.

Dr. Bhaba Kumar Sarma (Managing Trustee), Department of Mathematics, IIT Guwahati, Guwahati.

To plan and carry out its various activities, the Trust has a Programme Committee comprising of fifteen members nominated by the Board of Trustees drawn from different parts of this region (presently all are from the state of Assam). The members of this committee are dedicated teachers who are involved in various voluntary activities for promotion of mathematics and science education in this region. These are some of the people who feel concerned at the present scenario of mathematics education and are ready to work towards its improvement.

For more details and information kindly contact any of the trustees.


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North East Writers' Forum

North East Writers’ Forum NEWF — a forum for the promotion of creative writing in English in North-East India -- was formed in January 1998 to serve as a common platform and to promote the interests of writers writing in English in North-East India, in order to make possible regular interaction and discussion among them and to contribute positively to the dissemination of creative expression to a wider audience. Besides this, the Forum also hopes to encourage the process of translating into English, and thereby make available to a larger audience, the best creative works from the regional languages of this part of the country.

Activities: A Monthly Meeting of the Guwahati Chapter of the Forum is held at the Forum office premises in the Deshabhakta Tarun Ram Phukan Stadium Complex in Guwahati. Readings of recent writings by Forum members and/or of other pieces of writing that members might want to share with others followed by a detailed discussion is the main component of these meetings. Even non-members are welcome to attend the meeting.

The Forum publishes an annual literary journal called NEWFrontiers containing literary pieces in English – poems, stories, essays, travelogues, book-reviews, comments – besides a newsletter containing recent and forthcoming activities of the Forum. Contributions are solicited from all. They may be sent directly to the Editor of the Journal at the office of the Forum.

Besides holding its AGM, the Forum also organizes work-shops, seminars and literary meets from time to time at various locations of the north-east.

Membership: Membership is open to anyone (who has passed Class XII or its equivalent) who is interested in writing. For membership forms and for further details about the Forum please contact the Secretary or send a request to the Office of the Forum.

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