We will show leadership to the world?
Is only India talking the nuclear truth? Other nations, less than perfect?

Can the Indian people trust only Manmohan Singh and Pranab Mukerjee?
What are the Prime Minister’s true beliefs on the nuclear deal?

Yes, India seems to be pretending a lot. We seem to be innocent and at the same time very smart! That is what both the PM and his long-time colleague in the Cabinet, the foreign minister, both together seem to give the impression to the country.

What is the credibility of these two gentlemen?
Someone should ask them like this!
If  the 23PM  doesn’t help to clear the many doubts or helps to instill confidence in his moves on nuclear deal, then, his  regime might prove to be less than truthful in  the running of the government.

Democratic governments win on public trust. More than the trust votes. More so in the case of the Manmohan Singh government.

This government is not centered on any one’s clear leadership. More so, when it comes to the deal like the highly technical and also highly controversial (even within the international community) deal.

And when it comes to Dr.Singh’s leadership, it is less than a typical democratic leadership. He doesn’t enjoy the confidence of the country at large, he might be a good man, a humble self and yet he derives his authority not from the people but because of Sonia Gandhi’s peculiar predicaments!

So, more than ever, the Prime Minister has a bounden duty to educate and explain to the people and must win the trust of the country at large.
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And a Chinese scholar who hasn’t visited India to lead the research team?

Oxford University is doing some innovative programmes on India, it seems. We should wlecome it in India for such innovative programmes, planned and run from far off, from a vantage academic background must surely give us, in India in particular some rare insights.

First, the programme. It is named after an Indian academic, Sanjay Loll who worked at Merton College and he is supposed to be an expert on Indian development and globalization challenges. Fine.

Now, the head of the team chosen for the Indian programme is a Chinese academic, Xiaolan Fu, a Chinese Indologist who was trained under an Indian economist but who hasnt yet seen India. The progamme is too mouthful, Programme for Technology and Management for Development. Rather too many issues, into too narrow a focus, we feel.

And, another topic thrown in is the “digital divide”! What is this? Someone must have got this idea by reading nor even closely looking at India’s emergence as a software giant? It looks like that.

First, the digital divide is not such a big divide as on date. The “e-service for farmers” is again a too early topic, we feel. We, at Vadamalai Media are working at such an issue for long. So, we must be knowing! Agriculture is  also a vast and also a complex issue if we are to bring in the “e-service”. “E-governance”, yes, is a greater and a more relevant issue at the moment and the TCS is doing a programme.

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Reason and Faith
How to create a secular India, a secular democratic society?

“Two extravagances: to exclude Reason, to admit only Reason”
Blaise Pascal
Modern life is as much about sciences and religion, as they ever was at any time. Also, reason and faith. They too are as much about our life, our everyday life as ever!

But there is history and historical developments. There are also the big questions.
The new year-eve, at the end of 2007 and the beginning of 2008 brought home the very same big questions from some big mind’s responses to them.
It was as much about sciences, the universe, the cosmos and these developments, these new ‘truths” also brought home how at every stage we change our opinions, be it the sciences, the scientific truths as well as the religious truths.

Now, we are told human evolution was all about man becoming a meat-eater. Now, the evolutionists say that evolution started with man learning to cook food. Cooked food gave man the leisure and the free time enabled us to devote our time for other cultural achievements.
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Anyone cares for such state of affairs?
Certainly not Manmohan Singh or Arjun Singh!

This year’s annual rankings of the world’s best universities are out! What is news? What do Indian universities know about such news? There was no reaction whatever from whatever quarters you expect to have!

Yes, no reaction from the Prime Minister, supposedly the most learned university man at the top of the honours! Not also from the next best bet, we mean the education minister of the country, the very venerable Arjun Singh who enjoys the distinct honour of presiding over the HRD ministry twice! What qualifies him to have that double honour? His learning or erudition or his political clout? Or, his track record? On any conceivable ground he is no performer, may be someone over-estimates his political clout or he himself imagines? One can’t be sure!

Then, in the order of our education hierarchy. UDC? When you last heard of such a body in existence? Or, the newly created AICTE? Its clout also had fallen, once the country realised that the private sector players, the most unscrupulous in the country had now joined hands to create education empires, vast complexes of campuses, almost rivaling the newly coming SEZs. Yes, it is literally vast real estates these private self-financing ventures that spin money Ratan Tata might envy. In TN, you can see the full play of this highly unscrupulous elements, each has a notorious story about himself, vast encroachments urban land, even encroaching the waterways and riverbeds and also adopting all the know rules to break all rules and conventions in establishing these complexes and literally collecting money through a water tap-like system!

The education standards you can expect from these establishments. They are also now all deemed universities; they don’t respect the UGC, AICTE or the state governments. In TN, it is an open scandal. No less in Kerala where the powerful private education lobby threatens the very Achudananadan government!

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Scientists, writers or leaders?

India is a land of Gandhi. It is a matter of great pride to Indians that at least this year, the Nobel Foundations felt constrained to publicly confess it was a mistake on the Nobel Committee not to have given the Peace Nobel to Gandhi.

Why? This question is not asked by everyone concerned. Neither by the Nobel Committee nor by the Western intellectuals. Nor by the Indians themselves.

The real obstacle to Gandhi getting the Prize was the power of British colonial power. Churchill and Rudyard Kipling, the two most undeserving names got the Prize for, of all reasons, literature! This should be the supreme irony. But no one asked and even today fails to ask.

While luckily at least Tagore was spotted by British artists and thus he won the Prize.

Even now, in post-Independent India, no one dares to ask why Indian language literatures don’t get the Nobel Prize. Or for that matter, the several others, more rare and precious languages, even the very small minority languages have good literature. The Eastern European nations have produced much literature, poetry and novels that testify to the triumph of human spirit.
Why only English language is given so much attention? Why you search for people who are past their prime to award this prize?

Even literature Nobel Prizes must come to the Indian language literatures.
This year, at least one Indian had the honour of being mentioned as head of an Inter-Government Panel on Climate change that won the Peace Nobel. Thank god, one heaved a sigh of relief!
Why then no Indian scientist, that is born and brought up and works in India, had won a Nobel Prize after Sir C.V.Raman had the honour in 1930? Yes, the other Indian names, Khurana and S.Chandrasekhar won the Nobel Prizes, but they worked for long enough, almost after they became virtually American citizens, as like other foreign-born, America-domiciled names, before they were honoured with a Nobel. Even Amartya Sen would not have won the prize if he had remained within India, nay, even if he had continued to live the UK! Yes, such is the power and pull of the American universities and also American material and political and global power.

This year’s Peace Nobel deservedly went to AL Gore, the US Vice-President who narrowly lost the Presidency and as commentators have endorsed that Gore won the popular vote but the Republican-dominated Supreme Court handed over the White House to his rival George Bush! Now, in a sort of rebuff, the Nobel Foundation had recognised that Gore is the man to save the world, unlike his rival Bush is seen widely as the greatest disaster that had happened to the US in recent years.

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An unequal and inequitous society?
Our society is inegalitarian; hierarchical only!

Only social sciences can give us that rare insight into human behaviour,human psychology and also much of the social dynamics without which we can’t talk possibly with any deeper sense about the future.

A new Liberalism in times of so much terror and destruction and violence?

The Social Justice ministry presided over by Meira Kumar, the distinguished daughter of the late great leader Jagjivan Ram, has written to the government, the ministry of braodcasting, drawing attention to the need for the media, in particular,how the names of specific castes be addressed.The current usages like “upper castes” and “lower castes” give a derogatory impression and so the correct scheduled castes and scheduled tribes and other backward castes are better in public discourse.This is a right message and the right sentiment,given the discriminations that abound in our society.
The terms “castes”and”classes” are always problematic and troublesome in our social discourse. They convey often conflicting meanings.
Society is a unique human organisation that accommodates and assmilates all the humans and their aspirations. Their often contradictory natures, the individuals and groups within societies, are turned into some structure and given meaning in differing manners suited for each age and times.
The various progressive measures to bring in a new sense of social justice have done much to ensure this but the more political solutions like 69 per cent reservations for OBCs have been stalled by court cases and at present the 50 per cent reservation seems to be one solution for justice.But the political solutions remain political, only a vote bank politics and the society as a whole has remained immune to the march towards what is called social justice.

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Winston Churchill dropped!
British curriculum doesn’t teach about him!
What about teaching at least the current history?

The latest terrorist attacks in Glasgow only highlights the new phenomenon. The Indian born, young doctors were implicated in the new terrorist threats.
While terrorism is a serious threat to a peaceful world,terrorists among the well-educated and motivated requires a serious study and response.
Can education help?What else education is for?

What we have to teach our children today?

What is the basic content and curriculum of education that can save the countries,old and the new? In the UK schools?And in the Indian schools too?
There is a need for serious introspection among the educators.
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Education’s current priorities! Education is not one word! It is a multi-layered concept. So,you can’t grasp the meaning and its reach in any easy way.

Education has now acquired a much more complex meaning and significance.

Education is a continuous process,its reach is enormous,it effects basic changes in societies and nations!
We live in a much changed world.There is large-scale migration of people,both educated and uneducated.
The best educated and the best motivated among the younger generation migrate!

Education is not one word! It is a multi-layered concept. So,you can’t grasp the meaning and its reach in any easy way.
Education has now acquired a much more complex meaning and significance.

There are other aspects as well.See the current generation’s changes.Now,girls’ education has altogether taken a new dimension.if there is one big change that characterises this generation,it is the girls’ education.
Just now, we read through a book on current world changes in this part of the world,namely in India,Pakistan,Afghanistan,Tibet and Nepal.Pankaj Mishra’s” “Temptations of the West” by a 35 year old new Indian journalist,new for the simple reason,he is one of the new generation himself and he brings a refreshing point of view for the changes that are taking place in these geographically nearer countries and regions of India.

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American elementary and secondary schools show India in a bad light!

USA is home to some strong 80,000 odd Indian students, some 20 lakh well-earning Indian families. Every other American worker or an expert must know how the Indian brainpower moves some of the biggest American enterpprises. So, the current negative perceptions of Indians taught in American schools could at best be only a short-lived phenomenon.

It looks that when the whole world is feeling the impact of globalisation and the peoples of the world are waking up to new realities in the emerging world, when old equations drastically change, some countries  seem to live in a more prejudiced cocoons.

A recent report that a study shows that American elementary and secondary school textbooks show India not in true light!

Asia Society is a well-known society that gives more academic and other scholarly pursuits to enhance the understanding of Asia and Asian countries and their cultures.

A 1976 survey by the Society, we are told, did cover some 306 books in 50 states and these books were studied by a team of some 103 experts and the findings were very blatantly wrong.
The picture of India seems negative from these books. So, says Prof.Arthur Rubinoff of the Toranto University, the outcome is that the American politicians, the Congressmen and the Senators, have wrong perceptions of India. John W.Mellor, the author of one book, India: A rising middle power says that US policy towards India is a product of some stereotypes, the popular and uncritical and much prejudiced views of India being a country of snake charmers and  Hindu sanyasis, caste, Dalits etc have give some wrong messages.

It is natural for a powerful country like America and more so for a highly materialistic and highly hedonistic modern culture like that of Americans, is very likely to get put off by the age-old customs and practices of a millennium-old Hindu civilisation and history. India after all is an ancient civilisation as the Christian and Jewish civilisations. Any developed and old religion is likely to be misunderstood for outsiders. Even when the Muslims and their Islamic religion is now misunderstood by the West, the Samuel Huntington’s thesis is so blatantly flawed and  for Americans to expect to approach such theme like Hinduism and its tenets in a spirit of  open mind is not easy.

A state department (Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs) study in 1982 found that “American attitudes about India focus on disease, death and illiteracy”.

It is not surprising. If only we Indians can retort:” You, Americans, how would you feel if we take America as a society where the black Americans are being treated as we once treated the Dalits in India, where in American the plight of single mothers, the deprived underclass live in such squalor and neglect, where to get any health benefit is next to impossible…You face the entire world’s hatred as to American approach to world affairs…”

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What is a political reality is now entangled in a complex judicial web!
It is time Mr.Arjun Singh, the HRD, minister makes way for a new comer!
Indian education caught in a man-made crisis!

Indian education system is something gigantic by world standards. It  caters to a billion population. India is also a young country. That means education matters a lot to a lot of people.

One aspect is the numbers, the quantitative factor. We have to provide education right from the start to the end of a professional career for lots of aspirants who now constitute the aspirations middle class. Second, there is the quality of Indian education.
On both the counts India  has done well, as far the statistics goes. But the statistics don’t go far enough.

There are now newer issues that have clogged the system with lots of backlogs, airpockets, social resistance, the case and the class and the new marketisation of education as a commodity. So, education is no more a concept that can be defined in any clear and simple academic terms. We have of course many well-meaning experts and genuine educators, idealists and experts in every branch of education.

But what is being missed today is that both on the quantitative and qualitative terms we have lots of broader vision. We have got stuck in some man-made crises.

One is the lack of progress on numbers in terms of the Millennium Development Goals. We have to push the education for all scheme more vigorously. This can be done only by the government, government machinery plus, may, be some private sector participation, NGOs and what have you. The Public-Private Partnership is a new concept that has to be imaginatively applied and result achieved.

SarvaShiksha Abyan is a great concept. But what is the progress? What is in store for the concept in the 11th Plan?

Of course children education is also closely tied up with ICDS and other midday-meals and other health and social sector spending, more on girl children.

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