"Snakes in the Ganga" - An Exclusive Discussion with Rajiv Malhotra

 

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Back from the enemy country

Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Dawn

RARELY are Pakistanis allowed to cross their eastern border. We are told that’s so because on the other side is the enemy. Visa restrictions ensure that only the slightest trickle of people flows in either direction. Hence ordinary academics like me rarely get to interact with their Indian counterparts. But an invitation to speak at the Hyderabad Literary Festival, and the fortuitous grant of a four-city non-police reporting visa, led to my 11-day 12-lecture marathon at Indian universities, colleges, and various public places. This unusual situation leads me here to share sundry observations.

At first blush, it seemed I hadn’t travelled far at all. My first public colloquium was delivered in Urdu at the Maulana Azad National Urdu University (MANUU) in Hyderabad. With most females in burqa, and most young men bearing beards, MANUU is more conservative in appearance than any Urdu university (there are several) on the Pakistani side.

Established in 1998, it seeks to “promote and develop the Urdu language and to impart education and training in vocational and technical subjects”. Relative to its Pakistani counterparts, it is better endowed in terms of land, infrastructure and resources.

But there’s a still bigger difference: this university’s students are largely graduates of Indian madressahs while almost all university students in Pakistan come from secular schools. Thus, MANUU’s development of video “bridge courses” in Urdu must be considered as a significant effort to teach English and certain marketable skills to those with only religious training. I am not aware of any comparable programme in Pakistan. Shouldn’t we over here be asking how the surging output of Pakistani madressahs is to be handled? Why have we abandoned efforts to help those for whom secular schooling was never a choice? 

To my embarrassment, I was unable to fulfil my host’s request to recommend good introductory textbooks in Urdu from Pakistan. But how could I? Such books don’t exist and probably never will. Although I give science lectures as often in Urdu as English, the books I use are only in English. Somehow Pakistan never summoned the necessary vigour for transplanting modern ideas into Urdu. The impetus for this has been lost forever. Urdu, as the language of Islam in undivided India, once had enormous political significance. Education in Urdu was demanded by the Muslim League as a reason for wanting Pakistan!

A little down the road lies a different world. At the Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) the best and brightest of India’s young, selected after cut-throat competition, are engaged in a furious race to the top. IIIT-H boasts that its fresh graduates have recently been snapped up with fantastic Rs1.5 crore (Indian) salaries by corporate entities such as Google and Facebook.

This face of modern India is equally visible at the various Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), whose numbers have exploded from four to 18. They are the showpieces of Indian higher education. I spoke at three — Bombay, Gandhinagar, and Delhi — and was not disappointed. But some Indian academics feel otherwise.

Engineering education at the IITs, says Prof Raghubir Sahran of IIT-GN, has remained “mainly mimetic of foreign models (like MIT) and captive to the demands of the market and corporate agendas”. My physicist friend, Prof Deshdeep Sahdev, agrees. He left IIT-K to start his own company that now competes with Hewlett Packard in making tunnelling electron microscopes and says IIT students are strongly drill-oriented, not innovative.

Still, even if the IITs are not top class, they are certainly good. Why has Pakistan failed in making its own version of the IITs? One essential condition is openness to the world of ideas. This mandates the physical presence of foreign visitors.

Indeed, on Indian campuses one sees a large number of foreigners — American, European, Japanese, and Chinese.

They come for short visits as well as long stays, enriching universities and research centres.

Not so in Pakistan where foreigners are a rarity, to be regarded with suspicion. For example, at the National Centre for Physics, which is nominally a part of Quaid-i-Azam University but is actually ‘owned’ by the Strategic Plans Division (the custodian of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons), academic visitors are so tightly restricted that they seek to flee their jails soon after arrival.

Those who came from Canada, Turkey and Iran to a recent conference at the NCP protested in writing and privately told us that they would never want to come back.

Tensions between secular and religious forces appear high in Modi’s India. Although an outsider cannot accurately judge the extent, I saw sparks fly when Nayantara Sahgal, the celebrated novelist who was the first of 35 Indian intellectuals to hand back their government awards, shared the stage with the governor of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. After she spoke on the threats to writers, the murder of three Indian rationalists, and the lynching of a Muslim man falsely accused of possessing beef, the enraged governor threw aside his prepared speech and excoriated her for siding with terrorists.

Hindutva ideology has put the ‘scientific temper’ of Nehruvian times under visible stress. My presentations on science and rationality sometimes resulted in a number of polite, but obviously unfriendly, comments from the audience.

Legitimate cultural pride over path-breaking achievements of ancient Hindu scholars is being seamlessly mixed with pseudoscience. Shockingly, an invited paper at the recent Indian Science Congress claimed that Lord Shiva was the world’s greatest environmentalist. Another delegate blew on a ‘conch’ shell for a full two minutes because it would exercise the rectal muscles of Congress delegates!

Pakistan and India may be moving along divergent paths of development but their commonalities are becoming more accentuated as well. Engaging with the other is vital — and certainly possible.

Although I sometimes took unpopular political positions at no point did I, as a Pakistani, experience hostility. The mature response of both governments to the Pathankot attack gives hope that Pakistan and India might yet learn to live with each other as normal neighbours. This in spite of the awful reality that terrorism is here to stay.

My Weltanschhaung - 14/02/2012

Being Valentine's Day, I am reminded of the guy who spoke at IIT-Kharagpur's humour festival - "Yeh Valentine day kya hai? Yeh to ek soone ka hiran hai jo dhanush banane wale companiyon ne bazaar me chhod rakha hai.! Translation, 'This Valentine's Day business is a golden deer released in to the market by firms selling bows'.

I am shocked at the competence of the managers of Jet Airways and Kingfisher Airlines who have not paid their staff salaries for two months. These are supposedly market savvy, professional and efficient firms.
What shocks me the most is the statement by Sanjay Aggarwal CEO of Kingfisher,  "We got hit by a couple of large unanticipated payments which had to be addressed on an emergency basis." 
How can you be unaware of such large payments coming up? Is there no penalty for not paying salaries on time? I think both these firms tactics aim to scupper any relief and rescue of Air-India, stating that they all need relief from the government.

I am surprised that the Israeli Prime Minister knew who attacked his staff in New Delhi even before the local police. The Israelis and its allies have been assasinating Iranian nuclear scientists without the same publicity though. The bomb blast in Delhi may be aimed at preventing India from signing up a bilateral treaty with Iran. Will the Indian government buckle under the pressure?

IITians are Big Fools

Rajesh Gajra

No, it wasn't a frustrated or failed aspirant but a former IITian who said this last week at a lecture while addressing a crowd of nearly a thousand IITians and other college students during the annual Techfest at Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IITB). But coming from Dunu Roy, who, unlike his colleagues and peers, decided to pursue grassroot integration of technology with local and practical requirements, it shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone who has followed this IITian's career.

But for a first-timer, the 90-minute talk and the subsequent Q&A could well have been an eye-opener. Provoking his audience by calling them "big fools" who know nothing about India and its village life, Roy said the IITians are victims of the politics of education and science. He added that the first lesson he learnt was that technologists and engineers are under an illusion that they get to take the decisions. That was not all. He went on to say that environmental dynamics aren't understood by engineers who seem to specialise in solving one problem to create another one, thereby creating a "sustainability for the engineering profession and not for the people".

"How many of you will end up working for the Haliburtons and Microsofts of the world?" he asked. And then proceeded to answer by pointing out that many of the students would do so because "Indian technical education is geared to meet global demands". The collapse of the US education system has led to a shortage of scientists and technologists, he said, which is why the courses they [the IITians] are learning are required for the US". Since Indian engineers are also cheaper than the American counterparts, "it made good sense for the Indian government to promote technical education so that you can provide cheap service to the US." Therefore, he suggested, the curriculum has changed. Earlier, he pointed out, IITs had a more integrated approach and also taught humanities, ethics and logic. But these subjects were removed in order to hasten the production of 'unreal' technologists.

The original vision to set up IITs stemmed from the independence movement. The Indian leaders at that time realised "the need to have trained scientists and technologists" who could provide equal rights to food, shelter, education and work to the people. The idea was to take the "best from universal education, invest in pockets like IITs (so that) they would return their expertise to the common pool of the country." Which is why the money to fund the IITs comes from the exchequer, he pointed out.

And then came perhaps the most thought-provoking part of the lecture. Referring to the hyped-up success stories of IITians , he cited the example of Kanwal Rekhi, a Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist who has earned millions of dollars, Roy posited that while the ostensible aim of education is to teach us about success, most of our learnings comes from analysing and understanding failures. For every one IITian who makes money, there are 10 others who don't. And no one talks about the thousands of IITians who stay back and work for the country despite encountering victimisation by domestic politics of science and technology. Urging the young students to ask questions, and not just be receivers of "wisdom", Roy asked them to "learn the laws of motion of society and not just the laws of motion of science."

And coming from him, it did not sound phoney. For after his post-graduation from IITB, Roy moved to Shahdol district of Madhya Pradesh and started the Vidushak Karkhana as part of the Shahdol Group carrying out focussed work on building a development model for the district and its implementation, in conjunction with local people.He was involved in this for 17 years during which he earned his income primarily out of repairing bicycles in the village district. He then shifted to Delhi for a four-year stint with the World Wide Fund for Nature, and later set up the Hazards Centre, a multi-disciplinary consultancy group.

It's rare for IITians to be the recipients of such blunt talk. And it should be noted that the student organisers of Techfest invited Dunu Roy to give this talk after accepting his condition that there would be no restriction on the content of his lecture. So perhaps the IITians are not such big fools after all.