Edutainment?

A friend who works with ‘Education’ (as we in the third sector often like to put it) once told me ” In India its difficult enough to obtain an education without having to worry about its quality too”.

I like to believe in the potential of private enterprise to do do wonders for education, professor James Tooley’s new book – the beautiful tree, does a great job of pointing how this might be plausible with primary education.

I’m also a long seasoned advocate of the Friedman argument that the Government has no business being in business. In India there is no business quite as complicated (both on the regulatory scenario front and on the potential impact front) as the business of higher education.

The argument against the utility of certification and regulatory roadblocks to offering and receiving higher education more common sense than anything else.

Sadly though, when one takes sides one often (and I am guilty of this in more ways than one) — one forgets to account for the losers in the short-run. Take the ICFAI mess in the cities of Hyderabad and Jaipur for instance.

So what can you do, as a student – while the rest of us sit and pontificate about the merits and demerits of who should be in the business of education or who shouldn’t?

Take a look at this article which suggests that students’ check the following four things before committing a good year or more of their lives to an ‘institution’ -

a. Is the Institution awarding the degree, either a valid University or Deemed to be University? If yes, is it operating within its authorized jurisdiction?

b. Does the course/ programme have the approval of the relevant professional council?

c. Does the institution have valid accreditation?

d. Is the institution awarding the degree a member of the Association of Indian Universities?

I recommend everyone who is contemplating any sort of higher education (in India) read this piece thouroughly!

As the author points out towards the end:

“…it is important that students know the regulatory environment in the field of higher education in India. Knowing the legal requirements and taking reasonable care in these matters can help the youth of this country avoid losing money and precious years to well marketed, money-oriented educational business empires. It is certainly better to be careful than to be sorry!”

Because

There was a point in my life when I was a fan of ’causes’. Not the Facebook app.

Friends would remember me as someone of strong opinions, strong ideals… as someone convinced of themselves. Wholly. Fully given to a set of beliefs and someone who always wore the same lens through which she saw the world.

Now I’m a different person – I ask why, how, do those numbers stack up?

A couple of years ago when an activist organization sent me an e-mail about the ‘evil’ of big corporations — I would do pass it around to everyone I knew and all those who happened to be on my contact list by accident.

Today I chanced upon another one of those e-mails (usually deleted these days without even a glance) and it caused me to ponder just how sensationalist and non-rigourous it was and consequently how sensationalist and non-rigourous by extension I must have been. 

There is nothing very surprising about this in itself. People grow up. Intelligence arrives as do wisdom teeth.

This particular mail I got had to do with the formerly christened Swine Flu now — now known by its more austere name the H1N1 virus.  This e-mail originated from a group of ‘concerned citizens’, whose sworn mission is to oppose large corporate entities they regularly blame for damaginf the environment, perpetuating hunger in the third world, sustaining child soldiers and now also causing Swine Flu. 

If you are like me, you already smell a rat, or a pig — as the case might be. To be anti-corporate entities for economic reasons, labour rights and so on is understandable. But to connect them to Swine Flue is an example of hijacking am event to strengthen the case of cause without any established causality.

Sample these statements from the e-mail I received – wait, forge the statements, here is the title “The Truth About Swine Flu”; did you know there was a lie involved? I didn’t. Insinuation number 1.                                                                    

Now to the statements — No-one yet knows whether swine flu will become a global pandemic, but it is becoming clear where it came from – most likely a giant pig factory farm run by an American multinational corporation in Veracruz, Mexico.” Notice, GIANT AMERICAN MULTINATIONAL CORPORATION —  advocacy communications at its best.

“These factory farms are disgusting and dangerous, and they’re rapidly multiplying.” – Incidentally, bolds are all as they are in the e-mail. Notice, DISGUSTING and DANGEROUS – also rapidly multiplying; here is my question – links, footnotes, data?

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) must investigate and develop regulations for these farms to protect global health.” Global health of course, is merely a function of regulating pig farms. Snort. 

“Big agrobusiness will try to obstruct and scuttle any attempts at reform” , ahem, substantiate?! 

If we reach 200,000 signatures we will deliver it to the WHO in Geneva with a herd of cardboard pigs. For every 1000 petition signatures we will add a pig to the herd” (italics my own) – This is how seriosuly we want to take global health and swine flu – not policy, not a serious study of what ‘regulations’ might work – but cardboard pigs, sure. Bring ‘em on!

“Smithfield itself has already been fined $12.6m and is currently under another federal investigation in the US for toxic environmental damage from pig excrement lakes.”…a combination of increased global meat consumption and a powerful industry motivated by profit…”, and yet because there is a market for pork apparently there isn’t enough regulation! Snort. 

Swine Flu, let me state, is something that calls for serious research and action. However, what it does not call for, is hijacking of its intrinsic importance by an anti-profit, anti-corporations bandwagon that does little else than hollar about regulations and practise strategic communication games to get ints finger on the world’s issues-pie. 

Sheesh.

Out of it?

Sometimes you realize that its been too long.

Too long since you’ve been on one side of the fence. Too long since someone called you, went for a walk with you, shared you as the prize with friends, had conversation, behaved as if you were a variable in future plans that could change the ‘effect size’…

Am I out of it?

What if the differences suddenly seem sharper the familiarities? What if a certain part of you has gone cold, if the rains are a little less wonderful, the winds blow a little less softly than they used to….

If silences are longer and  heavier than the laughter?

I know we say working on it helps, but what if working on it is no longer an appealing thought? What if every word seems like a potential escape hatch. What do you do with a feeling that keeps telling you — Its you and the crowd, again. And you don’t care enough about the crowd anyway.

What if you feel that the fundamentals are disappointing. Am I out of it?

The face no longer lights up any warmth in your heart, the words seem like unsolicited advice, the phone calls are an obligation and the effort seems totally unnecessary.

What do you with the effort you made for so long? Give up on it? Move to a different city and forget it? Stay in the same place and fight alone because there is longer anyone to share with who would understand anyway?

What if you are own best friend now, if people you would barely call friends seem to care and do more for you in comparison? Is it time then? You tell me…

Wanted: A Transformative Experience

I’m going through a crisis of faith – the non-religious kind.

The ‘drafts’ section of my e-mail is overflowing with links to new jobs. I’ve even been gifted a new set of paints and a sketch-book. I was advised to use my lay-off as a break, find some time to ‘unwind’, do what I feel like…. but that is the problem.

I feel stretched, uninspired even to apply, tired to read, my ears are buzzing with music that sounds no more different from set of discordant clangs.

How does one find that single transformative experience? A little tranquility, a little less panic, a little noice, some wind, some space, a burrow, freedom? Its been eons since I’ve done anything even remotely creative, carefree, happy and just me. In fact I’ve forgotten what that ever felt like.

In two weeks I’ll be starting with a new place, a new set of bosses, a new house (not home), more brokers, bank accounts….

This is what I have been reduced to – a rag doll who hammers away at a silly machine all day with a plastic smile. And this is what I have reduced this space to — (once creative and even fun) just another scrap of digital papering to record my irrational miseries.

The 29C Effect

Everyday in the morning I wake up at 07:00 a.m to the constant beeping of my cellphone. I then press ’snooze’ and get back under my sheet.

I do this at least three times on average and end up waking up at 07:30 a.m. I then rush through a bath, put on a thoroughly unmatched Kurta over ancient jeans and walk through a mini-swamp, a pile of stones, huge piles of cow-dung and some lousy construction to reach the famous ECR road.

By this time it is usually exactly 08:20 a.m.

At this point I slowly melt into the motley bunch of fisher women, harried mothers’ with school bags and children in tow, men looking for casual labour, the day-shift call center executive and the proverbial IT kid. We all then compete with each other to stuff ourselves into already over crowded share-autos.

Share autos are just larger three wheelers with open sides that make up for the fact that they are not quite large enough.

Once I succeed at getting into one of these I make my honking journey across ECR to Thiruvanmiyur bus stand. This entire painful routine usually ends up guaranteeing me a seat in my all-time favourite bus – the 29C AC special.

The AC specials are ultra-modern ‘low-floor, high-seat, music-blaring, air-conditioned, automated-swinging-door, uniformed conductor and polite driver’ specials. They are lovely.  They are also white with huge advertisements painted in bold colours across them. And there are just two leaving every hour.

I have a favourite seat, its in the back half of the bus. Second from the front, near the windows that the 29C occupants can see out of but that people on the road can’t see through. I wait to pay the conductor my 23 rupees and then listen to my iPod till I get to Sterling road.

The 29C community is a small bunch of people. A retired army officer who does strategic consulting at some shady Nungambakkam firm, a real well meaning middle-aged aunty who has a bad leg and requests an unscheduled stop at the Chola Sheraton, the three college girls who talk about the ‘worst lectures’ ever who get off at Stella and the quirky young chap with a stubble like Abhishek Bacchan — carrying a pink bag and reading a book on fashion design.

We see each other every day. Some of us smile, some of us even say good morning. Most of us know we are in this bus together sharing a journey. We wait together when our beloved bus is later and express surprise if even one us misses a day in the week. The 29C effect calmed me, prepared me for office and battles of the day, made me belong to a bunch of comfort-seeking yet poor members of the ‘middle-class’.

From 6th of March i will cease to be a part of these people’s lives and their stories. I will never know if the effeminate guy won his art competition, if the aunty managed to get her sons to fix the fuse, if the girls managed to bunk their classes or if the tired wage worker managed to save up to recharge his phone to tell his son in Perambur that he now uses an AC bus.

Another two days and the inexplicably comforting 29C effect will be history. No wait, it will go on to write histories that no one will ever read.  I will no longer be a character on its stage. Stop the bus, I want to get off…

The Business of Being Lonely

I need a new place to go to and if people didn’t hire-by-the-blog I would say more. All through this trauma I’ve felt a cold updraft blowing up my neck.

I’m surrounded by people who say they care. “Don’t worry”,  “come on, you know you’re talented”, “why should you have any trouble finding a job”, “its not your fault”, “don’t be silly girl, you are so bright” – the constant refrain.

It rings in my ears, swims around in my brain and I still can’t deal with it.

They call me and mail me because they’re concerned… “I can’t believe this has happened to you”, “there must be something wrong with people where you work”, “the organization must have a history”, “maybe you just don’t fit”, “this is how the sector works” and the king of all kind words is this one – “Its all for the larger good” ….. SIGH.

And I get tired. Writing the same old applications, back to square one from six months ago.

The trouble is this is not what I want to hear.

I don’t want to be told I am good, the hell with it – I know I am, or rather was, good at what I did. I certainly know I was better than most average people.

I know, for example, that I added value, made things efficient and I poured my heart into it just like Howard Schultz did. Maybe not at the same scale, but certainly I tried. He ended up with Star Bucks. Look at where I am… don’t even have enough of a bank balance for a blessed burnt coffee from a lousy Barista down the road.

Its not even that its recession, that my firm ran out of money or even that ‘losing the job’ perse that matters.

Some part of me felt (and knew, albeit wrongly) all through life  that anything I gave a fair shot to would end up being a success.

I’ve been schooled to believe that the bright come out first, and that in my case, in most instances — laziness got in between. So how am I here now? At this juncture – out without a job like so many others (but not quite like them), too late to go back to grad school, missed the bus on all scholarships and with little hope or faith that I will land another job anytime soon.

Welcome to the business of being lonely. This is how it feels to have landed a great job, worked hard and then be thrown out. This is what it feels like to be honest and put in effort and then become a pawn in an entirely new game you never knew the sophisticated souls around you were playing.

The business of being lonely is characterized by a strong sense of anger (mostly self-directed), a large dose of disappointment, a reality-check cum slap-in-face (choose what you prefer), a huge looming sense of disillusionment and the need to hear the right thing from people around and be totally disappointed on that front too.

People make it their business to sympathize – but its in the business of being lonely where the little things start to hurt. The fact that others around you earn, have busy lives which they expect you to understand because after all you were once there yourself, the fact that well meaning others will constantly tell you that its not a big deal – and just because you don’t mope decide that you are so strong that making jokes about it wont hurt either.

The business of being lonely is big business. Its so big it will swamp you in its enormity, it will dwarf all other concerns, zap your energy and make others impatient with you.

It is after all efficient, who has the time for emotions – the world is pragmatic and if I don’t pull up my non-existent socks someone else will walk away with the Gucci boots.

Where are we headed?

Its raining and it doesn’t stop.

I trudge and wade through streets flooded with brown water -  the television and newspapers are also flooded with news of Mumbai’s latest horror story, the burning domes of the Taj, lost lives at Leopold and the people whose lives were lost on a shooting spree in a police vehicle.

Seems almost surreal, like something out of a good new age cinema film – only we can’t just walk out of the cinema hall and applaud the good screenplay.

So, while I trudged out in the pouring rain two incidents came back to me in ‘TechniColour’.  a Diwali shopping venture at Sarojini Nagar and the bomb blast that followed – the panic, the flames and the desire to be extraordinarily cowardly and run.

Cut- to a different country – an upscale furnished apartment in Washington and the news of some six plus bombs in Ahmadabad. Me trying to figure out what was going wrong with India – desperately searching for Indian news channels on television, calling friends and reaching an annoying beeping sound every single time.

I didn’t lose anybody either time, and not this time either. But I do lose a little of myself every time. Why kill? Why bomb? Why derail an entire system, a city and an entire people?

A little bit of myself goes cold – with fear, with revulsion and with the thought that we all just took another giant step backwards – we went from civilized negotiation to fist fights, from speeches to squeezing life out of throats and perhaps just witnessed the start of yet another violent uprising against a particular people.

What is there to be said? Resilience only goes so far.

Is it worth it, anymore?

I’ve been asking myself this question several times lately.

I now have an excellent job. I do something that I thought I always wanted to do. I am paid much better than anyone else my age, I also have the luxury of living at home with hot food on the table when I come back from work. And despite these obviously happy circumstances my life seems to be slowly twisting itself around in a spiral.

I decided to chase the good life and I don’t regret it. And yet, maybe the pursuit of the good life is not liked enough by people around me. I can’t seem to able to communicate anymore — conversations are running out, drying up before they begin. I thought I outdid myself in ‘being with’ but it never seems enough. Its like Alice, running and running to stay in one place –  only in addition I see stuff I care about about slipping through my fingers.

I look back and I think- is it worth it and am I worth it? What does one have left to say when they are told that they  got lucky, its all a chance – these successes they have nothing to do with ability.

Perhaps now is when I should call it quits.

Two Spectacular Goof Ups

My friend pointed out here, that I haven’t been expressing too much of an opinion lately at Una Voce and he is right.

One plausible reason is that I have spent far too much time lately researching Indian agriculture for a presentation due sometime next week. The problems of Indian Agriculture are too numerous to summarize in a hour and so distilling and redefining the problems has lately become the centerpiece of my attention.

I spent my afternoon today working on Indigo plantations and what they have to do with colonial rule. I was surprised but not unduly so to re-discover how much nonsense I had unwittingly absorbed during high-school about ‘development’.

Let me step back and explain the context. One part of the project I am working on demands that we present a thorough history of Indian agriculture- at one of our group meetings I suggested a good place to begin might be to look at how widespread Indigo plantations had ‘hurt’ Indian agriculture in the past.

Little did I realize then that this was my brain-washed mind recalling an absurd little sentence I had been forced into reading and believing in high-school. The book was called the ‘Violence of The Green Revolution’ authored by a food fascist cum fake scientist cum feminazi who goes by name Vandana Shiva. Sitting at a ‘farm’ far away from the ‘evils’ of the developed world such as cellular phones, mp3 players, electricity, gas stoves and mattresses a small group of sixteen year olds were forced to read this violent, inaccurate and utterly despicable rendition of the state of Indian agriculture.

Somewhere hidden in those pages was the idea that ‘Indigo mono-culture(s)’ had destroyed Indian farm land and made them un-cultivatable. The stupider side of my mind for some reason accepted this suggestion and regurgitated it at the group meeting. My friend sent me a mail today asking me if I could find any sources online to check that claim because she couldn’t find any.

I consented to look and to dismay it turns out that Indigo is actually a legume- not only does it not rob soil of nutrients- it helps fix nitrogen and so by all conventional biology must have helped make soils more fertile and rich. The downside of Indigo planting was that it was out-competed by synthetic technology and Indian farmers launched a civil disobedience movement against the adoption of this newer technology- simply because it would take away work.

Being as this was, the one argument Vandana Shiva’s book got right was that Indigo was a mono culture, primarily because it was enormously profitable to grow Indigo. There was of course nothing remotely democratic about the way the British got Indians to grow Indigo on a wide scale- farmers were oppressed and cheated out of their profits, nevertheless the argument and the facts have nothing to do with the destruction of soil. The arguments are and were economic.  And so I had to eat my hat.

This is of course not the first set of incorrect facts (or lies – as I call them) that Vandana Shiva has resorted to. This is another example of how bogus her arguments are.

The second goof-up which has made me more than red in the face lately is a bizarre $2800 (and counting) telephone bill because my own inability to read and comprehend the fine print in contracts.

The ‘I Hate Vista Snowball Effect’

Last week I became a part of the Snowball Effect group on Face book. The group is trying a social experiment to illustrate the snowball effect which is the long-standing phenomenon that people follow what others do.

The ‘Mojave Experiment‘ put together by a Microsoft research team illustrates this idea nicely. The “Mojave Experiment” is an attempt to find out -

What do people think of Windows Vista® when they don’t know it’s Windows Vista? We disguised Windows Vista as codename ‘Mojave,’ the ‘next Microsoft OS,’ so regular people who’ve never used Windows Vista could see what it can do – and decide for themselves. …

Results from the experiment indicate that over 90% of users rated Vista much better than they did based on preconceived notions.

For most part, Vista works very well for me- sure it has annoying parts like every Windows system has had in the past, the real question is; Are we all sheep?