When the market logic of customer-service provider creeps into higher education, the pressure to constantly be productive in a circumstance where your basic existence as a student is under threat due to political reasons becomes a mental burden.
How should undergraduate science and technology education in India evolve in order to meet the challenges of the future? There has been considerable thought in this direction in the past few decades, resulting various steps like the inclusion of humanities and social sciences in the IITs and NITs as stand-alone courses for engineering students, increase […]
Can we consider a person’s intellect well developed if that person is not aware of different national level political ideologies or does not have any opinion regarding what is happening around them? If they are aware and touched by political developments around them, and feel strongly about a cause, can we ask them to keep their mouths shut?
Among the student community in research institutes, a sense of moral superiority in the fact that one is protesting could easily arise and in my opinion does arise. This is sheer nonsense. Protests are held for change, not so that you can look good in a photo and then reminisce about it twenty years later. Or make cool sounding noises when you pass each other in the halls.
The students/youth fought for freedom, democracy and secular values during the freedom struggle. They defended these values even after independence, whenever they perceived any threat like they did against the imposition of emergency in 1975. Bhagat Singh and the political values he bequeathed, should be the guiding spirit for students and the youth today. It is an opportune moment to rebuild an India Bhagat Singh aspired for.
Too often, there are suggestions to confer some kind of elevated moral standing to student politics. This is insulting both to students and to other citizens of India. This is because fundamental rights by their very definition apply to every citizen and no one citizen can claim that their fundamental rights are morally superior to that of another.
We should not be surprised if we find the engagement with the world and society of many great souls, from Nachiketa to Gandhi, was marked by questioning and conscientious disobedience.
Campus agitations (and now campus violence) are a consequence of the breakdown of communications between the administration and the student body, not the cause. Especially after months of a lack of communication, patience can wear thin. When one hears the different sides of the story, it can seem like a contemporary re-enactment of Rashomon, and a slightly fantastic one at that.
In this article, Rajan Kurai Krishnan, a well-known social anthropologist and professor from Ambedkar University, Delhi, takes the examples of three very popular films in Tamil cinema and picks up a common thread in how they view science and scientists. As he mentions in the conclusion, there have been films with differing perspectives, but those were much smaller in impact and popularity, hence his reason for basing his arguments on these three.
Confluence Series on Perceiving and Reacting to Science.
