Requiem to a passing year

 From the Director’s Desk…

Requiem to a passing year

As I sign off the year to wish a new, and perhaps difficult, year in battling yet one more variant of Coronavirus, I must signal two important events pertaining to education and knowledge dissemination, both happening in the last quarter of the year. One was the opening of the Sarojini Devi Memoriallibraryin mid-September, a paean sung to an inimitable person whose persona had charmed me all my life though by a happy coincidence she brought me in humanform into this world, my mother; the other, a much awaited platinum jubilee celebration of my beloved school, BiswambharBidhyapith, which happened with much fanfare in the third week of December in Puri. It could be anybody’s guess that I may have been the common factor in both, and the spirit which emboldened me in both enterprises was the passion to pay back to societyselflessly what little I had earned and made it my calling.

But before going any further, let me wish you andyour family a healthy, successful and prosperous year ahead. May the New Year ring in new and inspiring ideas.Thehuman is an ideational being, the only such species to ideate all the time, even during sleep, in the form of dreams. And sometimes dreams materialize and condition human behaviour as Freud, the famouspsychoanalyst,would tell us. Therefore dream big, no harm in that. Be inspired by memories, events, persons and actual-life events.

2021 has not been a very positiveyear. We started with Delta and endedwith Omicron, both deadly variants of the coronavirus threatening over 20 million people and wiping our over 5 million lives at a conservativecount. On top of it the year has seen somesocially destructive developmentswhich have contrarily threated to mar peace and social harmony- the so-called Hindu seers whose mission has been to let the society splinter along communal lines- for electoral or religious-chauvinistic purposes, or both. At the end, the body polity has beenseriously damaged.

I have been talking in my last fewlectures on governance and public policy. Both are organically related. In effect, good governance could become the fulcrum of good policy-making, hallmark of a democratic constitution-based polity. Ambedkar, father of the Indian Constitution, in his very last address to the Constituent Assembly in Nov 1949had called politicaldemocracy (which independence procured for India) as ‘dressing on the top soil’ and signalled the need for economic and socialdemocracyalongside. 75 years since, this is yet to materialize. On the contrary, charlatans in the name of nationalism are out to wreck the fragileharmony of avulnerable pluralistic society as ours.

We must learn to observe, analyse and dissect whatever is going around us. Distil the fake, falsely-inspired news from actualfacts based on our reading and analysis, and take our own decisions. True education must instil in us that spirit. 

Renowned Americanphilosopher and educationist John Dewey (whom NobelLaureate AmartyaSen has acknowledged as one of his mentors)cautions about the complicacy of social inquiry in hiseponymous treatise whileadmitting its essentiality when we study social relations. Peter McLauren in his Critical Pedagogy talksabout the need to understand dialectics, the co-existence of opposites, in understanding human behaviour. Emphasizing the need for critical theorizing, he says, “Dialectical theory attempts to tease out the histories and relations of acceptedmeanings and appearances, tracing interactions from the context to the part, from the system inward to the event. In this way, critical theory helps us focus simultaneously on both sides of a social contradiction”.

I have reiterated inmy lectures the need forcritical thinking and creative action, the former leading to the latter as an organic process. As social science students and observers our primary concern should be to deconstruct the self-effacing reality and transpose it with something more permanent, constructive and beneficial in the long run.

We intendtobring in some innovations in the New Year. A desk featuring ‘New Arrivals’ will be laid outfor thebenefit of our students to spur them to cross-referential reading and discussing, encourage them to thinkcritically sifting out the irrelevant in the true spirit of unity in diversity. We would also strivetobring in some eminent personalities on a regular basis to expose them to their thinking and help them further in developing a critical approach. This, in the long run, would engender appropriate pedagogytoaddress social contradictions. The much talked about NationalEducation Policy, 2020 (NEP), which is now being hotlycontested by asection of theintelligentsia and teachingcommunity as not quite appropriate for the needs of the society in a rapidly-evolving tech-orientedsociety, shouldstillbe more comprehensible and palatable to the teaching community, those who will eventually use and disseminate the ‘new education’. Therefore criticalpedagogy and dialectical understanding wouldbeapplicable as much to the students as to the teachers, more so the latter in capturingthe essence of what they would be disseminatingtothestudents.

The society, as reflected in the younger generation of today, with a steep decline in employment opportunities, isdesperate to embrace any kind of job anywhere, implying a sad devaluation of our education standards. This, as any policy maker would divine, needs a thorough revamp and critically apply to the changing needs of the society to generate more employable graduates at the end of the day.. The younger generations should be therefore encouraged at every step to strike bold, ifnot gold, innovate and create social and economic capital.

Let the New Year be a concrete step towards that realization.

Happy New Year,

  (Malay Mishra)