January 2013 - And then...

Gang aft agley

Recent events, more of a personal nature than public, brought Robert Burns’ To a Mouse to mind. The University lives, as it were, from plan to plan, and like those best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men in the poem, they don’t always work out quite as one wanted. The plan above should really be Plan with the capital P, referring to the Five Year Plans that are overseen by the Planning Commission. We are now into the twelfth (XII) of the Plans that started on April 1, 2012, the date being quite a cruel joke on all of us.

The UoH did well in the XI Plan. Well, in this context, is really in the money that was granted to the University via the UGC and other funding agencies, the total being about Rs. 210 Cr, and one should also count the additional grant that came as a result of the OBC expansion, Rs. 154 Cr. This really enabled the University to dream big, building new hostels, new buildings, new major equipment, new infrastructure, and so on, and the results are there for all to see.

For the XIIth Plan, the UGC and the MHRD initially asked us to dream even bigger, and keeping the then rate of growth of the Indian economy in mind, the Central Universities were asked to project plans that were three or five times the grant we got in the XIth Plan. That’s serious! But that was also at a time when the body politic seemed robust and secure, and also not in a state of limbo as it has seemed to be in the recent past…

Anyhow, we rose to the call and made a XII Plan Proposal that was commensurate with these ambitions. Big plans. But now, when it has come to the implementation stage, there have been subtle (and not so subtle) indications that the budget allocations will be nowhere near as generous as they (or anyone) had hoped… The economy has not been so good, there are massive cuts, everyone is suffering, one “reason” after the other. But more to the point, ten months after the so-called start of the new Plan, we still have no clear idea of what the UoH has been allotted, not in terms of money, not in terms of positions, and not in terms of programmes.

The fact of the matter is, a five year plan period does not really make much sense anymore, least of all for the higher education sector. The world changes too fast in five years, and so do priorities. And five years is not a natural timescale on which anything particular happens in the world of academe, so why quantize it that way? There is no logic to it, and the fact is that by the end of every sacred Plan Period there is always unspent money. (And that accounts for something like Rs 65 Cr out of the 210 that we got in the entire Plan, which comes to nearly one third of the total amount!) I think it would serve us far better if we made proposals for shorter periods – it would help us project our needs better, it would help us to adapt to changing scenarios, and it would help the University to stay competitive instead of locking us into a firm commitment that may eventually evolve into something unrealistic over five years…

One plans and plans, and plans so… and then! Being at a University should prepare one for such uncertainty though. As it happens, I find myself admiring Burns more with the passing years, and seeing through his eyes and words, more of the universality of the human condition. The next stanza of the poem captures perfectly the angst of the moment,

Still thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me
The present only toucheth thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e’e. On
prospects drear! An’ forward, tho’
I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!

So what’s Gang aft agley? Och, the sorry fate of the best-laid plans of mice and men…

UoHTube

Over the past year(s) we have had several “Distinguished Lectures” at the University- namely special lectures by eminent scholars that we hope will address a range of issues that are of general interest. In reverse order, these have been

Veena Das, Politics of the Urban Poor. 11/1/13
Joseph Stiglitz, Macro Economics in crisis: An agenda for rejuvenating the discipline. 4/1/13
William Dalrymple, The Return of a King: Battle for Afghanistan (1839-43). 10/12/12
Michael Berry, The maggot in the apple: peaceful coexistence of incompatible theories. 18/10/12
K Srinath Reddy, Public Health Needs An ‘All of Society’ Approach. 17/9/12
Vasudha Dalmia, Nature, Science, and Civilization: Agyeya’s Anti-city Novel (1952). 30/8/12
Walter Russell Mead, America’s Sticky Power. 7/8/12
Maria Cristina Marcuzzo, Re-embracing Keynes Scholars, Admirers and Sceptics in the Aftermath of the Crisis. 9/3/12
Andrew Sheng, The Seven Distortions of the Global Economy. 25/1/12
David Hume, Macrophage Colony-Stimulating Factor and the Control of Macrophage Differentiation. 10/1/12
Mriganka Sur, Brains, Minds and Machines. 6/1/12.
Herbert Gleiter, Can Poly/ Nano-glasses open the way to an age of Glassy Materials? 15/11/11
Barbara Harriss-White, Capitalism and Common Man. 11/11/11
David Shulman, A South Indian Concept of Nature: Notes from Telugu Kavya. 8/8/11
Girish S. Agarwal, Quantum Interference between Independent Photons. 4/8/11
Yu Yongding, China’s Development Strategy over the Past Three Decades. 28/7/11
Palagummi Sainath, The Media: Another Kind of Convergence. 20/7/11
V. S. Ramachandran, Neurology: from molecules to metaphor. 19/7/11

In addition to these, there have been any number of lectures by equally distinguished persons- Rudy Marcus, Mahasweta Devi, Romila Thapar, M S Narasimhan… many others.

A new initiative to share this bounty with the public has led us to put several of these lectures onto YouTube. The most recent three of the above lectures, as well as the speech by Rudy Marcus are all on YouTube, and we have a photoblog as well! All courtesy our recent S N School graduates Gautami and Manikrishna. And the PRO, Ashish Jacob…

Enjoy, and please also let your friends know! The special lectures of the UoH are now available for all. Here are the links. Veena Das, Joseph Stiglitz, William Dalrymple, and Rudy Marcus. There will be more as time goes on… So mark the blog space, and you can always search for . Thats large!

Is Life Elsewhere?

At its best a University is meant to prepare one for a life in the real world. LIFE in the outside world, so to speak. But, and not as Milan Kundera put it in his brilliantly titled novel, life is also not really elsewhere, even if the University provides only a transitory environment for most. I’ve been mulling over this post for a while now, these thoughts prompted by a number of things that happen from time to time on the campus.

And in the classroom. I was mildly (to put it mildly) irritated some months ago when two students asked for permission to miss a class since it clashed with an entrance or qualifying examination for some other institution. Like there was a destination that was demonstrably more important than here, which was just a stepping stone in any case… which more than kind of devalued the present in favour of an imagined future. But maybe I was being unnecessarily touchy.

The issue continues to bother me though- why do many of our students, and typically the more promising ones, not consider the UoH as a serious destination for research. Better facilities elsewhere is one reason, of course, but there is something more to it. Over the years I have seen a variety of students who intend to pursue further studies choose destinations that are almost surely not as good, and also seen them exchange the familiar for the alien, exchange the possibility of good mentorship for the probably indifferent… But then, I have also seen them perform well enough later, so this is also somewhat of a sense of regret of “what might have been”.

Nevertheless, the question of why Indians seem to do better abroad is one that has been asked often enough, and reasons range from the obvious to the banal. A typical one being that “India’s biggest problem is its mindset. India still views itself as a third world country or less harshly, a “developing” one.” Comparing our (presumed) national characteristics with those of others is an old practice: Rabindranath Tagore, for instance, when talking of the Japanese aesthetic felt that in Japan, there was a certain sense of order, discipline and unruffledness he missed in India, where people wore themselves out with disorder, effusiveness and over-reaction [as cited in K G Subramanyan’s article on RT and modern Indian Art].

So is there something more to it than better facilities and infrastructure that attracts the aspiring student to more developed (or richer) countries? Is life elsewhere? A colleague recently wrote (and I am extracting from his mail) on what the main differences were. This was about the attitudes of people to the following principles of life:

Ethics, as basic principles.
Integrity.
Responsibility.
The respect for Laws and Regulations.
The respect from majority of citizens by right.
The love for work.
The effort to save and invest.
The will to be productive.
Punctuality.

The differences, that analysis asserts, arise essentially from the proportion of the population that actually follows these principles and not from some other national characteristic, intrinsic superiority or natural advantages that these nations might possess.

Surely these principles are neither so profound to enunciate, nor are they that difficult to follow in a society. And yet…