If you shiver in chilly weather of winter in Northern hemisphere you might envy me – I am still in tropical India. I did not write anything substantial on blogs recently though I was tempted to ink a thing or two on atrocities in Mumbai. First, I had a lot of work (I finished book on Goa), second I was on the move (I had been in Nepal) and then I was somewhat depressed.
Goan schoolchildren
Winter in India is the best time of the year, pure champaigne. It’s time when Indians’ favourite gods Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva descend on the country every winter. It’s actually not my metathor, Outlook weekly magazine once compared thus famous Indian writers V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and Amartya Sen. Tempestous Naipaul usually acts as Shiva but since his latest book was badly received he’d gone into hiding, that’s why he is taking off invisible Brahma avatar. Rushdie is not in India, but from distant New York he sent stern warning to Pakistan and its president Asif Ali Zardari – “stop pretending that you have no evidence or you’re complicit in covering up Mumbai attackers”. Pure Shiva – destroyer of the worlds. Gentle creator Vishnu – Nobel laureate Amartya Sen is here, yesterday in his characteristic style he was mumbling something about vitality of “Idea of India” after Mumbai attacks on Indian TV. With scientists it’s better to read them than to listen to and I picked up a book of his essays from my bookshelves, “The Argumentative Indian”.
Some essays are nothing new but what attracted my eye was his article about Rabindranath Tagore “Tagore and His India”. Tagore was genius, everybody knows it, yet he was misinterpreted and misunderstood prophet, especially in the West due to poor translations. I don’t know Bengali language but I did not need to – a year ago I watched the BBC documentary “Himalaya with Michael Palin”. If you did not watch the series here is a quote from his book about the epic journey across Himalayan regions:
“The morning wears on. The sun grows stronger, but I find it hard to tear myself from the deck rail. The dancing silver patterns of light reflected on the water, the gradual release of the countryside from the mist, the sound of flute drifting across, all create a feeling of the world slowed down, a seductive and fragile sense of peace.
Moni and I are talking about this, about how the world’s most crowded country can offer such sense of calm, and she asks if I’ve ever read any of Tagore’s work. I’m ashamed to say I haven’t. Rabandranath Tagore was the Shakespeare of Bengal…A lot of Moni’s favourite songs are Tagore’s poems set to music and she sings some to me as the countryside he celebrated slips past….One of the songs Moni sings tells of the bruised Bengali people standing in line, crying, and asking their god to `speak into our ears and into our hearts and tell us there is good news'”.
– Michael Palin, “Himalaya”
Unfortunately these days there were not so many good news. What caught my attention yesterday? On NDTV in “Big Fight” there was lively debate about coalition politics between 2 Communist parties and BJP and Congress. Later on the same channel in “Walk the talk” Fareed Zakaria gave an interview, he was pointing out that Americans have to choose between modernizing project in Afghanistan and fight with “Al Qaeda”, it’s impossible to bring in democracy to incredibly impoverished country with 53 tribal warlords in the field besides Taliban commanders. Later on CNN Christiane Amanpour came out with “Czar Putin” about Russia full of villains and without heroes.
Most interesting news was sworn-in ceremony of new Congress government in conservative Rajasthan [the state roughly the size of France and very popular with foreign tourists]. It was revealed that one of 13 ministers Golma Devi could not read the text of oath. She is illiterate. Headlines in yesterday newspapers were screaming: “Rajasthan’s Rabri Devi” and so on. [Rabri Devi is allegedly illiterate wife of current Indian railway minister Lalu Yadav. She was chief minister of Bihar from 1996 to 2005 because her husband was then enjailed on corruption charges. Bihar is eastern state with population of around 80 mln people].
It’s not that illiterate people (especially women) cannot be sworn in as ministers or chief ministers. Golma Devi’s elevation only highlighted once again the plight of Indian system of basic education. According to latest data only 64.8% of 1-bln strong Indian population is literate. There was some success, notably in better governed small states and in Communist ruled Kerala (where literacy rate stands as 90.9%). However such figure was achieved not through network of better basic schools with compulsory education for kids but via volunteer activities. Keralan public schools are not much different from the rest of the country.
I did not come to India to inspect her educational institutions and cannot generalize on what I saw. My limited experience during 6 years of travels in all parts of India included not so many schools. However what I found fits well with description of school in this year’s Man Booker prize winning novel “The White Tiger”:
– Aravind Adiga, “The White Tiger”
Probably Adiga meant Bihar when he wrote about unspecified area of Darkness ruled by Great Socialist, and Bihar is one of the most impoverished and lawless states in India. Wherever in India I visited schools, children have worn neat uniforms, carrying some books and notebooks in their rucksacks, also they are provided with simple lunch. Problems lie elsewhere – local schools as almost any public buildings in India are usually kept in far from good or even satisfactory condition. Often there is no any glass in windows (God blessed India with tropical climate). When there is no protection from elements one may safely assume there is nothing valuable inside – no laboratories, no didactic materials, no library, least of all computers.
Schoolchildren are eating their lunch during excursion in Hyderabad’s zoo while their teacher looks on.
I found long ago my lack of pedagogical talent, though I spent one year as teacher of English in a school in my native Siberia (Far Eastern Russia) and here what I can recall from my experience. The school was very small, just 4 classrooms and a sporting hall. The school was located in my ancestral village with population of few hundred people and naturally there were very few students (9th level class had only two students). There was a single computer (it was early 1990’s), classrooms were fully equiped for lessons with maps, pictures, globes, etc. There was a separate school library. District educational committee provided all paraphernalia and salaries for stuff and teachers, while villagers, on their expense, constructed new building of school complete with autonomous heating system and were very proud of its shining sporting hall (which was also used for social functions like meetings and weddings). Why they did this? For the sake of their children. Recently I heard personal computers and laptops became commonplace, there is satellite internet connection. Not that education in the tiny village school (or anywhere else in Russia) was particularly effective – in my school children could not speak even Russian language let alone expect them to converse freely in English. Most if not all did go on footsteps of their parents, became hunters, farmers, raindeer-herders etc.
The main difference, as I see now, was in the level of corruption and apathy of population, in existing culture. Adiga continues:
Where were the authorities?
“One morning a man wearing the finest suit I had seen in my life … came walking down the road that led to my school. .. This was surprise inspection. The inspector pointed out his cane at holes in the wall, or the red discolorations [The teacher used to spit pan on the walls], while the teacher cowered by his side and said: `Sorry, sir, sorry sir.’ `There is no duster in this class; there are no chairs; there are no uniforms for the boys. How much money have you stolen from the school funds, you sister-fucker?'”
– Aravind Adiga, “The White Tiger”
And yet, the teacher got away with his wrong doing.
Not that Indians, especially the brightest ones were not concerned with the plight of education system. Amartya Sen wrote about Tagore elaborately, about his public and personal life, cultural achievements, his image in the West, comparison with Gandhi and his views on multitude of topics starting with British rule and patriotism and ending on science, education and personal freedoms. Tagore visited Soviet Russia in 1930 and he “was much impressed by its development efforts and by what he saw as a real commitment to eliminate poverty and economic inequality. But what impressed him most was the expansion of basic education across the old Russian empire”. Sen quotes Tagore’s “Letters from Russia”: `In stepping on the soil of Russia, the first thing that caught my eye was that in education, at any rate, the peasant and the working classes have made such enormous progress…The people here are not at all afraid of giving complete education even to Turcomans of distant Asia; on the contrary, they are utterly in earnest about it’. Tagore was not romantic – he sharply criticized the lack of freedom he observed in Russia but this is not the main point here. Sen continues quoting Tagore: “In my view the imposing tower of misery which today rests on the heart of India has its sole foundation in the absence of education. Caste divisions, religious conflicts, aversion to work, precarious economic conditions – all centre on this single factor“. Amartya Sen then proceeds to speculate on what India has or has not achieved since independence particularly on education front: “If Tagore were to see the India of today, half a century after independence [the article was written in 1997], nothing perhaps would shock him so much as the continued illiteracy of the masses. He would see this as a total betrayal of what the nationalist leaders had promised during the struggle for independence“.
Yesterday in mentioned above public debate on “Big Fight” the audience applauded whole heartedly only once, when Communist leader Gurudas Dasgupta appealed to people after 60 years of independence finally to liberate themselves from shackles of rule of mainstream parties which could not provide employment and basic education for people. One may suspect whether Communist party apparatchiks can deliver where other bourgouise parties fail but his words are golden, he expressed what resonates with overwhelming majourity of Indians. Only I fear that failure of system of basic education in India has much to do not only with the government’s fault (what else to expect from often corrupt and sometimes illiterate politicians) but with widespread apathy of society – why people continue to tolerate rampant corruption in educational system thus forfeiting the future of their children.
