Author: Arun Elassery

Taking the red pill

The red pill and blue pill represent a choice between the willingness to learn a potentially unsettling or life-changing truth by taking the red pill or remaining in the contented experience of ordinary reality with the blue pill. The terms originate from the 1999 film The Matrix.
– From the Wikipedia article on ‘Red pill and blue pill’

Modern education, technology and media build very powerful narratives. Narratives like:
– Education makes us rational, thinking human beings.
– The uneducated are primitive, confused and miserable.
– India is a superstitious, dirty, over-populated hell-hole.
– We have no choice but to go for ‘development’.
– The economy can keep growing forever.
– Science and technology can solve all human problems.
etc.

As the news coming out now shows, the hysteria that was whipped up to sell questionable pharmaceutical products to the entire world, was seriously misguided. Just today, I heard Scott Adams, the inventor of the Dilbert cartoon, say something like – the people who chose to remain unvaccinated took the right decision, my analysis was wrong and their distrust of the pushed narrative was right.

It is difficult to ignore or not be swayed by the narratives. They are pushed very hard and the voices that are speaking against them are ridiculed and silenced. In this scenario it is good to have some go-to resources that can help give us some new perspectives, correct the balance. Here is a random collection that you may find useful…

https://www.theautomaticearth.com/

https://boriquagato.substack.com/

https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/217015.html

A Vision for the Future Of Bharat

“I think the period from 1750-1947 is largely a dead period in Indian history. This may be an extreme statement. But I think it is true. Ultimately this period should be written off. Nothing was achieved in this period in terms of creativity or originality. On the contrary people have suffered in every respect and become lesser human beings.”
– From Dharampal’s ‘Rediscovering India’

As a nation we appear to be deeply lost. The Western philosophies and way of life that were thrust upon us by the British don’t seem to have taken root in our soil. However, all our efforts seem to be focussed on making this wilted foreign seedling grow into a mighty tree. We want world-class ‘development’, ‘hospital-based-health’, ‘school-based-education’—we want to compete with the West, play their game, and win at it. This is probably not possible and playing someone else’s game, the rules of which are incomprehensibly alien to us, is not a very useful way forward for a nation.

Yet, the sparks of our civilization burn bright in the middle of the spiritual and material darkness we find ourselves in. We continue to speak our numerous languages, we still celebrate our beautiful festivals, we continue to cook our elaborate ancient cuisines, our women continue to wear their traditional dresses and a large percentage of our population—of all denominations—continues to be very religious.

The wise, confident, infinitely creative civilization that was birthed in this soil, which gave us the Vedas, our self-sufficient villages and our magnificent art and architecture, must have grown from native seeds. It is only from such seeds that vibrant civilizations arise, civilizations that sing the song of the soil and have the potential to touch the hearts of sensitive, considerate and courageous people from every part of the world.

There is no going back! And going forward in the direction we have been currently herded into is suicide! So, what do we do? Maybe we need to do nothing because the game of Kaala is on, wholly inscrutable to us, and things will go where they will, perfect as ever.

Meanwhile, here is a proposal…

With all of the above as background, it would be good if we vision a future for Bharat, vision it with the blessings of our sacred soil, vision it in silent communion with our ancestors and our Gods, vision it with the collective wisdom of our purvajanmas accessed in silent meditative contemplation. Because a vision has great power and it is time that we sit down, look past the toxic fog that surrounds us and think about the future that can be ours.

The Development Addiction

My cousin has stayed all his life in Kerala and is a long-term communist sympathiser. The national highway that passes near his house is only two lanes wide. Unfortunately this highway is now part of some larger national scheme and is currently being six-laned. In the hilly parts where my cousin lives, this means very long bridges and large scale destruction of hill-sides and the houses and shops that crowd on both sides of the highway. Talking to him I was surprised that he is happy about this highway work. He said this is real development that will help Kerala become economically stable. I pointed out to him that:

– The people uprooted and resettled in the road construction are the working class people who his party was supposed to be looking out for.
– The highway and bridge construction and the sand that it will require will cause more destruction to the river near his home.
– The increased traffic will cause more accidents that will probably involve the youth of his neighbourhood.
– Crossing the road safely will need to be done in a vehicle because you may have to go a long distance to get to an underpass or pedestrian over-bridge.

He agreed to all this but he said that these are the sacrifices we have to make for development. As the argument got heated he told me that it was people like me who have kept India in the dark ages and that I was a danger to the nation.

In all the big cities of India the traffic increases faster than the incessant road construction work. We don’t need a war with a foreign power to make us feel that we are living in a war-zone. We are managing to do that fine with the smoke and noise and maddening chaos of our city traffic. On a particularly bad day in Bangalore, probably when rain had clogged some of the roads, Google maps was showing 4 hours to go 20 kilometres in a car and was showing around the same travel time if we went walking. And yet none of us are willing to give up our personal transport vehicles, the companies bring out strange-named (why Brezza or Creta?) car variants all the time and hundreds of people die on the roads of India everyday.

Recently the people I was staying with warned me against walking on the roads in Hyderabad. When I told them that I am always careful they told me of a car that fell off from a bridge and killed a pedestrian. I told them that I will be extra careful and along with right and left and front and back that I am used to checking I will also check ‘up’ in their city.

We can extend the above argument to include other ‘development’ markers like consumer goods and multi-storey buildings and malls but I have reached my 500 word limit and will let you do the extrapolation on your own. What kind of madness have we normalised in the name of development? Where is it all going?

The World’s Best Cuisine

A friend who lives in the US and grew up in Andhra is a great food-lover. His mother was a very good cook and he grew up eating the large variety of food that makes up coastal Andhra cuisine. As he started travelling the world for work, he explored the local cuisines of all the places he visited. He says that it took him a long time to come to his great realisation about world food but he thinks that, at age 50+, he is on the right track now. He tells the story about travelling to a town in Italy and searching and reaching the restaurant claiming to serve the best pizza in the world. He sat on the table on the street outside the restaurant and had a truly memorable meal. When he asked to compliment the chef, out walked the smiling Oriya chef. 🙂

My friend says that the shock set him thinking about the food that he had tried over the years and he felt that the scales had fallen from his eyes. For example, he realized that the French do not make the best food in the world, they are just very good at loudly marketing whatever unappetizing, bland food they eat (My friend’s opinion not mine). He says that, for the first time in his life, he was able to dispassionately evaluate the Andhra cuisine he grew up with. With its vast storehouse of curries, podis, chutneys, pickles, sweets etc. he is now convinced that it is the BEST cuisine in the world. 🙂

I will add a personal story here before I lay out the point I want to make with this post. When the Covid lock-downs started, I was caught alone at home in Bangalore for five months. My wife had gone to visit some relatives and was unable to get back home till the lock-downs lifted. Now, my job in the kitchen till then had been mostly limited to cutting vegetables and I had to quickly learn to extrapolate that to cooked food. The photos of the alu paratha, poori, masala dosa etc. I made look good and I was accused by many friends of making the photos in Photoshop and not the food on the gas stove. When the five months were up and I again started eating good food made by my wife, I realised something. There are what appears to be hundreds of tiny bottles in our kitchen and most of them have contents that I cannot identify. When I was taking the nice-looking photos of the food I was cooking, I was using the contents of only four or five of the tiny bottles. The realisation I had was about the vast storehouse of knowledge hidden inside the heads of people who make Indian food.

The process of education and socialization we go through draws our attention away from the richness of life that we become part of just by being born in this country. I talked about food above. How many other vast and valuable storehouses of knowledge we still have access to have we learned to under-evaluate? I can think of our languages, our literature, our worldviews, our sciences, our customs, our handloom and other arts and crafts, our festivals, our calendars…

I think it is time to evaluate our rich heritage and stand tall again. What do you think?

Shiksha and Education

Today morning a friend read out some poems of Bahinabai Chaudhuri. Bahinabai was a Marathi poet who wrote about the life she experienced in rural Maharashtra. One of her popular poems titled ‘sansaar’ starts with the lines:

अरे संसार संसार
जसा तवा चुल्ह्यावर
आधी हाताले चटके
तव्हा मिळते भाकर!

(O, life, life, like a tava on the flame, first you burn your hand and then you get the bhaakar/roti)

All the poems my friend read out used very simple imagery to show life from new perspectives. I was deeply moved!

Now, here is what Wikipedia says about Bahinabai:

“Bahinabai Chaudhari (24 August 1880 – 3 December 1951) was a Marathi language poet from Jalgaon district of Maharashtra, India. She became a noted poet posthumously. Bahinabai was born in a Mahajan family at Asode in Khandesh region of the present-day Jalgaon district on the 24th of August 1880. . . . she was married to Nathuji Khanderao Chaudhari of Jalgaon. Following her husband’s death in 1910, she led a very difficult life . . . . She had a daughter named Kashi and two sons, Madhusudan and Sopandev (1907-1982). Bahinabai composed her songs verbally in ovi (ओवी) metre in a mixture of two dialects: Khandeshi and Levaganboli. Her son Sopandev, who became a well-known poet, transcribed them. According to one account, Sopandev read the story of Savitri and Satyavan to his mother from his textbook, and by the next morning, she had composed a song of the tale. Impressed by her talent, he began writing down her songs in a notebook. Her poetry is characterized as reflective and abstract with iconic and realist imagery. It captures the essence of her life, reflects the culture of village and farming life, and presents her wisdom. After his mother’s death on 3 December 1951, Sopandev found the notebook and shared one of her poems with Prahlād Keshav (Acharya) Atre. Atre recounts calling the first of Bahinabai’s poems he heard “pure gold” in his introduction to the collection published under the title Bahinabainchi gani (Bahinabai’s Songs) in 1952.”

In the customary box giving the personal details, Wikipedia, under ‘Education’ says – None. In our current way of looking at things we would have called her ‘illiterate’.

I thought this was a good topic for some deep reflection on the difference between Shiksha and Education. What do you think?

Shiksha in the Indian tradition – Part 2

This is the second part of the talks I had with Dr Prabhakar Pandey, a professor at Sanchi University. The first part is available here. The main points made by Dr Pandey are:

– The Upanishadic sutra says – ‘sa vidya ya vimuktaye’.
– Vidya or gyan is the goal and shiksha is the technique to move towards it.
– The sutra says that vidya is what liberates. (from the three Rin’s dev-rin, pitr-rin and rishi-rin)
– Dev-rin is our indebtedness to sacred nature and we work it out by doing yagya.
– Pitr-rin is our indebtedness to our parents and we work it out by nurturing our children.
– Rishi-rin is our indebtedness to our teachers and we work it out by growing the knowledge that comes to us.
– Vidya also liberates us from avidya (the confusion about what is real) and develops the drishti that tells us what to do and what not to do (All of Bhagawad Gita is about this. In the beginning Sri Krishna is saying what is right and what is wrong but at the end he tells Arjuna that since he has understood the difference between right and wrong he should now choose for himself. This, in a compressed form, is the philosophy of what Bharatiya shiksha is designed to do)
– Holistic development as advocated in Indian thought means development of all the 5 koshas (Annamaya, pranamaya, manomaya, vignananmaya and anandamaya)
– Gurukul, indicates that it was the ‘kul’ of the guru or the family of the guru that was considered important.
– The idea of a kutumb or parivar is central to Indian thought.
– Common words like chandmama, billimausi etc. show us that the idea of family was not limited to our close relatives but was very extensive.
– Life at the gurukul WAS the curriculum (not something like the academic transaction that goes on in schools today).
– Dattatreya speaks of his 24 gurus. These include the sun, sky, ocean etc. To prepare a person who can learn from everything around him was the objective of Indian shiksha.
– The activities connected to real life (not making thermocol models) at the gurukul were the main focus. This along with the availability of the guru and the ability to learn from everything ensured shiksha.
– The practice of tending to the agni at the gurukul and of bhiksha, begging for alms, were very powerful learning practices.
– The practice of begging for alms ensured that the student was directly connected to and aware of the contribution that society made towards his shiksha. This practice also kept the ego of the student from getting bloated by the knowledge he was gaining.
– Graduation from the gurukul was based on the guru’s assessment of the student’s understanding. There are stories of gurus who did not graduate their students but put them back to work more.

– Today, we have no understanding of the form and objectives of shiksha. Looks like the new motto is ‘sa vidya ya niyuktaye’. 🙂

The full video is available at:

Shiksha in the Indian tradition – Part 1

I recently recorded two videos about Shiksha in the Indian tradition and found that it opened up many new perspectives for me. The videos are each almost one hour long and I don’t think many people will go through them. I thought of extracting the main points to generate interest in seeing the full video. The main points of the first video and the YouTube link are given below.

– ‘Bha’ is gyan, so Bharath is a civilization that is ‘rath’ in ‘bha’, or steeped in knowledge.
– We have two paramparas: Shruti parampara (Tatva chintan, universal truth, codified in the Vedas) and Smriti parampara (vyavahar chintan, that changes over time, detailed in Puranas/ Dharmashastra etc).
– Basic tenets of Bharatiyata include Samagrata (holistic thinking) and Ekaatmata (interdependence and integration in the diversity of life, for example, a lamp made of a cotton wick, oil and earthen container work together and give off light).
– Vedas have two main subjects – Yagya (a productive work done by a group of people, all work has the possibility of being a yagya) and prarthana (a prayerful bhava or feeling).
– In Bharat the objective of Shiksha has been vyakti-nirmaan (man-making towards becoming a useful member of the family, society and world) and not livelihood (as it is in modern education).
– Our idea of Shiksha is not limited to schooling but something that continues over our many lifetimes.
– In the Indian tradition the subjects are all interconnected (Bhasha, Darshan, Vigyan, Ganita etc. all interconnected) (Bhaskaracharya’s ‘Lilavati’ about Ganita has exquisite poetical verses)
– Saraswati means ‘with rasa’. In our tradition knowledge has been something full of rasa, full of ananda. Modern education is therefore not Shiksha but probably only transfer of burdensome information.
– Taittiriya Upanishad Shikshavalli has a prayer by the student for ‘sahano yashaha’, that the student and teacher move towards the goal together.
– Shiksha has been seen as a process of creating the environment in which the knowledge inside (the student and teacher) reveals itself.
– The teacher knows that in his relationship with the student, he is working towards his own and not the student’s growth.
– In the Indian tradition a lot of emphasis is placed on bhasha, language. The purity of knowledge is considered to be linked to the purity of the language.

– About the current scenario: Nature has its self-correcting mechanisms and materialism is also part of Nature. (If everything is Rama then Ravana is also a part of Rama). Our civilization has always looked to the future with hope.

The YouTube video is linked below:

The Illuminations Workshop

The Illuminations workshop organized by SIDH was held between 2nd and 6th November 2022, at the Songtsen Library in Dehradun. This was the first time we were trying a workshop of this kind and we were not sure about how it would go. The feedback from the 18 participants leads us to believe that the objectives of the workshop were at least partially met and the workshop was a success. In this blog post I would like to talk about the process we followed and what surprising results emerged from it.

‘Illuminations’ is a book by Professor AK Saran in which he advocates a method of breaking out of the spell of modernity. This does not mean rejecting modernity but seeing the ill-effects at the individual and societal levels and letting us work towards a more conscious engagement. The book is divided into two parts—part 1 lays out the method and part 2 is a collection of 125 passages. The idea is that people reading through the carefully selected passages written by modern writers may be struck by one or more of them and this will help them go deeper and see through their assumptions and misconceptions about modernity.

The way our workshop was structured was that we spent a day going through part 1 of the book and laying out the context and the method we were to follow. The remaining time was spent in reading through and discussing the passages in small groups of 4-5 people and then presenting the group’s understanding to everyone else. Some things that happened during the workshop were:
– The setting of the workshop and the way it was held ensured that everyone participated in the discussions.
– The understanding of what a passage meant got built up slowly as the discussions proceeded.
– The process was highly collaborative in spite of the participants being of differing ages, educational qualifications, levels of understanding etc.
– The collaborative nature of the workshop meant that participants built up the group understanding by adding their unique perspectives to what the previous speaker was saying.

An example from the workshop will illustrate the process. The following sentence was one of the passages for study:

“A bud unfolds into a blossom, but the boat which one teaches children to make by folding paper unfolds into a flat sheet of paper.”

Think for a minute about what this can mean. The discussion among the participants yielded the following insights:
– A bud is natural but the paper boat is man-made.
– The bud unfolds by itself but the paper boat needs to be folded and unfolded.
– It is easy for us to imagine that we are ‘doing’ something as we make the paper boat but there is nothing to ‘do’ for the bud unfolding.
– In our schools we are making and unmaking paper boats without realising that the project of learning is about letting buds flower into blossoms.

We will record a YouTube video going into more details about the workshop but I hope this gives a flavour of the conversations that happened. Going by the feedback we got from the participants, the workshop was a success!

Livelihoods Vs Vyakti-Nirmaan

If we look at our modern educational journey all the way from nursery to a PhD, it looks like what is not outright wasteful is all focused on preparing us to earn a livelihood. I was talking to a Sanskrit scholar who was telling me that in our tradition the focus has always been on knowledge. It is not that we have neglected the aspect of livelihoods, but it was understood that the larger project we are on is about knowledge because that is what helps bring us out of Avidya or ignorance. Also, in our tradition we thought that Shiksha was a continuous, life-long process and not one that started when we went to school and finished when we finished school. We had a much broader perspective on Shiksha that spanned lifetimes. Another way of looking at it is that our traditional Shiksha was about Vyakti-Nirmaan or person-making.

When we look at it closely, it looks like there is very little Vyakti-Nirmaan happening in modern education. Of course, too much Vyakti-Nirmaan, creating people who can tell the difference between Truth and falsehood, will only disrupt modern systems like the State and Marketplace. What are required are automatons who question nothing and blindly believe everything they are told. The modern education system does a good job of creating these mindless consumers.

In the middle of this mess, if we thought it important and wanted to focus on Vyakti-Nirmaan, how would we go about it? Perhaps we can start with the following tentative list:

— Look carefully and realise that most of the modern educational journey has zero contribution in making a good, wise, knowledgeable human being. It is basically a transaction of huge heaps of useless information. (Tell me why Integral calculus is of use to all but 0.0001% people who will use it for some esoteric research work)
– Understand that the focus of the modern educational journey is to create mindless workers and consumers. People who can efficiently do a mind-numbing job to earn money that they can then spend on useless, body-and-mind-destroying products.
– Act according to the above realisations and pay minimum attention to the bloated academic syllabus. Don’t be under the misunderstanding that this is about education and needs to be understood. Find creative and efficient ways to pass the necessary exams that are the hurdles along the modern educational path.
– Focus on Vyakti-Nirmaan through immersion in self, culture and nature. Immersion in real life!

What do you think?

The impact of schooling

As part of the videos that I have been creating for the Asli Shiksha YouTube channel, I did an interview with two of my three children and something that I consider important emerged from that exercise. When people find out that our children are homeschooled, one type of question that comes up repeatedly is about the academic content of school education. People ask, how did the children study? Did we engage tutors for various subjects? Or, are we, the parents, qualified to teach all subjects till the 12th standard? And, do we understand how children learn without ourselves having gone through a B.Ed. program? My response to these questions has been that I have zero interest in the academic syllabus and I consider it excessive, useless and, in a large part, propaganda designed to create and maintain our subjugated mindset. This response usually puts a quick end to the conversation :-).

In the video I asked the boys what they remembered from their homeschooling journey. How did they prepare for their board exams? What was their normal ‘school’ day like? What came up was that both the boys found it very difficult to answer these questions. They found the academic part of homescholing so unremarkable, so easy, that they remembered very little of it. They were living a busy life and ‘schooling’ that is such a big burden for most parents and school-going children passed by without them noticing it too much. (Mahatma Gandhi and many educational reformers after him all talk about the distancing between home and school as a big problem with modern education)

I was talking to Manjunath and Shashank from Udhbhavaha school about this and they told me about an exercise they do in trying to link History (the school subject) with personal experience. They ask children to write their personal histories. What Manjunath and Shashank found was that, in every single case, of the children they have tried this with, school takes up a large part of personal history. (I was in X school but I was having some problems there and things became better when I shifted to Y school… etc.) Of course, children spend a large part of their childhood in school and their memories will naturally be affected by it. But, is nothing else, nothing more memorable, going on in their lives? Why are family, friends, holidays, festivals, melas, adventures etc. not the first things that come to their mind?

We cannot draw out any general rule from this Udhbhavaha anecdote but it points to the huge impact of schooling on the lives of children. It is as if some part of the brain is set aside permanently to deal with our schooling experience. Acknowledging that there is a problem could be a good first step in trying to see what we can do about it. After that, the Asli Shiksha byline ‘Learning is natural’ could give us some ideas on the next steps we will need to take to come out of the unnatural pressures exerted by modern schools.

The Asli Shiksha video I was referring to is: