Year: 2022
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The Illuminations Workshop
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‘Illuminations’ is the name of a book by Professor A.K. Saran, a critic of modernity and one of the great scholars of modern India. The byline of the book ‘A School for the Regeneration of Man’s Experience, Imagination and Intellectual Integrity’ gives us an idea about the book. The book is based on the insight…
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The Original Mind and the Ordinary Rational Mind
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During 1st to 4th September, 2022, a workshop was held at the Songtsen library, Dehradun on the Original Mind and the Ordinary Rational Mind. The workshop attended by some 40 participants and organized by SIDH was chaired by the Venerable Samdhong Rinpoche. The following are the main points made by Rinpocheji in his opening address.…
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Hinduism in Contemporary India
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This week’s post has some excerpts from a very interesting book ‘Hinduism in contemporary India’ by A.K. Saran. Excerpt 1: “One, a sacred or traditional society, say, the Hindu society, cannot be understood in a non-traditional frame of reference; and, two, the sacred and the secular are not two types of social systems in some…
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On wisdom
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The following excerpts from two ancient foreign texts talk about wisdom. Excerpt 1: “The man of character lives at home without exercising his mind and performs actions without worry. The notions of right and wrong and the praise and blame of others do not disturb him. When within the four seas all people can enjoy…
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A zero waste life – Part 2
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(This is the transcript of a talk given by my wife Kanti in 2018. Part 1 of this post is available here.) Four and a half years ago we shifted to a village in Kerala. This was my in-laws hometown. We had about three-fourths of an acre with a pond, house and well all to…
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A zero waste life – Part 1
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(This is the transcript of a talk given by my wife Kanti in 2018. Hope you all like the story she is telling here.) All our friends and relatives have heard our story, usually in parts and in the middle of random conversations. For the first time, I have the opportunity to organize my thoughts…
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The value of higher education
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I am just back from a trip to IIT Kharagpur, the institute where I got my engineering degree 34 years ago. With its 2100 acre tree-filled campus, 40+ departments, 15000 students and 800 faculty members, IIT Kharagpur is the largest IIT in India. Like everyone who passes through residential colleges, the time I spent on…
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School reforms: The way forward
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In these series of posts (part 1 and part 2 here), we have talked about problems with the modern schooling system and have tried to look at the paradigm of modernity inside which the system functions. In this final post in the series, we will try to talk about a tentative way forward with school…
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School reforms: Systems and Paradigm
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In last week’s blog post (linked here), we looked at some problems with the current education system and why it seems so difficult to effect any school reform. This week let us zoom out a little and look at the broader perspective, at the paradigm inside which the modern education system is situated. We can…
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School reforms: The problem statement
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When well-meaning people start questioning the way current school education works, they run into a fundamental problem. You see, our entire experience of education is from within this deeply flawed system. So when we try to think of making things better, we are unconsciously trapped within the limits of the existing system. A little bit…
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Sthiti and Gati
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(The following is the script of the audio-visual component of chapter 8 of the SIDH online course – ‘Understanding Modern Education -An Indic Perspective’) Our experience of reality has two aspects: The stable, unchanging, intrinsic, unseen, intangible, BEING part. We are calling it the STHITI. And the changing, sensorial, tangible, manifested, DOING or behaving part.…
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A good education
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My schooling happened in Delhi, where I grew up playing cricket and football with the neighbourhood children and paying minimum attention to academics. After my 12th class, I studied furiously for an year and got through the IIT entrace exam. I ended up at IIT Kharagpur, where, after four years of hanging around aimlessly creating…