Author: Arun Elassery
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Why we homeschooled our children
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I was thinking about it recently and jotted down some reasons that may have been at the back of our minds when we decided to homeschool our children. Reason 1: I learnt a lot of complicated real-life engineering in the first six months of starting my first job as a bridge design engineer. I also…
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Covering the earth with leather
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“Bodhicharyavatara composed in the 8th century C.E. by Shantideva is one of the most celebrated text of Mahayana Buddhism… In this masterpiece, the author, who belonged to the Madhyamika school of Nagarjuna, describes in detail the conduct of a Bodhisattva.”– From the foreword by The Dalai Lama to the English translation of Shantideva’s Bodhicharyavatara by…
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Joyless education
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“I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me… I am verily persuaded that I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader…
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Taking the red pill
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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…
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A Vision for the Future Of Bharat
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“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…
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The Development Addiction
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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…
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The World’s Best Cuisine
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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…
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Shiksha and Education
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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 संसारजसा तवा चुल्ह्यावरआधी हाताले चटकेतव्हा मिळते भाकर! (O, life, life, like a tava on the flame,…
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Shiksha in the Indian tradition – Part 2
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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…
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Shiksha in the Indian tradition – Part 1
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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.…
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The Illuminations Workshop
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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…
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Livelihoods Vs Vyakti-Nirmaan
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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…