Author: Arun Elassery
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The impact of schooling
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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…
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Modern Traditional Schools?
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I recently read, and started thinking about, A.K. Saran’s proposition that, today, we cannot be practising Hindus because Hinduism is inextricably linked to a Hindu samaaj* and today there is no functioning Hindu samaaj left. I got to thinking about all the still surviving parts of our Hindu samaaj. These would be our languages with…
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Takamori Lecture: The Crisis of Mankind
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This is a book by Professor A.K. Saran based on a lecture he gave in 1981 at Takamori, a small village in Japan, to assembled religious and spiritual leaders from all over the world. Professor Saran’s lecture was very well received and was later expanded and rewritten as a book. Professor Saran started his lecture…
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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…