Letter from a professor to fellow academics

Namaskar. 

Please find copied the text of my talk at the Media and Media Education Summit-2018 in Delhi on 22.11.18

It was presented as a letter.

"Letter from a professor to fellow academicians

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Dear Academician,

Namaskar! 

I have a request. Will you as an individual professional care to ask yourself just a few simple questions:

● Is my understanding of the problem based on data-led narratives or narrative-led data? 

● Do I critique a solution in view of what is desirable under ideal conditions only or what is feasible under the given circumstances?

● Do I have ideology-inspired ready-made solutions to problems or have a basket of perspectives capable of providing customized solutions?

● Do I have concepts straight from the West or the ones that are indigenously developed/customized?

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I have dared to ask myself these questions and the answers are frightening, to say the least. So brace up for my answers on behalf of academic community:

● We rarely bother to let data speak for themselves as we are too cowardly (read ideology-driven) to work on data-led narratives (read perspectives-driven) that are inherently solution-oriented.

● The narrative-led data gathering make us intellectually lazy and we conveniently embrace what is desirable under ideal conditions rather than what is feasible under the prevailing circumstances. Consequently, we end up inventing a conflict where there is none and ignoring a conflict where there is one.

● Intellectually incapacitated by our embrace of the ideology-driven ready made solutions, we further regress into  depending on anything FOREIGN and overtly start priding in self-hate which results in sheer absence of indigenous concepts.

+++++

In view of the above, I say this with full responsibility as an academic that the current Nizam-e-Higher Education (UGC) is mostly anti-academic by design so much so that it ends up sponsoring the institutions that churn out India-hating copycats.

Interestingly, this didn't go unnoticed by a Mexican Ambassador to India in 1960s, Octavio Paz, who also got Nobel Prize in literature. He had famously said: Indian elite remains unsurpassed in its copycat-character.

This is further testified by the fact that Indian academics rarely work on developing indigenous concepts that could lend themselves to better understanding of problems unique to India. This would have further led to customized, not mimicked, solutions to the problems at hand. 

If India has achieved anything good, it is despite UGC or ,for that matter, the government. Thus the credit goes to indomitable human endeavor and not the  systems raised specifically for this. No wonder,  a professor is typically more bureaucratic than a seasoned bureaucrat. Put differently, a seasoned bureaucrat is generally more academic than a professor.

This is more true of Social Sciences and Humanities than of Sciences per se. 

I WISH I WERE ENTIRELY WRONG.

Your comments are welcome,

Thanking you in anticipation,

Prof C P Singh.

Note: An honest search for the aforementioned questions may be facilitated by the following concepts:

बुद्धिजीवी, बुद्धिविलासी, बुद्धिविरोधी, बुद्धिपिशाच, बुद्धिवंचक, बुद्धिवंचित, बुद्धिवीर, बुद्धियोद्धा।

#OctavioPaz #UGC #Professor #Bureaucrat #IndigenousConcepts #CustomizedSolutions #Copycats #Copycating #SocialSciences #Humanities #Sciences" 

Waiting for your critical comments please.

Thanking you,

With warm Regards,

CPS.