I was born intelligent... education ruined me

"Education and education alone can lead to India's Salvation" - Sir Syed Ahmed Khan

A bright october afternoon...
It was our last micowave lab session, we had a group experiment to do- plotting the radiation pattern of a dipole antenna. automation and development of software tools made this job easy. one transmitting antenna is fixed and the receiving antenna is made to rotate which is wired to a computer which plots the signal strength and all we need to do is take a print. we assembled after finishing it, to do the most sick work we have ben forced to do all the 4 years of college life- observation. enter Mr.Shit (nomenclature explained shortly).

Mr Shit: Whats all this noise!!... go back to your seats and write down ur observations!!!

Me and MARUN were arguing as to wat the plot stands for... the pattern of the transmitting antenna or the receiving antenna. I was telling him transmitting or receiving doesnt matter... its only abt which one is being rotated. Mr Shit was watching the commotion silently. When were leaving, he beckoned me silently and whispered, "err... Arvind, can you explain to me how its receiving antenna pattern?"

Welcome to the world of Mr. Shit (this is the name bestowed upon him by one of my friends... i shall use only this and not his christian name to make this post obvious only to those who will relish reading it!!!)- a living legend who joined the department as faculty for electromagnetics 2 years back. I'm sure none in the class have met a guy like this in all our lives. a teacher so commanding and smart that a kindergarten kid would not think twice before bullying him! fortunately, our class was spared from listening to his state of art lectures (why state of art? coz he reads them out from state of art books!) as he handled antenna theory only for the cd batch.

his supervision of class is outstanding. he spots so minute a mistake such as a missing arrow head in an arrow in a block diagram which we have to show before we can start the experiment. and man he is strict in duty or wat? that missing arrow head would mean the student goes out of the lab, redraws everything and only then can come inside. wat after that? teach them how to do the experiment?... er... never mind all this trivial stuff!

in the 7th sem, almost every day we heard new stories about Mr. Shit's demonstration of sheer intelligence and charm in class from cd batch guys.

Student: Sir, why haven't u given me marks for this derivation... i have got it right
Mr. Shit: What nonsense! you didn't write this sentence as it was in jordan... (how will i know if u got the result at all) ?

Mr. Shit: you know RAVI... I have been thinking about you all this weekend... can you guess why?
Some back bencher: Because you are a homo!

perfectly dedicated to his work... knows all the textbooks word by word (but i doubt if he understands even one word) . and he is the pet of the all senior faculty. and why not?... he turns hunch back when ever he sees them...

I'm yet to find a student who doesn't want to see him die.

all these four years, we have been subjected to similar faculty time and again (ofcourse none of them was as good as Mr. Shit!)- faculty, who leave us to marvel at the way the system has accumulated such huge amount of filth over time. i some times wonder that if such a reputed institution can can drop to such low levels, what about those colleges whose names we've never heard of. I hear similar stories from my friends in private institutions. i hear similar stories from my friends in andhra pradesh, maharashtra, delhi... there must be a Mr. Shit in every college in this country.

and most importantly, it makes me wonder-given our inherent conservative attitude- whether education in india was always like this?... when i look at the country's legacy for an answer, im confronted with an emphatic NO! we have splendid examples in the past as to how educaton's true purpose was reaslised- betterment of mankind. let me take u back in time, some 150 years, when modern education as we know it, was still in its infancy. this is the story of a forgotten hero, a lone crusader who changed the lives of millions in india.

its late 1850s and India is in shambles. the mutiny took its toll on the government and people alike. the reform movements started by the likes of Raja Ram Mohan Roy have received major set backs and goverment turned hostile to any petition reformers made. heaviest penalty is being paid by the Muslims. from the late medieval times, apart from the very small percentage of the community which constituted the nobility, muslims were downtrodden and received almost no education. the british government is making the matters worse by isolating them and pusruing an anti-islam policy. the muslim community itself was closed to external ideas and scienctific education is shunned by the madrasas.

A man named Syed Ahmed Khan enters the scene. he belonged to a family of nobles in Aligarh, UP, and hence had the oppurtunity to study sciences and english. he was fascinated by the prosperity and liberal thinking of the europeans and swore to bring forward all the Muslims in india. the first step he took in this direction was to translate all the contemporary scientific work to Urdu, making it accessible to the common man. he did this while in civil services. he also involved himself in interpreting Koran to suit the modern era, bring the muslims out of the nut shell and put an end to discrimination against women.

he soon realised that working in a room with books won't do any good and if he needed to reach out to the masses, he needed some place to teach them and let them learn themselves. thus the seed was laid, which later was to grow into a huge tree called Mohemmedan Anglo-Oriental College, now known as Aligarh University. but he needed money for building the college. his family reserves had dwindled and so he decided to collect donations.

every morning he would make his usual journey on foot in and around the city to collect donations. he did this for many years. his colleagues and friends were tired of donating. still he persisted. even during his toughest times, he had an aura about him, maintained a delicate sense of humor during arguments with friends which probably kept him alive. on one such occassion, one of his friends argued that his whole idea of university was worthless

Friend: see, people are being taught in mosques that science is against allah, then how will ur university run? who will come to study?
Syed: people will come, university will run
Friend: it wont run
Syed: it will
Friend: it wont
Syed: it will
Friend: lets bet on it for an asharfee (persian word for coin currency)
Syed: ok... u have one asharfee with u?
Friend: yes
Syed: show it to me
His friend keeps the coin on the table. Syed picks it up, looks at it, smiles at his friend and drops the coin in his donation box
Syed: let it be ur donation for the day till u win!

in 1875, his brainchild found realisation. his struggle, though marred by extreme loyalty to british government, helped a whole community find its feet. to this day, many muslims in india owe their lives to him. people like syed brough education to india. and people who followed them, sustained its pristine value. it gave us great thinkers like c v raman. but some where down the line, we lost the value to our selfish lives.

the legend of Sir Syed would put most of the so called educationists of today to shame. private patrons see their schools and colleges only as money vending machines and so press for better results in examinations rather than over all development of the student. corporeal punishments have taken their toll. sporadic suicides serve as indicators. as for the government schools, they are filled with Mr. Shits.

contrast this with the US where 80% of the schools are government run and only people of the very elite business community send their wards to private institutions. the public schools are run with splendid professionalism and are self sufficient. even the americans understand education is too critical a functionality to be out sourced to private bidders.

einstein, who studied in Zurich University said that though his college left much to be desired, the true purpose of education- "which was to train the mind to think"- was well satisfied and hence college education is indispensible. Some one should have asked him to come to india and ask him if he still feels bad about his college!