Tradition Building

Macaulay's Minute

Education in India has not departed much from Macaulay's views of 1835. The document related to his view on how the British Government of those days needs to spend Rs 1 lakh on education in India is rather long and is mixed.

Excerpts of his minutes that were accepted in toto by Bentick are shown below. The decision set in motion teaching 'natives' in English rather than Arabic (Delhi) and Sanscrit (Benaras). Full text: Also

"Thomas B. Macaulay's "Minute on Indian Education

2ND OF FEBRUARY, 1835

Thomas B. Macaulay asserts his viewpoints about a British colony, India, in an early nineteenth century speech. Macaulay insists that he has "never found one among them [Orientalists, an opposing political group] who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia". He continues stating, "It is, no exaggeration to say, that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England".....

....... We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.."

Much like all of colonialism, this too was from our repugnant past. Churchill let only 20 million Indians die of starvation in Bengal, Macaulay's sting was and is larger and much longer lasting.

Time to Rethink

It is high time to jettison this baggage and think like we ought to. We need to find a solution that matches our needs. Any solution we come up has to respect our culture and take into account present reality.

Kashinath Prabhu was an engineer from the first batch and had joined KarMic against his grandfather's wish. The old man, respected the rebellion and wanted to understand more about the company, more the dreams associated with it. He was not in a position to travel. So all of us including Dr S J Bhat decided that we will all head out to Honnavar to meet Kashi's grandfather.
Memory is sketchy but we had landed in Honnavar on a Friday. We had good discussion with him and he wanted to donate the company five gunthas of his land for a building - he was not a highly educated man but a learned one and had achieved a lot for the region socially. It was an honour to have made such a good impact.

At the 9;00 am Saturday, a working day for KarMic Training Centre, we used their living room to hold a class. At 10:30 AM just like in Manipal, the family provided tea for everyone and the class was completed by lunch time. Two major sights on the Udupi - Hubli road are the Maravanthe beach and the grand Sharavati near Honnavar. We all had a grand time after the class including a boat ride on the Sharavati and a trip to beach. This was the first of many cases of moving the classes to where we all were.

We held weekly seminars as an outlet for engineers to organize their thoughts and present it to their colleagues. Our friend, Dr Niranjana UC was head of Biomedical Department in MIT, the local engineering college. He officiated and lived in an old Lingayat Muth built by Keladi Channamma, right in front of Udupi bus station. At our request, he allowed us to use the Muth premises to hold the seminar. After lunch all of us pile into a bus, reach the place and hold the seminar. The blend of a four hundred year Muth and VLSI was a good contrast to say the least.

On one occasion, we found out after reaching the Muth, that it was being used for another function. After a bit of thinking, we got into another bus and got to Kaup Beach and held the seminar. We had discussions of masks, layers and pseudo layers on the beach, the sand providing a place to draw the figures. I can still remember the curious chameleon watching us, who took its time to decamp after much shooing.

On other occasions, we have had classes in Sringeri Muth on semiconductor memory with a midnight revision class back in Manipal. This time, the lights went out but the class continued with engineers envisioning the diagrams in the air in the darkness.

Celebrating Small Victories

Manipal is a college town mostly populated by students who have travelled far. The richness of their parents is apparent. In fact, the town is very westernized. In KarMic though atmosphere was anything but.

Most Indian universities had gotten into the habit of holding convocation for just the rank holders because of the large numbers graduating.

In KarMic, after completion of the training, we held functions to celebrate our partial victory over silicon. We would routinely invite all the parents of graduating engineers and to make these functions memorable to the engineers, we would come up with something different.

In the first occasion, unhappy with only a limited number of people lighting the lamp, we decided to have large number of earthen lamps to be lit by parents, engineers and guests. This function itself has not graduated to include a video capture of the event. On another occasion, we cleaned up a lakeside slope, set up a pendal. There are laterite rocks in the area, we flattened the tops, applied a bit of cement to make a seat. Besides the lamp lighting, the function included aarti to the engineers, a Deepavali tradition where the aarti is done to the breadwinners in the family. Aarti plate and lamps were earthen. After the function, Vaibhav commented that the shoulders felt heavier. We had Merrill Wortheimer, his wife and I think Mark from US who participated with gusto. I had talked to Barjees, a muslim, if this was alright before the function, she was happy to participate.

Elephant in the Tent

Kameshwar Rao, a friend of mine and I were discussing how to make the events more memorable. We hit upon the idea of bringing in the temple elephant during the ceremony so that engineers would be tickled. We discussed with others and the general feeling was it was a stupid idea. Kameshwar is stubborn and said stupid or not, we were going to do it. With the help of Udupi Muth, we got the female elephant up the mountain, the mahout said that she enjoyed the trip. As planned she came while the ceremony was going on. However, instead of engineers going out to be surprised, Kashi brought the elephant into the tent to bless the engineers and it was a great fun for everybody.

'Lagaan' came out a couple of years later. It had aarti for the cricket team and elephant that the king rode on. At least in our circle, we contended it was our idea first.