Democratising Epistemology

Epistemology is the key. The prevailing epistemology anytime is an outcome of the play of multiple factors, ideas, and designs of organisations. It shapes people's imagination and in turn fashions people's lives. For the substantialization of democracy, the democratization of epistemology is a critical urgency. Education institutions must equip learners with the skills for identifying the sources, purposes, functioning, effects, and aftereffects of the prevailing pieces of knowledge and their working. They must be made to rise above being the passive subjects of knowledge.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Functional Universities

Being the most populous in the comity of nations, India needs the highest number of functional universities. Functional here means functioning to the collective good. It is about holding on to whatever sustains the good and building upon that.

 
For skill-oriented education, India's top-notch institutions have done well; in particular, they have served as great preparatory schools for gaining entry into the finest Western universities. And by graduating from there, many Indians now occupy high positions in the global corporate world.

 
But for pure sciences and liberal arts, Indian universities have yet to attain functionality. Globally, such national attainments are reflected in the number of Nobel awardees or by the prestige universities of a nation command across continents.

 
In fact, functional universities create enabling ecology and improvise mechanisms for enterprises and agencies to make life livable and facilitate betterment.

Nations failing to ensure a dignified life for their constituents speak of their universities if they have any.

 
Niraj Kumar Jha

Arun Yogiraj

Shri Yogiraj is a blessed human being. He sculpted the Divine to life. The eyes are more alive than those of any living human being. What he did appears pure inspiration. It is ethereal; no work of art of any earthling can match in beauty or grace.

Arun Ji got everything by his sheer Chosen Role, which a person can aspire to get in their life. But, the grateful nation can do the least is to confer Bharat Ratna on him and offer membership in the Rajya Sabha by nomination.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Of Personas: Natural and Positioned

People commanding some socially recognised position or seeing themselves on a mission invariably have a lot of artificiality in their persona. They cannot be called abnormal, but they are not normal either. Their demeanour is overbearing, and they expect people to be submissive. A person who has normal mental makeup, is self-respecting, and does not suffer from any want, actual or notional, would feel uncomfortable by their presence around and sometimes even find them unbearable.

Why do we have positions and missions occupied by such overbearing people? The basic fact is that people err in imagining and working on their coexistence. Why does such an error prevail everywhere on the populated parts of the planet though in proportion to the state of development? This may be because of the genetic coding of human beings. We have lived for a far longer duration of our existence in jungles where bare survival was an act of extreme heroism. Extraordinariness which was once a survival need remains a human goal. People devise extraordinary positions and roles for themselves, which in turn necessitate extraordinariness in human beings to play those roles.   Precarious conditions and human consciousness together disconcert human agency. 

Niraj Kumar Jha 

Morality: Manifest and Latent

I get this: while the conclusion part of a write-up states the manifest morality of the author, it is the statement of fact that betrays the latent morality of the writer, which is a more authentic thing to know about. Knowing the morality of an author in the fullness of its manifest and latent forms is a crucial part of reading any text. An author might have tried for objectivity with honesty, but the relativity of morality, by and large, remains unavoidable. For instance, the colonial era colonisers' writings can be decoded thus. It may have also happened that in its manifest form, an author might have concluded otherwise what they would have put in the statement of fact, They might have found ways to speak the unspeakable. Take the same context as mentioned above, for instance, the colonial era native literary forms often take this form.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Mutuality in Order

 More mutual goodwill and respect are highly desirable. What causes the hugeness of desirability? The reason is that a person does not value themselves. Many would not accept this as a fact. They would see people highly valuing themselves, but these people value their assumed positions, real or make-believe, not their persons. Arrogance and self-respect look similar but are essentially different. A self-respecting person would be unfailingly respectful to fellow people. 

This desirability does not emanate from something natural. Most of it is rooted in history where enslaver regimes through ruthless coercion denied any dignity to their subjects. Such people are now DNAed to hate each other and always love some high office to dictate their lives. Mandating collectivism has a history in the background. 

Niraj Kumar Jha 

Freedom of Expression and Progress

Generally known and accepted fact is that the single factor most critical for progress is the freedom of expression. What gave the West an edge over the rest of the world and enabled them to colonise a large part of the globe was that they had this freedom, at least in the elite circles. They had clarity of vision and thereby winning strategy. 

Freedom of expression is not a commodity given or taken, held or snatched. Its abuses may erode it, and good uses may enhance it. One must choose to speak and care to speak with clarity, knowledge, logic, honesty and tact. The elements of honesty and tact may sound incongruent, but honest purposes sometimes need, on occasion, some tact to make it work.  

Having a right to freedom of expression bestows on one the duty to promote this freedom. Speaking honestly, truthfully, politely and with civility helps, At the same time, one must strive to improve how they speak by enriching their knowledge and, thereby, cultivating open-mindedness.  

Niraj Kumar Jha 

A Community University

I visualise a more rooted and functional alternative university system as a communitarian and cooperative one, wherein a whole township is fused into teaching, researching and learning while dwellers would carry out their usual businesses as town-dwellers do, sweeping the streets, running a shop or a factory. Roles such as ordinary citizens, administrators, learners and teachers would be flexible and changeable. A practising doctor may also teach in a classroom and undertake some research work at a lab.  A businessperson would teach management, and a management professor would own some business. A sanitary worker would be taking classes on hygiene or folk music. A homemaker would be tutoring on childcare and cooking and discussing the literary merits of Kalidas or the mysteries of the universe at some public fora. Here, education would be a lived experience and nourish life instead of dictating and dominating people. Classrooms, labs, and institutional centres would be scattered over the whole geography, and things would be coordinated by those willing to do so and capable of doing so. In the traditional system of India, communities used to patronise the education of their young and even outsiders in the case of larger townships. Hermitages were small communities of teachers and learners. Till very late, many settlements within some larger townships served as such communities. Even now, if a township evolves into a community and cooperative university or a university fuses itself into a township, it would make education really democratic, and such a setup would end the self-arrogated rights of scholasticism over folks.  

Niraj Kumar Jha