Wining and dining at S.D.’s was the fun stuff that it always is—a lot of good food with alchohol and conversation, both of which just ceased to flow. Darby and I met A.di for the first time and I have to say this. I have never seen anyone wear such a crisp white shirt before. I would even a few days ago take pride in mine but I abdicate the throne. Moving away from such frivolous sartorial details, let me type my impression of A.di, someone I’d love to be in touch with. She is one vocal, feisty and fun woman. She is an ex-colleague of S.D.’s and we had already heard so many good things about her. S.D. had told us in detail the effort and vigour that A.di would put in everything she did at the hell-hole of a university they both taught in. But she just ‘had to’ leave the place the moment she had the opportunity for it seems she couldn’t have survived there. And I don’t blame her. One might ask “why not stay there and fight the system?” but the survivors there who make any sense confess that with the ‘crab mentality’ abounding there, no decent or honest work gets done. And that has been the case for over 15 years. A.di now stays in New Zealand with her husband and son. She has successfully completed a creative writing course, one of the best in that country and plans to devote herself to full-time writing. She seems to be indebted to her former workplace for two reasons—1)one because it has taught her that good people are the same all over the world and bad people are the same all over the world, too, and 2) had it not been for her terrifying work experience there, she wouldn’t have discovered the writer in her. Incidentally, it has left such an indelible impression on her creative mind that her dissertation is an impish campus novel. She is currently working on getting her work published in India and I hope she tastes success.
Our free flowing discussion that day covered as diverse topics as the current absurd questioning by Heathrow Airport officials of Indians they presumably think might tell them something about the Mumbai terror attacks(guffaw!), the increasingly democratic tendency seen in the selection of Rhodes Scholars in the recent years, a Jewish friend of A.D.’s who is a devout believer and a homosexual simultaneously, how he tries reconciling these contraries in his life, and plagiarism. I learned a couple of things. Supposedly, Indians and Koreans are the most notorious when it comes to plagiarising. I am not surprised that Indians make it somewhere to the top of that list because poor us! We do not even understand the concept of plagisrising and how serious its implications can be, precisely because a majority of us go through the entire grind of education in our country (even higher education) through the tried and tested method of ‘rote and mug’. Koreans, I was informed, apparently take the cake. Whereas tutorials in India often ensure that the same material is produced by all their beneficiaries in examinations, where even university professors are guilty of writing lectures where they ‘harmlessly’ lift from other sources, in Korea, the best essay adjudged by a teacher in a language class is copied by all the students as per the instructions of the teacher!!! This, my friends, is the norm there. I don’t know which is worse. And then we talk about brain drain and how the best are leaving India for greener pastures. Have we ever pondered over the fact that may be not all, but so many leave their own homeland because their efforts are wasted in the by lanes of redtapism and because their best work goes unappreciated in their own land? People are too busy celebrating mediocrity and accepting lack of originality time and again in almost all spheres of life to bother about the ones we lose to foreign shores.Brain drain is happening every day all around us in our country—in our homes, in seats of learning, at workplaces, in election booths. And I call it brain drain because I find all around me a culture that ingrains in its followers a tendency not to question, a perverse desire to nip doubts in their buds without letting them grow, without quashing them with reason and convincing logic. I feel responsible as a teacher to ask my students to think, to analyse, to question and not accept anything or anyone at face value. And if I have failed in fulfilling this moral duty, I have failed to do my job.
P.S. I must make one point clear about this post. I do not think at all that Kaavya Vishwanathan was oblivious to the fact that hers was a case of blatant plagiarism. What I was referring to is academic plagiarism in classroom notes and answers found in tests. Students in India find framing answers by lifting passages from critics a completely innocuous exercise.
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8 comments:
don't u think the education system in india is faulty? with the pressure of useless syllabus, we are just destroying the students'potential to be creative. we are just teaching them something which will fetch them MARKS.as a result they are losing their ability to think. they just mug up notes dictated in the class. i remember once i was discussing answers in a class and a boy was trying his best to copy down each word. i really felt sorry for him, when he failed to hear a word and kept on asking me ,'AFTER PODGER? AFTER PODGER?'
i agree with u but i do not think that our problem lies in syllabus alone. that's there in every education system in the world.the problem lies in the way education is approached and the unwieldy number of students (in cities) the classrooms in our country deal with. education at the school level should help u with tools to arrive at your own answers and not provide all the answers themselves.it is unfortunate that this is hardly seen anywhere despite the best of intentions. you tell me. how many times do we penalise answers because they have filmstars or amorous love mentioned in them? why can't such answers be accepted? after all these are part of the reality that these students deal with everyday of their lives. why cud you not just go ahead and give rik the highest score in a tutorial assignment where he wrote something absurd about kolkata changing? we cud feel amused in our lounge reading it but the poor boy went without a word of encouragement and appreciation for his creativity and originality. so he seeks inspiration and encouragement in a different land. we better accept our faults.
p.s. i am just arguing a point. so hope uyou take my comment in the right spirit.
you know ... I feel very torn on this topic. on the one hand, I cannot deny the brain drain, the 'mug and pour' mentality in my country - and on the other hand, I cannot but admit that the average Indian student knows more, has more perspective than their counterparts here, or in many other places.
so where is it that we are failing? are we becoming a country where the mediocre thrive but the brilliant are frustrated?
given our population pressure - can we afford to create educational programs that are so mindful of the individual?
when examiners are over-burdened with the sheer volume of papers they have to go through, do they find the time/energy to appreciate individuality, or is it just easier to score papers basis staid, much-discussed points?
and when it's time for my kids to go to school - should i send them to a different country? or should i take as much, if not greater responsibility to equip them with the ability to think on their own?
very true. i agree with u. the problem lies with us, the teachers. we expect the students to write what we think is right. ur reference to rik reminds me once i scolded him and said, "keep your weird imagination to urself and write such things down in your diary". promptly he anwsered,
"then for me my diary would be true and proper and not this tutorial copy" . he said it laughing and not with any intention to insult me. i realized how helpless we teachers are, we cannot even allow these students to use their imagination.
another student in a paragraph on "the day i discovered a hidden treasure" wrote about a love letter from a childhood sweetheart.. i liked his paragraph immensely but i was not allowed to give him marks on it. i didn't feel like telling him," you should not write such things" but i had to as instructed.
Lol - that bit about teachers preparing their notes from the prescribed reading reminds me of college, and this bizarre teacher we had, who would do just that - and his idea of 'teaching' was just reading that stuff out loud while we obediently copied down every word. And then, after our exams, he'd actually have the audacity to tell us 'You haven't studied one bit, all you've done is mugged up my notes'. while we spluttered in anger, trying to decide whether or not to tell him - 'Hey, we read the books set us all right - the only problem is, you beat us to it while preparing your lectures!'
thank u all so much for your comments. and this is for she says...i agree with u that indian students have often shown gr8er perspective than students from other places around the globe and that is why the situation is all the more unfortunate and needs to be looked into.individual students shine and teachers at individual levels might inspire or encourage them but i know this for a fact that the system does not support their endeavours. and do not forget that it is because they have volumes of papers to assess, that they find an occasional spark of originality worth applauding. however why the brilliant are so often frustrated has several answers and all of them pretty murky.in west bengal it cud be the red army interfering. wat say, pro?
Red army might just be right, more directly than you would think - that teacher I wrote about was a die-hard 'Marxist', and one of the topics we 'studied' under him was the theories of Marx, Engles and Hegel!! :D
lolzzzzzzzzzzzzz!!!
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