It's a small world after all...

A large part of the formal education landscape across the world, and also in India, is based on what is called Outcomes Based Education, or OBE for short (nothing to do with the British Empire). But the way it gets implemented on the ground is sometimes mind-numbingly tedious and only promotes a toxic compliance-driven culture, rather than nurturing a culture of inquiry.  One of the first mistakes we do is to equate "outcomes" with "exam performance" and argue for all of education be designed around examinations. We even hear weird axioms like "assessments drive learning". It is one thing for assessments to assess learning-- but once they start driving our learning, we have lost the very reason why we are educating the population in the first place. This culture has also completely taken out the emphasis on learning, in classrooms. Most of our courses today start as a contractual agreement where we first present the assessment model, exam pattern, etc. an...

 A common source of confusion that we often encounter is regarding the terms "subjective" and "objective" statements.  The term "subjective" is often defined to mean as expressing an opinion or sentiment, while the term "objective" is defined to mean statements that are factual or unbiased.  But there is a problem with such definitions. How do we know that what we are stating is indeed factual? We may believe it to be a fact, while it may not actually be factual. Similarly, how do we know that what we are saying about something is unbiased? We may not even know what are all the possible sources of bias, and we may not have the complete picture about something even if we believe otherwise.  Yet another (really weird) definition of these terms is that, a "subjective" question (in an exam, for example) is something that requires an essay-type answer, while an "objective" question is something like a multiple-choice question, or a...

Purva paksha:   When we study Advaita Vedanta, we learn about the impermanent and transient nature of existential reality that is called Maya. Our daily experience of reality comprising of matter and interactions among them are in a continuous state of flux. Vedanta posits that the underlying substrate of all of our experience is an unchanging reality (that is called Brahman), that is the only reality that exists. This substrate is existence itself-- and forms the "is-ness" of everything that is.  An example that is oft quoted is that of a clay pot. A clay pot is just clay and nothing else. There is nothing called a pot if we remove the clay from a clay pot. The cause of a clay pot is the clay, and the clay itself appears as a pot. The name, form and function that forms a pot is not at the same level of reality as the clay. The clay can exist without the pot, but the pot cannot exist without the clay.  The transactional reality of our universe comprising of laws of physic...

In an episode of Young Sheldon, young Sheldon who is supposedly a genius and a budding scientist, is listening to the live broadcast of the Nobel prize ceremony live from Stockholm. He had invited several of his friends to listen to this live broadcast, even tried to engage in debates with them on who ought to be winning the Nobel this year, and also arranged for snacks for them to have a listen-party-- but no one turns up. The next scene shows him lamenting that he may end up dying all alone, at this rate. The scene then shows other future BBT protagonists as kids, and what they are doing at that time. Young Howard is tinkering with some machine, Young Raj is looking at the stars, Young Leonard is reading something, Young Penny is sleeping, and so on. None of them had invited anyone else to listen to the live broadcast from Stockholm and were lamenting about no one turning up.  It appears from this, that the real budding scientists were Young Sheldon's friends. Young Sheldon only ...

Recently, I had the opportunity to visit several locations in rural Malawi in southern Africa, to study different initiatives towards financial inclusion. This was part of my collaboration with a UK based organization called Rural Inclusion , and its implementation partner, CADECOM ( Caritas Malawi ). This activity was supported by a grant from the Frontiers Programme of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering.  Rural Inclusion, as an organization, works with several Community Based Organizations (CBO) in multiple countries to provide training on financial literacy through their platform named Ostrii. The CBOs in turn work with several communities to impart this training as well as assess impact on the ground.  As part of our visit, we interacted with several communities in the Dedza region, and the Ntchisi region of Malawi. Communities in these places had organized themselves to create informal banking systems called VSLA (Village Savings and Lending Association), where communi...