Insights - 2: Weaving a Bharatiya approach to academics

Manju (name changed) is a high school student in a small village in a remote corner of Karnataka. I knew him from when he was just a 4 year old kid. 

A couple of years ago, I and my family members met him again after several years, and were amazed at what he has become. He is in high school now, and was showing us a toy tractor he had built from cardboard boxes and bottle caps. What was amazing was not just the structure of the toy that resembled a real tractor. It was also powered by two motors-- one for the wheels, and another stepper motor for controlling the plough. He had also created a small control panel with which we could control the movement of the tractor, as well as the plough behind! 

We were seriously impressed with his engineering skills and strongly encouraged his parents (who were low income farmers with very little schooling themselves), to get him to study and go to college. 

Fast forward a couple of years. Manju no longer lives with his parents after having had a showdown with them regarding his low marks in school and not having performed up to expectations in school making his prospects of entering college, dim. He has run away to his grand-parents place and cannot face his father. 

I was aghast when I heard this. And even more aghast (with a sense of deja vu) when the dad said that Manju was not all that bright a kid, unlike his elder brother who is so enterprising and dashing. 

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The above episode is in a nutshell, the epitome of the serious pathology that afflicts our formal education today. Formal education in India today is a nightmare for anyone who have their own creative potential and can think independently. The system systematically dispirits individuals to make them into insecure automatons with certificates, who can then be exploited employed in some form of compliant service. 

We keep talking about our "demographic dividend" and keep lamenting why Indians are not innovative or creative, and ask how do Indians excel abroad when they struggle in India itself? 

But hardly anyone seems to be interested in systematically analysing the pathologies that afflict our formal education system and do something about it. 

The formal education system in India, is an efficient system of deracination. Through relentless conditioning and pontification, it makes us dissociate the knowledge that we learn, from our sense of individual personhood based on lived experience and original thought. With several years of schooling, where students are measured on narrow metrics that have little or no relevance to the world around them, they end up learning to live almost completely within their minds with no sense of ownership or belongingness to the reality around them. 

Which is the reason why, in many of our "elite" and "premier" institutions, it feels like we are in a different country altogether. Some of these elite institutions have existed for several decades now, where they impart advanced training and conceptual insights to their students. Yet, outside the campus, the city would have remained as backwards as it were when these institutions started. Very few of the "elite" students engage with the city council or the municipality or the community around them. One would imagine that the entry of an elite academic institution, will change the social ecosystem around it too. Yet, (with some exceptions in recent years), it has hardly been the case. 

Knowledge systems in our formal education today is a direct import from the West. Right in kindergarten, we learnt about summer vacations where people go on picnics to "soak up the sun" and eat plum cakes. Never mind that we had never seen a plum cake before-- and I'm not sure I have seen one even now, and "soaking up the sun" in our summers would be a really bad idea! (Nowadays it is a bad idea even in Europe!) And all the way into higher education several decades later, we learnt about "market basket analysis" without having seen a single supermarket store (at that time), and at work where I remember having written a device driver for a CD changer device just from a textual description of what is a CD changer, and without even having seen such a device! 

Even as researchers, we find today that our work is valued only so much as some major community in the US or Europe values it. No amount of logical arguments or evidence or proofs would serve to convey the importance of any original idea we have developed. All argumentation about originality will be seen as lame excuses, with the only evidence of research quality is to be recognised by some "worldwide" community that is directed by institutions in Europe or US. When we do manage to convey the importance of our original idea, in order to be granted our degrees, we are then expected to work it out to the minutest detail, including implementation and deployment-- a process that would have taken decades even in the Western world. 

(In one of my courses, I include John Nash's seminal paper about the existence of Nash equilibria in finite non-cooperative games, that lead him to eventually win the Nobel prize in economics. I make it a point to note that the first version of this paper had no equations at all in it! It just provided an idea that a result in algebraic topology can be directly applied here. Fat chance in India today that we can ever publish an idea at this preliminary stage and expect to be taken seriously!). 

And whenever I have argued for a need for a Bharatiya approach to academics and research, I usually get a pushback saying that the age old wisdom of Vedas and Upanishads are not relevant today, and that "science is universal" and there is no such thing called "Bharatiya approach" to science. 

I refute both these arguments as follows: 

• By Bharatiya approach, I am not necessarily advocating returning to our education system from thousands of years ago (although it is a good idea in itself, to study our ancient knowledge systematically from today's hindsight-- without the contemptuous interpretations accorded to them by colonial interpreters). I only mean that we need to stop blindly copying either Europe or US or China or Japan or whatever else, and address our challenges with original thought and implement solutions that address our challenges directly (rather than implementing a solution for some other country first and let it "trickle down" decades later).
• Second, the outcome of science may be universal knowledge, but the path to science is highly rooted in socio-cultural-political landscape of the population practising it. To quote Heisenberg, "What we observe is not nature itself-- but nature exposed to our method of inquiry." And there is definitely an original Bharatiya approach to the method of inquiry. When we change the method of inquiry, the universality of our discoveries will not change. Only what we end up discovering will change, and the outcomes of such discoveries will be more directly relevant to our lived experience.

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So what would such a Bharatiya approach be like? I hesitate to offer specific structures and processes, because one, Bharat is way too complex to be described by one specific structure or process; and two, given the way we operate today, whatever specific structure or process we bring in, the system will quickly overfit to the metrics rendering the whole exercise meaningless. 

Instead, I am going to propose the following dimensions that we need to think through, for bringing about effective change: 

Resilience: One of the most important changes we need to bring about is make the education system more resilient. Today, a student's entire future is dependent on "cracking" one exam with stratospheric marks, that pretty much mean nothing in terms of what skills or insights they actually have. Our teenagers cannot afford to fall ill, or get tired, or pursue some creative activity, or take a break. If they do any of these, their future is gone-- not just in terms of jobs or money, but also in terms of basic dignity of existence. Our system is that brittle. 

In my own case, for the crime of having been interested in science as an end in itself during my high school (and having my own science lab at home, and having built my own ham radio, etc.) and not focusing on my exams instead, I am still paying the price in terms of greatly attenuated opportunities and having to receive a lot of contempt and derision. We are way too brittle, and if we wish to really address our mental health crisis, we need to start building resilience into the system, rather than removing ceiling fans from student hostels so that students cannot hang themselves! 

Capability: The second dimension that we need to work on is a holistic sense of "capability" (to use the term in the sense of Amartya Sen's "capability" approach). Capability is an abstract term that refers to how easy is it for someone to build the lives they want, and act meaningfully. Capability includes, but is not limited to the technical and scientific knowledge we learn in college. It has several more dimensions like managing health, wealth, culture, people, uncertainty, risk, etc. 

We often say that college education should be "job oriented" and we reduce it even further, to focus just on what companies coming for placement are looking for. However, in a more fundamental sense, what we are all insecure about is not "job" per se, but "livelihood". For most of the country, jobs are still hard to come by. And even for the "elite" ones today, thanks to disruptions caused by AI, a "job" is no longer a guarantee for "livelihood". 

When we address livelihood instead of jobs, we see that we will need to impart many more skills to our students. Most importantly, jobs require our students to compete for a small number of positions, while livelihood requires them to collaborate and promote teamwork to improve our chances of earning. Livelihood training requires us to teach how to identify problems, how to find what the market needs, how to manage costs, how to manage uncertainty, how to build networks, etc. A job oriented approach to education makes us more competitive and insecure, while a livelihood oriented approach makes us more capable as well as resilient. 

Creative agency: The real outcome of education is how we are ourselves transformed as a result of our learning journey. To promote this, we need to encourage originality of thought and action-- or our creative agency. In most of our curriculum, we only teach from books and get students to understand what knowledge others have built. We hardly ever get students to create their own knowledge. 

Knowledge creation is a very hard process. It is not as easy as it sounds. We easily form opinions-- but an opinion is not knowledge. The most important skill to learn for knowledge creation, is objectivity-- or separating the creation from the creator. Whatever we create will be subject to a lot of failures and criticism, and it is very important for us to learn how to direct the criticism to the idea (even if the critic aims it at us), and improve our creation, rather than respond to it as an assault. 

Sovereignty: Finally, if we really need to bring about Viksit Bharat, protecting and upholding sovereignty in all its dimensions is of utmost importance. Today, we are increasingly becoming dependent on technologies that are developed and even controlled from outside India (GPS, AI, Semiconductors, social media, mobile phones, etc.) And for a large part, it is our own former students who have been instrumental in developing these technologies, that are sold back to us at a premium, and which can be turned off by some external party, anytime. 

In recent times, there are some very encouraging efforts to move development of key technologies to within the country. But without ground level changes in our education and research ecosystem, it is very hard to really bring traction to these initiatives within the country-- and, like in the case of automobiles or mobile phones, we may just end up as another assembly line unit for technologies that are conceived, designed and developed outside the country. 

The above would be what I would call the foundations of a Bharatiya approach to our formal education. Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) are definitely very important and should be introduced as a subject or even as an entire discipline of study in our formal education. But our indigenous approach to education should be based on original thought rooted in today's reality. 

Insights - 1: The social value of academic research

This is the first in a series of posts on my lessons learnt from being in an academic environment that promotes a research mindset, and also as an administrator having tried my hand at nurturing and strengthening such an environment. 

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Conventionally, the term "research" was associated with universities and academia, while "industry" was all about production, manufacturing, construction, and business. This is because, research is the process of creating new knowledge, and up until the mid 20th century, knowledge was seen as the exclusive forte of academia and universities. 

But this stereotype started changing by the mid 20th century. For example, many foundational concepts that make up a textbook in Computer Science today-- like automata theory and finite state machines, have their roots in industrial research labs like Bell labs, Xerox PARC, etc. 

Ever since the end of the second world war, industries have steadily acquired more and more knowledge processing capabilities. Today, even the conventional industries invest more in knowledge processing than in the actual mechanics of construction or manufacturing. An EV car manufacturer for example, need not learn about internal combustion engines at all, but needs to learn about software engineering for safety critical systems. 

The role of knowledge processing in industries have become so much, that some people even argue that universities are not needed anymore, and that (especially with the onset of AI) universities are broken, and not relevant anymore. 

There are also several corporate entities starting their own universities stressing on the "industry focused" nature of their syllabus and research activities. 

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In this post, I would like to characterise the social value of what we conventionally know as academic research-- knowledge building activities involving more of books and thinking and debating, and less of programming, GPUs and AI. 

Firstly, let me address the misconception that academic research is "theoretical" in nature, while industry research is "applied". I think this framing is incorrect. Several theoretical results have come out of industrial research, and a lot of academic research address practical issues. 

Yet another misconception is that academic research is somehow "blue sky" in nature-- in that, these are knowledge pursuits as an end in itself, pursued just for the aesthetic beauty of the underlying mathematics. Maybe so, but I find this argument too often being used to evade accountability. "Just give us money and leave us alone" is what this argument seems to say, which after being an administrator, I find it hard to digest. 

This post is hence, about the social value of academic research. If society is to support industry or academia, there needs to be a value proposition that we offer to society. As academics, we have to now ask that if knowledge generation is greatly facilitated by the better levels of wealth and resources available in the industry, does academic research have any social value at all? 

Similarly, when we say that AI can replace education altogether, and industry can offer more resources than an academic environment ever could, does conventional universities hold any social value at all? 

At least in the current way we are interpreting the role of universities-- as institutions providing skilled personnel to the industry-- our answer may well be that universities will be obsolete soon, and the society will not miss anything. 

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I would however, like to argue just the opposite. Knowledge processing may have entered the forte of industry and business in a big way in the 21st century, but there is a characteristic difference between how knowledge is processed in the industry and in the university (and no-- it is not applied versus theory). 

Here is my understanding about research in the industry and research in academia: 

Industrial research builds social capability, while academic research (needs to) builds social resilience. 

Industrial research often starts with engineering or business challenges, builds new technologies to address these challenges and sometimes goes further to build a new science that lays the conceptual foundations for the technology. The end result of this is that some form of social capability is enhanced. As a result of industrial research, we typically end up doing something better, faster, at a larger scale, with lesser time and resources, etc. Sometimes the capability advances are so huge, that it ends up "disrupting" the existing way of doing things and bringing in qualitative changes in the way we did things. For instance, the Internet made information flow so fast and so much more capable, that it did not just create faster telephones and telegraphs, or better radios-- it entirely reinvented the way we process information and organise societies. 

This kind of research includes both applied and theoretical elements. Many of these could also lead to "blue sky" endeavours that are pursued just for the beauty inherent in these research questions. But all of these primarily are driven by the zest to enhance capabilities. 

Academic research on the other hand, had served and will continue to serve, a very different purpose. Academic research is not (should not be) based on what we produce-- but on what we become as a result of the research journey. Academia is fundamentally about building people-- not building knowledge or technology. The outcome of an academic research journey is (should be) greater wisdom, greater awareness, greater philosophical depth in people's everyday conduct. 

This could eventually result in better technologies and greater capability, when these people come together and build industries. 

Academia builds new knowledge not as an end in itself-- but as a means to build and empower people. It is the way that the people transform when they build new knowledge, which is the key outcome of academia rather than the knowledge itself. The collective outcome from such an endeavour is social resilience.

Social resilience is the ability of a society to absorb shocks and disruptions, and reinvent itself to bounce back stronger. Every increase in capability eventually leads to a critical juncture that results in a paradigmatic change in the way society operates. In such cases, it is our resilience that keeps us from falling into chaos and emerging stronger from the disruption. 

Today, AI is disrupting the workforce like never before. There are very real possibilities of large-scale job losses and threats to individual privacy as well as national sovereignty by AI. But advancements in AI continue nevertheless. Will this disruption lead to widespread chaos and strife in our society, or will we as a society absorb this shock and reinvent ourselves, will be a function of how resilient our education has made us.

Social resilience is possible when the individuals operating in it are resilient themselves, and have the depth and capability to reimagine their lives and to reorganise their activities every so often. This comes from the philosophical depth from which they operate. If their ability to generate new knowledge is contingent upon them having access to huge resources and latest technology, they may be capable of specific things, but not exactly resilient as individuals. 

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Let me explain further with an example. 

With great advances in AI, there is now a big concern about AI Ethics and Responsible AI. But the way this topic is being discussed today, has two broad categories. 

The first line of thought directly looks at the way AI is built and used today, and builds relevant structures around it to make it safer and act ethically. These could involve building guardrails, RLHF, hard (constitutional) constraints, sandboxing, etc. 

The other approach is to address the question philosophically, asking what do we mean by ethics itself? Is it doing something that conforms to expected norms (deontology)? Or is ethics about acting for the greater good (utilitarianism)? Or acting in a way that is mindful of consequences (consequentialism)? Or upholding some desirable characteristic (virtue)? This line of inquiry also asks whether acting ethically is necessarily in conflict with acting rationally to maximise self interest? Is ethics subjective or can there be an objective definition of AI ethics? Can one person's ethical AI be an evil nemesis when seen from another person's perspective? Can a machine be truly ethical or does it only reflect the ethical considerations inherent in its training? 

The two approaches are characteristically different. The former approach is addressing an immediate question. It is addressing the question of AI ethics primarily with a motivation to avoid getting hit by lawsuits. And any solution that can deflect the blame away from the AI is good enough for the business. The latter however, tries to understand the concept of ethics analytically and asks architectural questions about AI and tries to understand the meaning of a term like "ethics" that was once reserved for human conduct, to be now applied to machines. 

I remember some time ago in a research presentation, a member of the audience expressed concerns about the seriously intrusive nature of the technology being presented and its potential to be misused. For this, the speaker had only responded by saying that these experiments have passed IRB review (ethics board) and hence, it is legitimate. What struck me in this response was that the response did not address any of the specific concerns of future misuse of this technology being developed. It just responded to protect the current activity from scrutiny. The IRB only clears the current, proposed activity, and does not usually delve into its future implications. This episode in my opinion, is a clear marker that distinguishes industrial research (that wants a solution or a patch shipped out fast) versus an academic research pursuit (that wants to understand the deeper, underlying implications). 

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Worldwide, we are failing to understand this subtlety, and are increasingly bringing the industrial research framing to evaluate academic research. 

I have seen several cases across many institutions, where some highly motivated PhD students would be juggling their research, job, and family all at once. But many of them burn out or drop out in between, even after working very hard and after paying significant tuition, simply because their PhD has an unwritten rule that it requires an "A*" paper to get them to graduate! 

What I see is not a failed PhD student or even low quality research. What I see is an individual who was resilient and motivated, but whose spirit was broken because the system failed to recognise the resilience and focused only on the output. As I see it, if this person understood the importance of setting aside time and effort for creating knowledge despite their daily grind and demands from work and family, then even a small success in this process helps them to reinforce their resilience, which would contribute constructively to society in important ways. 

But by not recognising this, and by framing research quality through a fairly narrow, and mostly meaningless lens, we are systematically tearing apart the only institution in society where resilience is built.