King's College is just across the road from my workplace at The Strand. Everyday I take the bus from in front of the King's College to go to the Waterloo British Rail station on my way home. Everyday I see the pictures of well known people associated with the King's College on the glass wall of the institution's Strand Campus.
Never did it strike the chord so strongly till the time when I entered the premises of the King's College to get myself enrolled for my latest academic endeavour. I felt a strong bond with John Keats, who abandoned his career in medicine to become a poet, Desmond Tutu or may be Martin Bashir. They were all alumni of the King's College. It is this special link with the past which probably makes us proud today and provides inspiration for the future.
I have seen such exhibition of the past glory in almost all the famous British academic institutions. Pictures of great Indians like Amartya Sen, Meghnad Desai, I G patel, K R Narayanan adorn the walls of the London School of Economics. Similar is the case with the School of Oriental and African Studies and the Oxford University, which has many prime ministers and presidents as its notable alumni. However, I haven't seen anything like this in the Indian educational institutions that I went to.
At the St. Xavier's College in Kolkata there were portraits of Jagadish Chandra Bose and Ramananda Chattopadhyay but probably the Jesuit institution produced more luminaries, who could be considered well known in their respective fields. That the West Bengal Industry Minister Partha Chattopadhyay is a Vidyalaya Praktani became known to me only after reading a report of his felicitation in a Bengali newspaper, although I have interacted with him several times during my reasonably long stint in journalism. Like the St. Xavier's College,Calcutta, Ramakrishna Mission Vidyalaya, Narendrapur, also produced many personalities, who later made significant contribution to either their fields of work or to the society at large.
From our childhood days we were taught to be humble and not to boast about ourselves. I still remember my grandfather telling me "baro jadi hote chao, choto hao tabe" meaning if you want to be seen as well known and hence respected you should be humble and not boast about yourselves. This principle, however, doesn't find many takers in the age of Neo-liberalism, when individualism rules the roost. One might not boast about oneself but should not be self evasive either.
What else could be more self deluding than being indifferent to the rich past and being ignorant about the good work of the predecessors. As a student of the Calcutta University's Economics Department at the Katakal Campus, I have never seen portraits of or commemorative plaque about people like Bhabatosh Dutta, Amlan Dutta, Santosh Bhattacharya, Panchanan Chakraborty and many others, who either as economists or as teachers were well respected during their times. Neither was there any knowledge or interest about these personalities and their works among the students nor any effort to make them (students) conscious about such things.
Engaging with the past bestows a sense of responsibility and pride for the incumbent generation, which is essential for success. Moreover, when the market has become the ultimate platform to assess success, probably marketing the past may ensure a better price for the future.
All comments are personal and have no bearing on others.
Comments on the post are welcome at the blog site.
Showing posts with label King's College London. Show all posts
Showing posts with label King's College London. Show all posts
Sunday
Tuesday
SOAS I live for thee
After a heart wrenching few weeks on making a personal choice between the two premier educational institutes in London, I decided to go for the King's College KCL over the School of Oriental and African Studies SOAS. This is of course no aspersion on the proficiency of SOAS as an academic institute of repute, not only within the United Kingdom but also worldwide. SOAS was my entrypoint to the world of academics in Britain and the decision to choose KCL has been largely guided by what the Bloombusry institution taught me in two years. As a hetrodox academic institute, SOAS taught me to challenge the mainstream and try things which situate thinking in a different perspective. The choice of KCL was only to witness the alternative to what I imbibed from the SOAS.
SOAS has literally been a melting pot of alternative thinking and the intellectuals there aren't shy of practising what they preach. One would thus see academics delivering lectures not in pin-stripped suites, as is the usual practice in most western institutions, but wearing Pink Floyd T-shirts and faded Jeans. The campus would witness a sprectrum of thoughts ranging from the Old Socialist school, vehmently opposing any reduction in the role of government, to making a case for the meanial migrant workers, who often face deportation threats, and finally queing up to have themselves fed by the 'karma food' provided free by the International Society for Krishna Conciousness (ISKCON).
It is not only the image of enacting the alternative that stood SOAS apart, the academics, undoubtedly some of the best in the world, also provided the intellectual succour behind the emobodiment of such a hetrodox thinking.
Being a student of the Department of Development Studies, I had the pleasure of interacting with some of the wonderful minds, ranging from acclaimed academics like
Subir Sinha to Gilbert Achcar. Subir Sinha influenced much of my recent thinking, especially his improvisation on discursive analysis provides a rare insight into the roles of civil society and social movements within the domain of global politics, and Gilbert Achcar is an epitome of knowledge.
Although I studied Keynesian economics at the undergraduate level in India, but it reached a fruition beyond the IS-LM Curve Analysis only after Alfredo Saad Filho explained the political economy of its rise and demise. Jens Lerche with his breadth of knowledge on agrarian change and class relations in South Asia would often meticulously attend some of my trivial queries on land following the developments in Singur and Nandigram.
Paolo Novak was my first admissions tutor at the SOAS. Coming from a South Asian background we are not generally used to seeing teachers as friends but as days progressed Paolo with his warmth and informality turned our relationship into more of friendship and similar was the case with Dae-oup Chang, who joined the SOAS in the same year as I did.
My experience at the SOAS has been more of a journey, as Henry Bernstein would use the metaphor to describe 'development', into the world of knowledge guided only by the pleasure of learning, made possible by the academics and also by a team of dedicated staff in the faculty led by Jack Footitt. I leave SOAS, with a heavy heart, only to put to test if I have rightly picked up the essence of what this hetrodox institution stands for.
All comments are personal and have no bearing on my present or past places of work. Comments on the post are welcome at the blogsite.
SOAS has literally been a melting pot of alternative thinking and the intellectuals there aren't shy of practising what they preach. One would thus see academics delivering lectures not in pin-stripped suites, as is the usual practice in most western institutions, but wearing Pink Floyd T-shirts and faded Jeans. The campus would witness a sprectrum of thoughts ranging from the Old Socialist school, vehmently opposing any reduction in the role of government, to making a case for the meanial migrant workers, who often face deportation threats, and finally queing up to have themselves fed by the 'karma food' provided free by the International Society for Krishna Conciousness (ISKCON).
It is not only the image of enacting the alternative that stood SOAS apart, the academics, undoubtedly some of the best in the world, also provided the intellectual succour behind the emobodiment of such a hetrodox thinking.
Being a student of the Department of Development Studies, I had the pleasure of interacting with some of the wonderful minds, ranging from acclaimed academics like
Subir Sinha to Gilbert Achcar. Subir Sinha influenced much of my recent thinking, especially his improvisation on discursive analysis provides a rare insight into the roles of civil society and social movements within the domain of global politics, and Gilbert Achcar is an epitome of knowledge.
Although I studied Keynesian economics at the undergraduate level in India, but it reached a fruition beyond the IS-LM Curve Analysis only after Alfredo Saad Filho explained the political economy of its rise and demise. Jens Lerche with his breadth of knowledge on agrarian change and class relations in South Asia would often meticulously attend some of my trivial queries on land following the developments in Singur and Nandigram.
Paolo Novak was my first admissions tutor at the SOAS. Coming from a South Asian background we are not generally used to seeing teachers as friends but as days progressed Paolo with his warmth and informality turned our relationship into more of friendship and similar was the case with Dae-oup Chang, who joined the SOAS in the same year as I did.
My experience at the SOAS has been more of a journey, as Henry Bernstein would use the metaphor to describe 'development', into the world of knowledge guided only by the pleasure of learning, made possible by the academics and also by a team of dedicated staff in the faculty led by Jack Footitt. I leave SOAS, with a heavy heart, only to put to test if I have rightly picked up the essence of what this hetrodox institution stands for.
All comments are personal and have no bearing on my present or past places of work. Comments on the post are welcome at the blogsite.
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