Sometimes a day happens for a reason

Chennai, late evening, back from dinner, still reflecting--9/21

This picture fits for today--it's of the entry to the IB building at M. Ct. M. Chidambaram Chettyar International School. The school is very traditional in many ways which has been fascinating. Sometimes a day just seems to be made for one important conversation--today was one of those days. I had meetings with Ms. Sudha and a talk with the Tamil teacher about student engagement and I was pulled into watch some physical science presentations by a group of middle years students. As I made my way back to my messenger bag and laptop, the English literature teacher greeted me and invited me to conversation. The English teacher is a striking woman with long grey hair and a posture and demeanor that radiates intelligence, wisdom and thoughtfulness. Our conversation began with a book recommendation for me and then connected to the differences between Indian and Greek tragedy--in Indian tragedy the character suffers from attachment (over-emotional attachment to lovers, to possessions, to children, to youth). It's more of a themes than a trait (the Western view of a fatal flaw--but this flaw could take many forms). I'm already hooked at this point, but our discussion goes deeper in to language and technology and emotion. She states that it is a paradox these days, the students have so much access to the internet but little curiousity. I commented that the Tamil teacher and I talked about this as well--the students had little interest in cultural knowledge of their region. She extends the point--unfortunately this also translates to their language ability. They are not necessarily fluent in their mother language adn their not fluent in English. They can only say the necessities, but cannot express their thoughts and feelings. English can be viewed as the language of the workplace--a means to make money, but it doesn't touch the real parts of you. In the past many people spoke 4-5 languages--they traveled and in order to communicate with friends, you learned their langauge. Now people, she said, speak a pidgin language--merely functional English. She related to me a longitudinal study on students grades K-8. The study sought to understand what would happen in English was superimposed on the mother language. What was found was that the students initially spoke Tamil, but soon the Tamil didn't keep up with their emotional needs, but English couldn't express these needs either. This trend has become apparent in the last 25 years--students that can't express themselves but have emotinoal needs. It's really quite sad when you think about it. Her own children were raised with Tamil spoken in the home (it was a family decision), and this brought them connections to film and art and older family members. Part of this decay in language may also be a change in society--the schedule of working parents changes the language and cheapens the language. Conversations are more along the lines of "did you pick up..." or "what is scheduled today...". This cheapened langauge affects your world view. People have become more reliant upon or are immersed in media--but this builds a view that nothing is really older than yesterday's paper. There are visuals of what society is like, what institutions or other cultures are like, but they are devoid of the connections--missing the humanity, the culture, the behavior. Slowly the cultural threads are lost--meaningful rites like birth, death and marriage become mashed together in a cultural hodgepodge as people borrow only what they find useful or what makes sense. Some of this can be seen in the ways business practices and organizations have been implemented in Indian society. The Western structures are there, but the people participating don't fully understand--they do the things in the structure but there's little adaptation or understanding of the practices. Our conversation went back to students. Many students view learning English as a key to economic improvement--their view of education is on the aspiration. This type of knowledge--acquiring it for purely economic reasons--is pretty shallow. The students must have real knowledge--paravidya (real knowledge, knowledge of the self or self-knowledge) as opposed to aparavidya (useless knowledge--what you need to get on in life). In the Upanishads the most learned man is an ignoramus if he doesn't have paravidya. You may have knowledge of the Upanishads, but until you act it, you are ignorant. You can also have real knowledge and slip back. It's fluid like that.

At this point she had to go to class so our conversation ended with promises to talk again. We both thanked each other and went our separate ways--she to class and I to pull together a seminar on Montaigne. In those moments as we sat talking it was as if I could feel the connections to the questions I had been wondering about--I could feel my perspectives and knowledge being stretched. Some days were just made for a single conversation.