Friday 10 June 2016

Indian Professors


I have a very poor opinion of most of the Professors in Indian Universities, like JNU,  Jadavpur University, etc.

They have only bookish half baked knowledge, and are not real scholars but only wage earners, who have little interest in seeking real knowledge, but are in the campuses only to earn a salary and fill their stomachs.

Most of them have little humility, think they know everything about their subjects, when in fact they know little, having crammed up their heads with some sterile 'knowledge' acquired from some books without questioning whether this knowledge was true or not. They are totally unlike Newton who said that he had only been picking pebbles on the sea shore, when the whole ocean of knowledge was before him

 And these are the 'scholars' who are guiding our youth. No wonder that the state of education in India is in a pitiable condition.

They remind me of Kabir's line from a doha ( coiuplet ) :

" Pothi Padh Padh Kar Jag Mua, Pandit Bhayo Na Koye "

  Richard Feynman, the great American physicist ( see about him online ), went to Brazil for a few months to teach, and at the end of his term there gave a talk which stunned Brazilian academics. He said that no real science was being taught in Brazil. The students only crammed up some books, without testing by experimentation whether what was written there was true or not, and the same was true of the science teachers.


 When I was a student of philosophy in Allahabad University my teachers taught me that the difference between the 6 classical systems of Indian philosophy (shatdarshan ), i.e. Nyaya, Vaisheshik, Sankhya, Yoga, Purva Mimansa and Uttar Mimansa ( Vedanta ), and the 3 non classical systems ( Buddhism, Jainism and Charvak ), was that the former relied on the authority of the Vedas  while the latter did not. But after I had passed out of the University and did my own study and reflection, I found that what my teachers had taught me was not correct. In fact the first 4 of the classical schools did not rely on the authority of the Vedas, and only the last two ( Purva Mimansa and Uttar Mimansa ) did..So evidently my teachers had only lapped up what they had been taught by their teachers ( who in turn had lapped up what had been taught by their teachers, and so on ), without reflecting seriously about the matter.

 Similarly, economics, which is a fascinating subject, is taught in our Universities in such a mechanical manner that it is made a dry and drab subject. The teachers have no real, deep knowledge of the subject, though some of them have Ph.D.s from Harvard, Yale or the London School of Economics. The main problems in the world today relate to the subject of economics, e.g. how to solve the problems of recession, unemployment, etc. but our Professors have no real clue how to solve them. Yet they are drawing fat salaries at the public expense

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