A shocking cowardly act !

Shocked at this! Terrorism is always a cowardly act, but when they attack an educational institute and that too a conference venue, the cowardice becomes too much!

Two flawed decisions

This post has been long pending and I finally thought of writing it before it became outdated. It’s about two government decisions, both of which I think are shortsighted and flawed. The first one (and still openly debated one) is the central governments decision to ban smoking in movies. Of course I am not one of those freaks who demand total freedom of expression, but this is a different case altogether.

The first point is that movies are reflecting mostly only things which happen in the society. If we ban smoking in movies, it’s like pretending that there is no smoking in our society. By refusing to acknowledge the problem of prostitution, not only does it grow unabated but we are also in an unenviable position with regards to AIDS. I can’t stop myself from remembering Marquez’s quote on self-deception here. Of course when mass heroes smoke in a positive character, then it does promote some people to take up smoking. But there are other methods to prevent this from happening. Like making Censor laws more stringent and categorizing films more – but the censor system here seems so broke that I may as well write an entire blog post on it. But still reforming the Censor system would solve many other problems like excessive sleaze in many of today’s movies.

The problem with a ban on smoking is that it prevents even deliberately negative depiction of smoking, which in the absence of other positive promotions, would serve to reduce incidence of smoking. And of course, politicians may also come up with innovative ideas of banning other ‘bad’ things like drinking, rape, roberry etc. from movies which would make them totally divorced from reality. And of course these things existed even when there were no movies! Actually I can’t still believe one person’s ‘passion’ could convince the entire cabinet on this. Anbumani Ramadoss, the health minister, had told a few months ago in an interview to a Tamil magazine that there would be a ban on smoking, drinking in movies. Then I thought that he had also begun to talk like his father, but now I can scarcely believe that it has become a law. Nowadays it seems anything can become a law here, which leads me to the next topic.

Recently Jayalalitha ruled that entrance exam would no longer be conducted for admission to professional courses and also that the marks of the exam conducted this year won’t be considered for this year’s admissions. The last bit is too ridiculous for anyone even unfamiliar with the topic. This is since, if this is implemented it would be like wasting the time students spent on entrance exam preparations. Any decision like this need to be taken at least one year in advance. Since entrance exams have existed for the last 20 years or so, suddenly announcing this is like government breaking its promise given to the students regarding the mode of admission. Thankfully, the high court overturned this order and the supreme court has refused to stay high court’s order, as a result of which, Jayalaitha has finally conceded to do this year’s admissions by including entrance marks.

The following are the reasons why I feel the order doesn’t serve any useful purpose even in long term. The reason offered by government is that rural students would benefit from this, as they don’t have access to entrance exams coaching centers. Even assuming the last part is true (which should be itself studied), the following are my arguments –

• Let us say that the pattern of public examinations are not changed, i.e not made tougher. Then there are two problems –

• The current pattern of public exam tests more of rote learning and neat handwriting-drawing skills than intellectual skills. Even then, the marks are always very subjective, since the correctors can’t obviously read everything and also there would be some totaling mistakes. The entrance exams, on the other hand are computer corrected. This almost rules out totaling errors and questions also tend encourage more objective thinking.

• With the number of centums and multiple centums always increasing (I guess more than 300 students have centums in all subjects for engineering), it won’t be difficult to imagine a situation where the number of students getting centums in all relevant subjects would itself outnumber the seats in a particular prestigious college. This is in fact more applicable for medicine and even more for O.C (non backward caste) candidates. Introducing other things like marks of language subjects, age or past marks to break this often occurring tie would be height of nonsense. This inevitably leads to the next point.

• The government had already proposed to make the public exams more ‘objective’ and hence (though this is not told) more tougher. So what would happen if all the questions in the public exam were to be made objective – it would almost appear like the entrance exam! And of course we are told to believe that the well-oiled coaching machines in the cities won’t find a way to coach on this paper. Even reaching some kind of middle way solution would be making public exams more tougher making urban students with more coaching benefit from it.

In the end the government is not changing anything! And it is making things unnecessarily tough for CBSE and ICSE students, since they would not be able to attend this public exam (unlike the entrance exam). Obviously this is all done with the upcoming assembly polls in mind and that’s why all the parties are forced to ‘support’ this move.

The real pity in this is that two issues which require real debating (and not such hasty decisions) have been ignored here. One is to prevent the hassle of students writing multiple entrance exams. In fact, it would be good to standardize this even across the entire country. The other is to promote better methods of examinations where the creativity of students is tested along with their technical knowledge. This would be the one which would prevent the growth of coaching institutes. I think CBSE public exams test creativity quite a bit, but I have heard some students say that they are way too subjective. But at least we must look for a solution without escaping with rules like these.

A desperate move?

I have a lot of things in my mind and since I wasn’t finding enough time to put them down, I thought I can take a look at a current issue. As some would have guessed from the title, it is nothing but the “ban” on release of non-Kannada films for 7 weeks after their release elsewhere. Surprisingly, this ‘ban’ is not from the government but from the film producers association (or whatever it’s called), but seemingly has the tacit support of the government. While the ban, which is from somebody outside the government being implemented, is itself a cause for deep concern, the reasons given for the ban are only more so. This move is supposed to protect the Kannada film industry and give more (captive) market for the Kannada films. I don’t know how they expected everyone to start viewing Kannada films just because other films are not available, rather than do the obvious, view the same other language films through pirated VCDs. The first obvious reaction of this ban has already come with the closure of many theatres in Bangalore. If, god forbid, should the ban become permanent, the net effect would be that most of the theatres which showed non-Kannada films would close down and there would be an increase of piracy for all these films and as a side-effect for the Kannada films too. Thus the producers association seems to have come up with a magical solution which harms both parties. The only reason for such a move could be, I think, desperation. After this ban, I came to know from various press reports that the Kannada film industry is in quite a bad shape. But the solution is to introspect and improve the quality of Kannada films, not these kind of moves which seem to be an acceptance of the poor quality of Kannada films. Of course during the rebuilding period some kind of protection may be required for Kannada films, which can be enforced in a much gentler manner like requiring all theatres to screen a fixed number (which should be judiciously decided) of Kannada films in a year. These kind of moves only end up in making people seeing other language films feeling discriminated against. As an aside, moves like these and some simple things like bus route labels still being in Kannada only, makes me feel that Bangalore is still unable to reconcile itself being a cosmopolitan city. Click here to see how a Kannada filmmaker also feels in the same way (read under sub-heading 'appalled').

The kumkonam tragedy and it's lessons

The recent fire in Kumbakonam is a very tragic and entirely avoidable incident. For many years, I have seen such schools which are run from a residential building with no open space at all. The thatched roof literally became the final straw, I think. Only now after the incident the government has taken steps to close all such schools. However I don’t think that this incident should be politicized. Also I feel the opposition’s statement that the government did not take enough steps after the Srirangam fire (which was at a marriage hall) is also not just. Simply because, the government had then taken steps to scrutinize (only) all marriage halls and this is what you expect from any normal government here ! Such is the state of governance and administration in our country that the government only takes stop-gap measures after each tragedy. May be another tragedy (though god forbid that) should happen so that government scrutinizes some other public facility. What is needed now is a complete relook at the administrative system that has allowed this to happen and just a suspension of a few officers involved in the incident would not serve that purpose.
 
However for me, what was more disturbing was the reports that teachers of the children had abandoned them and saved themselves. Also it is reported that one of the teachers instructed the students not to leave and told that the fire can be controlled ! As if to vindicate these reports the teachers are still absconding. I think that this is only symptomatic of the moral decline of our society. In a society driven by money, teaching profession (especially at school level) is not at all lucrative because of the pay levels. Thus mostly only those who are not able to take up other professions end up in this and they also only think of earning more money by taking tuitions. Being service oriented and caring for their students seems to be a thing of the past. If not for high ideals of the teachers even basic humanity should have prevented such a despicable action. That the teachers who are supposed to make the next generation don’t even have these basic human values is a cause for grave concern.
 
As an aside, I think the habit of students going for tuitions has increased phenomenally in Tamil Nadu. I myself never went to tuitions until my 12th standard and it was the same for most of my then classmates. Now I hear of students going for tuitions for many subjects even before 5th  standard, even in small towns. (In this atleast there is a generation gap with in 6-7 years!)And most of the times, the tuition teachers are the same as their teachers in school ! Also, various pressures exerted by teachers to make children join their tuition, like being biased against them or not teaching properly are not uncommon. I am strongly against this trend, not only because this puts the teaching profession in a bad light, but also because it is sure stamp out any creativity that is still left in the students after going through our syllabus and examinations.