Open Your Eyes

With 'Lyrics of life ', A blog devoted to the poetry only is started by me. I will try to transfer all of mine favorite poems from my blog into this to give it more space and voice. And for reading purpose, here comes a good post.

1- If Lahore is Pak’s soul, and Islamabad its mind, then Karachi—in all its scrappy glory—is Pakistan’s guts. I consider Pakistanis as our brothers whose fate is inter twisted with us. Taliban has grown so much that even journalist fear to venture in SWAT valley. Journalists don’t talk about fear much. It goes against the grain of the culture; the lone wolf, the impassive observer, the tough guy in tough places telling tough truths. Are they slave of our own public images? Then change your perspective by reading e-magazine by Pulitzer center on crisis reporting. 'Killing Fields' film is must watch for everyone who wants to witness the cruelty of genocide and war.

#The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper journalism, literature and musical composition.

2- For generations, people who would now be termed ‘Islamophobes’ have recounted a striking fable about Islamists and irony. It takes place at the ancient world’s great receptacle of wisdom, the library of Alexandria. When a Muslim commander ordered his men to raze the site, some of them demurred. “Surely”, the dissenters responded, “it is not right to wantonly destroy these books?”. Their leader disagreed: “Either the books will contradict the Koran”, he told them, “in which case they are heresy; or they will agree with it, in which case they are superfluous”. This is a mythical story told to put us in wrong perspective against Islam. Read further in this topic in “Has Islam a Place in a Modern World?”

3-The success of US model is assembling persons or attracting brain power from different parts of the world and yet maintain the dialogue between them in one language. The one language concept is opposition of diversity but it helps in communicating across the language barrier of intellectuals belonging to different country.There past and connection to other world nourished the diversity factor needed for healthy debate in the society.But have you ever hear of Child labor in America. Go through this blog post and discover ugly side of the U.S.A.

Tuning the media to science

Speech addressed by Professor Yash Pal,Chancellor, Jawaharlal Nehru University at Indian academy of social sciences October 5, 2007. (Original Link)

There was a time when we dreamt that someday we would have a countrywide TV channel that would be primarily used for education and science communication. This was also the time when we were preparing for the “satellite instructional television experiment”. At that time a foreign interlocutor once asked me whether we would be able to have programs like those on American network television. My reply was that perhaps we could but that would be a tragedy because we had different values and different needs. Perhaps the tragedy i talked about is already upon us – and with a vengeance. indeed we have gone much beyond the state of American TV in brainwashing people into buying goods, services and a great deal of tinsel. In the process of doing that with much song and dance, movie clips and news of crime, murder and corruption we do not have time for any serious thinking or analysis. TV programmers always ask for bytes and not any engagement with subject matter. All possibilities of understanding are scrupulously avoided because audiences tuned in that direction might even begin to question the veracity of the sales pitch that forms the backbone of the program. There is a great deal of mythology, very little historicity. great wonders of technology are sometimes introduced with a clear message that only demigods abroad can produce them and there is little point in understanding their soul. in any case any attempt at explanation is considered too lengthy, or boring, to be included in the programs.

All deficiencies in this regard may not be intentional. It is possible that most on them arise from an aberration that is common to our school education. We believe that education is belittled when connected with common concerns and curiosities of ordinary people outside the school. Because of this mind set we have tended to create two categories of knowledge. One is that of vernacular knowledge that is current outside the school and the other that is uncontaminated by outside and works and operates only within the school. Thus the school learning is largely discipline bound while innate curiosity of humans is not restricted by any such boundaries, because living itself is not. This mindset has done tremendous damage to school teaching. Not only to school teaching but all education. it has restricted the use of formal learning to problems of life and it has made the process of learning boring and bereft of joy. Children’s spontaneous curiosity is curbed to inculcate a belief that every thing is not to be understood. In this atmosphere superstitions and gullibility flower. Astrology has tremendous ascendance. Idols begin drinking milk. Dirty, polluted sea water at a sea beach begins to taste pure and sweet after a heavy rain. Images of gods seem to be seen in weathering marks on buildings. A pattern on an old tree trunk and its branches is seen as a signal for special appearance of gods.

I am not against mythology. Mythology represents creative layering of a society’s imagination and wonder. We cannot define human collectivities without their mythologies but we find it difficult to distinguish between historicity and mythology. Often times mythology gives a more endearing portrait of a society than history but history is history and cannot and should not be thrown away.

Let me share some personal experiences of science communication that I have found rewarding. The year was 1973 and we had to start planning the production of science programs for children for the forthcoming Satellite instructional television experiment. The audience was to be the school children in some of the most backward villages of India. By that time I had come to believe that science is learnt best through the discovery approach. After going around thousands of the target schools I felt extremely discouraged because none of these schools had even a rudiment of a laboratory. After months of agonosing thought and reflection i made a discovery! These schools might not have had formal laboratories but they were actually living within a gigantic laboratory all around them. The farms, hills, ponds, fruit trees, and of course the home kitchens, the bullock carts and bicycles, their flying kites and footballs could all be considered as components of a laboratory available to all. This emphasis persuaded me to frame a credo for our programs: Science is everywhere around us, to be experimented with and learnt from, and through the method of science this environment could be better understood and influenced. With the help of a number of friends all around the world we prepared a large number of briefs that young producers fresh from the film institute learnt to convert into programs. It was an exciting program and eminently successful.

Finally, I would like to share the rich experience of working with the television series “Turning Point”. I am amazed that more than a decade after that program was terminated, college students, even some school students and many of their teachers remember that program with great affection. In terms of its trip it was second only to the serial Ramayana that was running at that time. How come that a science program developed such an appeal? It is possible that there was an advantage in not having so many commercial channels to compete with. But none of the commercial channels have come up to offer any thing of that interest?

Turning Point was done in the company of a number of wonderful producers. There were several occasions when after going through a shining script I was forced to ask: “So what? What is that small bit of understanding that you are trying to get across?” if no positive answer emerged the script was revised or rejected. I do believe that such a demand was new in Indian program-making. In addition I started to answer questions from the audience. Pretty soon, there was a flood. I insisted that I would like to entertain questions that children and others in the audience had discovered. The questions kept coming, presenting me with much challenge, learning and enjoyment. There was a time when we were getting three to four hundred letters a day, mostly postcards from towns and villages spread across the country. These questions really tested me, but they also convinced me that true knowledge is built only on observation, perception, wonder and self-learning. I did not address questions whose answers could be easily looked up in textbooks. It was clear that the greatest interest lay in the world beyond those books, because the children sensed that their curiosity and confusion was somehow outside the ambit of what could be formulated as an intelligent school question. Most teachers I met seemed to agree with students – they accepted that the questions were not “school” questions. They either infringed the boundaries of syllabus or of the discipline being taught.

At the time I was engaged in this exercise, it was hard fun. But even now, years after that program ended, young teachers, researchers and students keep telling me that the reason they took to science and engineering was because of Turning Point! When asked about the reason for their remembering that program, they often turn around and say: “Sir, don’t you know, we are the Turning Point generation.” while there must be a strong element of courtesy in their remarks, perhaps something special was triggered through the efforts and insight of the production team lead by the executive producer Naazish Hussaini. I certainly learnt a great deal about the nature of our education in schools and colleges. Primarily, I learnt that we need to make the walls between disciplines porous, that learning from life and learning in schools must be connected, that contextual relevance is important to make learning and living more enjoyable and creative.

My question is why such programming cannot become the norm. Can we persuade the present day commercial media to go in that direction? At least the state supported channel that was subverted into going the way of the commercial channels can be brought back. The discoveries made were not personally mine. They belonged to the teams involved. Such teams should still be possible. I am delighted that this approach to science and education has been strongly supported by the National Curriculum Framework – 95. I recommend that every one connected with education, particularly science education – at any level – would gain by going through the documents of NCF – 95.

Best 7 Convocation Speechs

1-Bill Waterson at Kenyon College, Gambier Ohio in 1990. --- Some Thoughts on the real world by one who glimpsed it and fled.

2-Steve Jobs at Stanford University in 2005.--- Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

3-Balraj Sahini at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi in 1972. --- Speech.

4-J. K. Rowling at Harvard University in 2008. ---- The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination

5-Chetan Bhagat at Symbiosis, Pune in 2008. --- Keep the Spark Alive.

6-Subroto Bagachi at IIMB in 2006. --- Go Kiss the World.

7-Ajit Balachandran at IIMC in 2007. --- The Bakshali inheritance.

Irrational Faith -2

My Life: I make deals with the god to make things work in mine favor and in exchange of it, promise to amend any bad habit. Even God holds his end, I forgot about the promise and life goes as natural till appearance of next crisis. I hope that you don't fall in mine category. I feel like bribing an omnipresent and omniscient invisible force by chocolate to finish my tiny work. Even it means to alter the whole world for me over billion others. Few months ago, I had huge belief in mysticism. The middle way sounds like solution to extremism and Godard's theory of incompleteness was final nail in believing that human could ever solve mystery of universe. I was thinking mystery of nature as Pandora box or downward spiral. It was like considering to walk on a path without knowing starting and end point.The philosophical point of middle path appear to be golden rule is still merged with my theology currently. It is still retained in me despite several extremist decision about life taken by me. I am hugely diverted by mind as making middle path rule as ideal rule but practical life is quite different and my moody nature always betray me in following any planned route. Now I claim about my ignorance about God than calling myself either atheist or agonist. The writing of Vivekanad and Osho inspired me very much, due to which so called blasphemy is now gone. I have now no problem with presence or denial of god. It is like choosing between emptiness of non believer and denial of inquiry by believer.

Article (Previous Part):-
We know what god or anything should be about. We don’t search, we already know. And that makes us to fall in trap of faith. If the eternal god exist,and all the holy books know completely about him.Then what is the need to search for him. It is not blasphemy but a doubt on ability of humans to explain everything by logic or faith only. Little knowledge is dangerous thing and in matter of god, a arm of genocide in the hand of extremists. Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don't have all the answers to think that they do. Most people would think it's wonderful when someone says, 'I'm willing Lord, I'll do whatever you want me to do.' Except that since there are no gods actually talking to us, that void is filled in by people with their own corruptions and limitations and agendas.

Evolution debate is now gaining my attention now days and denial of holocaust is also one of the issues caught my me on Internet. The fall of Catholicism was started in the time of reformation and renaissance but industrial revolution was major blow to it. It attracted best brains to divert their area from Latin, religion and philosophy to natural sciences and technology. Still core region of Islam, Arab and U.A.E. are outpaced by slow speed of reformation. Remember, Taliban was recognized in Afghanistan by Pak, UAE and Saudi Arabia. The caste system in Hinduism is more degradatory than apartheid and must be abolished by us only.

Today, I can't find a single voice to take strong action on extremist Hindu or Muslim, only condemnation for news. Muslims killing Hindus and Hindus giving it back to Muslims when the point of concern should be man is killing man. In a land where men would rather kill their own than give up the fight, what hope is there for peace? Hoping that all is not lost in the fight against hate.

Small Notice

I am highly addicted to the Internet and word 'diversity'. I have recently started 2 blogs with my same 'yayaver' profile.

1-For the sake of study --- http://fusedvision.blogspot.com/
It is just prepared for academics and professional purpose by me.

2- For the love of cinema --- http://hybridchoice.blogspot.com/
It is just created for maintaining the database of the films watched by me.

We didn't imagine that somebody takes breathe and live in his own way 10,000 miles away from your home until now.- Ankur Joshi.

It was line spoken by Ankur to whom I met in Germany. That becomes a inspiration to understand universalism in world. I will now trace the history of my reading habit. There was an awesome article on Kolkata long ago in 3quarksdaily taken from Eurozine. Since then, I had became reader of both these online magazines with focus on 'culture' tag. As interest evolved, I started reading articles on diverse topic about my college, cinema, politics, education, cricket and agriculture. There links are now mentioned on this blog.

Now days, There is decay in reading from books but daily almost 50 news or blog articles are read by me. This paranoia of reading on Internet is one of extremist quality that has shuffled my life. I always dedicate myself fully in some passion and after few months find it boring and jump to other one. But now, this inconsistency, craziness and undisciplined life is taking toll on my health. Still a self destructive nature is pushing me for more writing and reading.

Tips for writing:

Harvey Keitel puts the soul of creative writing in one para in the movie The Shadow Dancer, Quoting him -- Get rid of that computer. Writing is not supposed to be easy, supposed to be hard. Typewriters make you think about the words you choose more carefully because you can't erase them with the push of a button.