Devil's advocate II - The JEE

It is now well past 1 am, and hence well past the time when I am expected to be both awake and sane. It follows therefore that I must do something insane now, such as getting into an argument over the internet.

Now, contrary to what this post's title seems to indicate, I am not going to argue that the government's decision to scrap the JEE was right: to be sure, I know little or nothing about that decision to make any informed argument whatsoever. I am, however, mildly pissed off at the flurry of Facebook shares this decision has caused, and at the number of "Save the JEE" banners that have cropped up. Pissed off partly because, hey, this is hardly the biggest issue right now worthy of attention (hear hear, so said the guy with a blog post on the topic!) but also because for some reason people seem to have this highly romantic view of IIT, almost as if it is some sort of coming of age ceremony; you know, something that separates the "men" from the "boys". The sexism in that statement is very much intended.

To be more precise, here are some of the arguments that are put forward, and why I think they are bad.

1. "It promotes a level playing field". It does not, rather obviously. Anyone who has been through the IIT system will know that quite a majority of students who get in are those who went to some coaching institute or the other, which is of course a monopoly of the privileged. This argument doesn't even deserve a rebuttal. 
2. "It tests raw intelligence". A milder version of 1., according to me, and subject to the same fallacy.  I have heard/seen people argue that the prevalance of coaching centres is just a small flaw that can be plugged. Not so. A little bit of thought will tell you that there can never really be an examination which does not favour the privileged : imagine two children of identical innate intelligence, the one unschooled, working perhaps for most of his childhood, and the other an upper middle class kid sent to the best schools. By the time they give the exam, the latter very simply has just had a lot of time to think, not withstanding the schooling. Intelligence grows with time, with experience and with education. Short of putting an electrode into the skull at the time of birth, there is no real way of checking "innate intelligence" or "creativity". If such things exist.
3. "JEE establishes IIT as a global brand". That is, to me, a totally meaningless statement. What are we more concerned about, providing higher education or creating brands? True, the IIT brand helps us graduates along quite a bit, but saying that the purpose of the JEE is to give IIT a brand name makes JEE sound like those annoying stickers on apples that say that they are imported, and that are annoyingly hard to remove.
4. "You need a difficult exam because studying at IIT requires some caliber." Well it's not supposed to. They are undergraduates for God's sake, IIT is supposed to provide them with caliber. I was a teaching assistant for Dan Klein's undergrad AI class last semester (we had 400 students in that class. Hear, ye who say that IIT has too many students, although we were 7 teaching assistants), and the one thing that the class taught me was that it is possible to have a course that doesn't require superhuman "intelligence" and yet teaches a lot. The assignments were extremely simple by IIT standards  (you could do them in a couple of hours), yet a lot more engaging and interesting than most (probably all) of the assignments I have ever done at IIT, and their coverage of the material couldn't have been better. In any circumstance, if a teacher cannot teach a student something, it is by definition a fault of the teacher. No one said teaching was an easy job.

There, that's it. I have vented my feelings. In short, the JEE isn't the sparkling jewel in a messed up education system. Quite the contrary: it is merely the sad and unhappy marriage of a higher education system that can't find enough teachers and a sickly mindset that forces engineering dreams like straitjackets onto innocent children.

And like it or not, we are the children of that marriage.

Adios.

G

Wrote a story! Read it here:
G.pdf

It's not a very good story, but it came to me almost whole, and I've learnt it's usually not good to stifle such stories.

Also it has a liberal sprinkling of science, mainly about vision science. I will not claim that the science is accurate, but it is accurate to the extent that it is based on reading half of a random vision science paper. If you want to know, the condition I talk of is, I think, called "visual agnosia", but I have had no interaction with anyone who actually has that condition; this is entirely my imagination. So pardon me if I am completely off-track.

Persistence

Persistence

Computer scientists talk of persistence
It is a thing you want
You want your data to stay
In a hard disk, or in some machine
But someone should tell them
Things shouldn't be persistent
They've got it all wrong

Because my feelings are not bit vectors
That won't change,
And I don't need to look back
And see who I was
Only to feel regret
Welling up inside

Because the past should be perfect
And the little nuances
That we endured from day to day
Should be smudged out lines
In a black and white photograph
So you can laugh and say
"Look how funny I look!"
And then whisper softly
"It isn't the same anymore"

Because words should not survive
The constant rub of time
They should mingle in the paper
Till all that is left
Is the sweet musky smell
Of yellowed notebook sheets
So you can believe the illusion
That yesterday is far away

Because when things persist
They are not memories anymore
They are truths, and sadly,
You can't feel nostalgic about truths.

Gently

Gently!
There are butterflies hiding
Beneath the leaves of the night
Gently! There are fireflies shining
In the shadows of the light
Don't flick your hand so carelessly
You know you'll scare them away:
These thoughts that hide in your eyes
Won't survive the light of day

You might not care, you might not know
Or perhaps you do, and choose to forget:
These dreams of yours show on your brow
And in what you choose to leave unsaid.
They hang like dew drops in the air,
These dreams of yours that you wouldn't say
And I know, though you deny them now,
You sometimes hope that they would stay

Well, perhaps, when we meet again
For a fleeting moment in the summer sun
And when we'll say those senseless words
And, as always, choose to run
You'll spare some thought to all this, I say,
That you whispered to yourself in the night
 And you will not laugh away
At these dreams that you held so tight

So gently now, before you start,
There are butterflies hiding in the night
Say softly what you will,
There are fireflies hiding in the light.


Endnote: In my defense, it is nearing 1 am :P

She was an angel, was she not?

She was an angel, was she not?

The winter's cold, the fog is dense
It was as dense yesterday.
I drudge along the road I take
Today, as always, as everyday

The chemist at the corner here
Has worn a scowl every time I pass,
But today, as I walk by near
I hear him break out into a laugh.

I look inside, but she's no longer there
Only the chemist with his toothy smile
But a silent whisper in the air
Tells me she stood here awhile

Further the road is crowded still
It is, as usual, a busy day
Yet, a look and I can see
Her footsteps all along the way

The beggar by the side is smiling, not
Because of the generous note he just received
But someone with a patient ear
Thought of paying a little heed

The man in suit right up ahead
Has paused in the middle of the road
Wondering, why on earth did that lady now
Smile at him with a smile so broad?

And everywhere where she walked past
Though the fog hangs in clouds of grey
She has left a trail of pleasant surprise
That something is different about today

She lingers in the smile on that woman's lips

A blink in the eyes of that boy standing there

A thought that just made time stand still

A faint fragrance that hangs in the air.

She lingers in the blades of grass
The dew that trembles on forgotten trees
Even the spider, busy on its web
Is surprised by the sudden breeze

She was an angel, was she not?
Perhaps she was just you or me,
But she left behind a little thought
As divine as thought can be.

The Devil's advocate

I intended this post to be about Anna Hazare's supposed fast, but as I write this post, I read that the impasse has ended, and the government will indeed join hands with civil society to draft the bill.

Should we be happy? I am tempted to say "yes". We seem to be firmly on the path of battling corruption. It seems the government will be kept in check by the civil society, and hopefully it will be hard for the "corrupt politicians" to  derail the process.

There are, however, several caveats. Involving the civil society in legislation is not a panacea that will rid the society of all evils. Not all members of civil society are of as spotless a character as Hazare, and more importantly, there is no law of nature that the civil society should always be right. All of us have very good intentions for the country, but as someone said, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". Saying that there should be no corruption is easy, to implement a law that will be successful in eliminating corruption is definitely not.

It should also not be taken for granted that civil society is always correct in its intentions. Right and wrong are dangerous and slippery things, and this is especially true in a nation where the vast majority of the populace is not literate enough to log on to Facebook and air their views. It is easy for us to support the drive against corruption which seems very obviously right, but it is much harder if the issue at hand is, say, the Naxal problem, or, God forbid, the issues of Kashmir or the North east. Also, Hazare has a great backing now, but we are very likely to ignore him when the problems he is talking of do not concern us, us being the middle class, educated population that reads newspapers, logs on to the internet and signs petitions. Indeed, how many of us really knew about Hazare's work in a Maharashtra village?

It is easy to look at your Facebook page and be heartened by the flood of support for a cause. Yet the fact remains that the set of Indians who have the wherewithal to air their views, over the net or otherwise is a miniscule proportion of the true India. As such, chances are that a movement that agrees with the conveniences of the educated elite will be touted as a "revolution", and a movement that does not will be scorned upon as a "mutiny".

Last but not the least, we have to bear in mind that the ills we are fighting against are not external but internal. As someone pointed out in an article, this is free India, and the only evil empire that we can get freedom from is ourselves. When we say that politicians are corrupt, we have to bear in mind that we elect them. There is no external "pseudo-democratic" government: our country is the sum total of the people in it, no more, no less. We have to realise that the evil of corruption is not in some abstracted out entity far removed from the people: it is in every one of us. The law of corruption that we require is, technically, a few hours in front of the mirror.

I guess the thought that I want to leave you with is this: We all supported Anna Hazare's quest to get a strong Lokpal bill drafted, but why did we support it? Was it merely because we have all been at some point or the other been victimized by corruption? If the answer is yes, then it means that our activism is merely a product of the injustices that we perceive as being done unto us, and that what we are striving for is, at the heart of it, no more than our own self-interest. At a deep, and perhaps (but hopefully not) an unachievable level, what we should be driven by is a question of what the right thing to do is. If each of us tries to do what is right, then the politician and the bureaucrat are also not corrupt, and the civil society doesn't need to arm-twist the government into doing what it needs to do.

Memories

Memories.
Footprints left behind, that have long since been washed away. Fragrances left untouched, pressed in the leaves of books. Voices, unspoken, hidden in melodies and songs. Little joys that got lost in the cracks of life, but only to take root and bloom as flowers a long time hence. Gifts that come back every once in a while, just when you least expect them, and just when you no longer remember what they contained, and so you open them and it is all the same again. Words that form but lose themselves before pen touches paper, like a little firefly of joy that must perennially be just out of reach, yet bright enough to light you through the rest of your life...

Memories...