GPS

We brought three phones to some children in one village - we had put some "English language learning content" into the phones in various folders and other arbitrary places and wanted to see what the kids would discover, use and challenge us to improve, focus on further and possibly re-invent.

I had been told that these kids had not had much previous exposure to phones before.  Maybe some of their parents had phones but they were generally from an area where mobile phones were not yet a pervasive reality.  In this age of smartphones, internet and so much trending dazzle of the impending wave of tablets, these were kids whose source of outside innovation was still paper-based information - members of the group of over two billion people in the world who do not have mobile phones.

This is a group of people who continue to be overlooked by many companies and otherwise well-intentioned institutions for simple reasons like "there's no business" in taking up the challenge of finding ways to bring benefits of mobility to these people.  I have heard many nice, good people who have given me nice and good and well-mannered explanations of well-intentioned efforts but essentially saying "we don't have the resources for projects in these areas; come back when you figure out a way we can make money and we'll talk".

When we arrived in a village, there was one girl who had a government issued English book.  When asked if she knew what was in the book she replied no, she only knew that it was English, but didn't understand any of it but was interested and was always looking through the book because it was interesting.  Other children were standing around her looking over her shoulder, kneeling next to her, heads craned to catch a glimpse of the pages.  It was an old frayed copy of what looked to be a first level primer - mostly pictures that were being directly associated with words.  She was flipping through the pages like a girl in another country far away might flip through a glitzy fashion magazine with sighs of dreamy visions of someday being in a world where those fairy tale dresses in the pictures might enclose her own reality of how she could see herself in some distant future.

If that girl from far away ever gets there I wish her well and only hope that those nice clothes fall upon a body that takes her intentions to heart in ways more meaningful and more impactful than the well-clothed words of those nice and good people of nice and good companies...

The children took the phones and started to explore.  One boy began working his way through the folders with a determined focus and rigor that reminded me of how someone described the way a visually impaired person sometimes develops a sense of space as they walk around - first becoming familiar with one length of space, then venturing a right or left turn and expanding that space very systematically and returning along the same path.  Or maybe it was just a simple process of working through every single nook and cranny of a landscape that this boy knew might offer up so much potential at any moment.  This boy was following the folder trail, exploring into a space of who knows what.  I was waiting for him to find the content that we had placed there. 

Eventually he found a few audio files that we had made - English spoken first, followed by Marathi.  I heard him call some friends over, speaking in Marathi, and I heard the word "English".  Soon there were many children flocked around him, looking and listening.  The boy played every single file many times.  Mango - anba...

Then the boy did something interesting - he went back to his systematic search and somehow found some files that I had not even known were there.  I thought I had deleted all stray files and folders but somehow I had missed these folders - the phone was a GPS enabled phone and sometime along the way (pardon the pun) someone had downloaded some maps and the voice instructions and this boy somehow found the folder that had the English voice direction recordings.  He clicked on one of the files in such a way that it not only began playing in the media player, but automatically played one file after the other.  He realized after a while that there was a repeat button and began playing "turn left" over and over, and the kids around him began saying "turn left" with increasing enjoyment - like it was a phrase that was pleasant on their tongue, easy to say or just somehow funny?

I wondered if there was some phrase in Marathi that had an equivalent sound?  Like maybe something like tornluft that means something goofy like underwear or earwax or tickle or pig nose?...

A funny image crossed my mind - a nice and good company personified as a child running through a field finally freed of the well-intentioned nicely-clothed surfaces of necessary words and able to run free with the joy of knowing that there is a way to bring benefits to children around the world - running with a renewed sense of direction that no technology-opted GPS (and possibly no business model) can calculate, determine, articulate or bring to life...

Two

I heard this story: there was a boy in a classroom who was shown a picture of a spoon and asked, "What is this?" The any said, "Two." The end. But then I heard the rest of the story. The boy had an English grammar book. In the book there was a page that presented numbers. By the number 2 there was a picture of two spoons.

Message in a bottle

It’s like walking along a beach and seeing a bottle washed up on shore.  You open the bottle and there is something that all of your past experience and understandings and assumptions have you recognize as a message, but it is not in any language that you recognize, so for all practical purposes is of no value whatsoever, either to you or to the person who had originally written it and placed it in that bottle.   

Do you even know that it was the same person who put te marks on the paper and who eventually placed the paper in the bottle?  So many possibilities but there you are, with only your imagination, of nonsensical vows of love written by a couple who the tossed them to the endless seas with no sense of a need of anyone ever finding them or a poem written by a solitary soul who then placed it in the bottle envisioning someone somewhere reading it and completely understanding its every nuance, whatever and anything but there you are.  A bottle and a message.   

You see a silhouette of a person appear in the distances, moving towards you and you know with the knowledge that only deep believe can summon that this person knows the language on the piece of paper that you hold.  Suddenly a whole world of possibility opens up to you.  Who is that person walking towards you?  What can they tell you, and what can you learn?  And if you were that person, what might you say about the message that you are able to read and which you would want to share with the other there with you?  Who would teach what?  Who would learn what? 

Holes

I was told an Indian saying: "If you find something good in a hole, take it and use it and appreciate it no matter how big or small the hole is." thinking about all the people I've been meeting, there has not been a single person who has not offered me some help or insight into this world around me, from directions if only halfway or maybe only a few hundred meters towards where I want to get to, to facts, history, details, stories, jokes, by the ways, a line comment, a suggestion, a simple answer to a simple question. But actually it's been no different throughout the years. Thanks to all of you and I can only hope I have been able to give something back within all the realities of those goofy holes that have been me...

Everywhere is a well-worn trail

I haven’t thought to explore so far within details of the Indian Olympic Association’s (IOC’s) latest activities but feel humbled by the extent of challenge, fortitude and determination to put a strong face forward into heavy winds of questioning, skepticism and anger.  Regardless of what the inner workings of those who seem to be considered the usual suspects, there is a sense of something astir that might be a little more than pride.  But then, what seems to be the question so many are asking is why should the activities of a few work against the many athletes who spend so much of their time and energy and perseverance trying to attain a dream, a large part of which is to compete under their country’s own flag at the Olympics?

I was supposed to have some meetings at a local college today, 6 December, but was told that this day is a national holiday in honor of the man who had led the writing of India’s constitution back in 1947.  So no meetings after all.  I decided to take a walk up Nagphani, a hill to the south of Lonavala, which was essentially a matter of taking a tuktuk to a nearby town, finding the railway station, walking up through a saddle between two hills, heading around the backside of the western hill, meandering across a valley and then trudging up the slope that led to the summit.  It was a hot winter’s day.  One main thought was to reference landmarks for the return trip; I filled up the landscape with points of return.

This was all fine and good on the way back except for one area that I came to call “wing it slope” on the backside of the western hill leading towards the saddle.  I wouldn’t say that I got lost – I was all the time aware of the lay of the land, the hill and the saddle, but there was a spot of time when I didn’t have a clue which trail I should be on.  All trails were fine – they all went somewhere that could seem like the right way at least for some short moment of time.  I could have felt like I was “everywhere and nowhere”, which is that terrible moment when the land begins to whirl around us, when we attempt to grasp at things that are ungraspable, when we lose focus, lose a sense of place, lose our way, lose composure and level-headedness – when we are in the most danger of really getting lost.  But I held to my sense of place, the sun’s position, the angle of the slope, a sense of where the hills were around me and kept moving on and eventually got “back on track” or as Aerosmith put it, back in the saddle again.

It was when I returned to my hotel room that I read the article about the IOC, and got thinking about some of the quotes of the athletes.  “It feels as if we have been thrown into an orphanage…”  “Politics should not be allowed to spoil sport…”  “There’s so much internal bickering and power struggle…”  And one commentary that alluded to a need for the cleaning up of a system that doesn’t treat sport and sportspersons as its raison d’etre.

There are choices at every moment and many times there might not be so much focused thought on the big picture, the ultimate aim or goal or destination, or, for instance, the ones who will ultimately benefit, or be penalized by being shunned by whatever action is chosen.

BR Ambedkar had been a Dalit – an untouchable - but he succeeded in getting a college education, prestigious degrees and a position that allowed him to bring a voice of civil liberty into the words of India’s constitution.  To honor him with a special day of holiday (which happens to also be Finnish Independence Day and the feast of St Nicholas, who was known for his acts of charity and love) seems to be giving a nod of honor to the act of focusing on the people who benefit from any action we take, rather than maintaining a focus on immediate, directionless, everywhere moments…

Noise

I was meandering along the streets of Mumbai and found my way out to the shore, moving amongst people, always people, and everything around was people within thousands of activities, and for some strange reason I got thinking about noise, and the way we typically think of noise as, well, noise: "This place is noisy," or "Where's all that noise coming from?" or "How can there be so much noise?" 

And I thought about learning, and how the best learning is usually quite noisy.  For instance, I think that learning might not always shine with its brightest light within "systems".  Content might be framed by a system, a curriculum might be defined systematically, a schedule might be established within a systematic approach to optimizing time - but the learning itself?

But before you go off running in the direction of children jumping around yelling and chattering and making a general ruckus and ruin of their learning environment, let me explain something about how I'm envisioning noise.

Noise as a word has a very close connection to the word "nausea" - a close cousin to seasickness, a drinking buddy with tipsiness, being a bit off-kilter, sort of dizzy, sort of off balance, befuddled, woozy and wobbly, dazed and confused... Like a mariner out on the high seas, rolling with the crashing of waves, getting battered about and getting feeling a bit out of sorts, but hey it's not all smoothness and sheens of calm out there. And that act of learning - those noisy moments when things crash upon themselves, wheel around and do the dervish with understandings sending assumptions weavingly away and causing us to rethink so many layers and depths and even the smoothness and sheens of so much of what we might even want to maintain as smoothness, but finding that it all just wobbles a bit, and makes the surface upon which we stand wobble, and makes the landscape or seascape or whatever scape has been constructed around us shift about in ways that may not have us feel like we're in as much control of our posturing as we might have imagined just a second before.

Then the ship rolls down into the sheltering trough and learning might call that brief moment of calmness knowledge, or understanding, as it gets its sea-legs set firmly on the deck in anticipation of the next beg swell.

And it can begin with the simplest of words and what do we know about layers of thought or conscientious depths?  For instance, how do children learn?  What is the noise?  Sometimes it's so difficult to envision what sparks a child's sense of learning and so difficult to maintain a perspective of this without drifting off into some space of one's own beliefs of what is best and right and proper, and we should be vigilant because that's when the "systems" tend to begin to re-emerge with their tendency to calm the tempests and smooth out the seas?

Ends of rainbows

There seems to be an ambivalence of attitudes towards the arrival and ongoing presence of IT in India and how it has woven its way into various mindsets of education; but actually it might be an ambivalence that is much older than this most recent technological wave we are calling IT.

At one end of the rainbow, IT has been accepted with open arms and enthusiastic fascination as great thing for a country that seeks to build a solid base of experts in a field that has taken the planet by storm as it wraps its digitized magic in wondrous interlacings of creativity, innovation and evolutionary commercialization.  A whole multi-layered matrix of schools, trainings, academies, institutions and universities compete within the highly competitive playing field of education, moving hundreds of thousands of students through the intricacies of instilling a solid basis of core skills in preparation for their emergence into this vibrant space.  Cities like Bangalore, with its “invisible downtown” somewhere around MG Road and Brigade, have completely redefined themselves as “the place to be” for tapping into the dream-stream flow of IT innovation.

At the other end of the rainbow is what you might say is that distant end (there always seems to be a distant end): the end that is a bit more vague, maybe a little out of focus, hazy, misty, effecting a sense of not so much settling upon horizons as much as a shrouding of an understanding of what might be a horizon, that seems to find solace in resting within a state of emitting some essence of not quite being where it seems it might be. 

This end of the rainbow is imbued with a feeling that IT has somehow confused the way people – students, parents, teachers, administrators, and on and on and on – see, embrace and evolve the role of education. 

Being a person who has so many times caught myself tending towards those vaguenesses of misty rainbow shrouded horizons, I find my attention here also being drawn towards listening to the ways people have been describing what seems to be a quite nascent feeling – that IT has somehow muddled and confused education to the point of disregarding elements like social implications and realities of self. 

For instance, when defining career paths.  A former colleague of mine summed this up quite nicely when he said that “IT has brought about a very solid attitude of ‘education as an investment’ that has led so many parents, and their children, to view education within a mindset of a need to stay focused on the path to success.”  I’ve been told that there is huge competition for students to attain best grades for best universities, starting all the way from preschool.  One person told me that some schools for children do not have playgrounds because they are so “academically focused” that playgrounds are seen as “distractions to learning”.  Many of the for-profit schools are working within the dynamic of passing students through the well-tended landscapes laid-out with clear trajectories of potential towards success – what one person described as a “channelized vision of education”.  One person said that there is a danger of building high expectations without enough effort being put on framing academics with “the right picture of the reality” right from the beginning so that students don’t get disheartened when the reality shows up…

But there are many activities and initiatives that are seeking to bring perspective into the views of education , consideration of career choices, and reality checks on how things might be “out there” – and it was surprising and inspiring to me to hear that there is one initiative that came into existence well before all of the momentum of IT had even reached first gear in its shift from grinding mainframes to finely-wrought flows of data upon a landscape of seemingly endless potential.

VEDH (Vocational Education Direction and Harmony), a TED-like event for kids around the age of 14-15, is now in its 22^nd year of existence.  I was fortunate to be able to attend VEDH in Nashik on 2 December, and although most presentations were in Marathi, I was able to feel the energy and enthusiasm of the panelists and the students and had some great discussions with some of the organizers.  This year’s theme was “Impossible to Possible” and the presenters took up this theme with their own unique personalities as the moderator, Dr Anand Nadkarni brought out their best.   

My understanding of their attitudes and feelings of hope and strength was defined through the kindness of the the man seated next to me as he occasionally whispered various phrases in English:

You all have opportunities and awareness that you can take charge of your own future.

Spend time with yourself.

What you know and what you are passionate about may not always be represented by the system.

Turn your passion into your work and you will be fulfilled.

Every moment is a mix of so many things, but it is harmony.

Believe in yourself and others will believe in you.

It was an amazing experience to sit there and hear these whispers, to see these people on stage who have remained focused on dreams of taking awareness and understandings of their own self into a future defined not by “the channels” but by vision and fortitude - and then to turn and see 3000 students and parents hearing these words in their local language and think that those moments might be moments of inspiration that define some element of some of their futures.

Maybe the misty sort of rainbow-end isn’t so misty after all, but is there to be brought into a clear focus of the destination to make of it?

Vegetables

I rolled down the window of the taxi to smell the vegetables lining the street like garlands laid out welcoming a victorious army. The army notes through the piles, filling boxes, bags, backpacks. The victory is plenitude. The bus is not yet full but I've been told that this is the last available seat. Number 13. It will be about four hours of traveling. There is an old dirty vomit-smelling rag hanging on the seat rail in front of me. When no one seems to be looking I brush it off so that it gently wafts down to the floor. A man appears at the front of the bus with a clip-board and hands it to the man in the first seat and then hands him a pen.  It seems like some sort of sign-in. The man with the clip-board progresses down the aisle, each person taking the clip-board in turn. I see him go to hand it to one woman. She gestures at the clip-board with a motion that reminds me me how I brushed away the dirty rag - maybe not the same depth of a question of what it actually was but of a similar wish for it to maintain a nice functional distance, not repulsion as much as just wanting to have it be away. The man seated next to her takes the clip-board. I wonder if what I thought I had seen was what I had actually seen. Even in my mind I try to re-see that gesture. A well-practiced subtlety; a sort of easeful purpose and I can imagine that she just likes her man to do those sorts of perfunctory boring things like filling in clip-boards just as I can imagine the dignity with which she would ask her man to remove the rag from the seat railing? We see what we see and on any given day we can only hope to celebrate our own little victories of sight in the never-ending war of comprehension. Victory, and sight, are relative things.