Open letter: Straight from the heart

SUSAN OOMMEN

In joining college, you've taken a decision to not opt out of a university education. For an 18-year-old that is indeed a daring choice to have made: to enter a system, to find your way through it, to realise that whatever you may have picked up along the way needs to be subject to scrutiny and processed by you in your efforts to sustain your world in the way you sometimes dream about it. I'm also assuming several of you went to the polls to vote out State Governments, claiming the privilege to engage with political reality.

I believe you have a manifesto. I'm waiting to hear you tell the world your expectations, as also your terms and conditions, for sectors today require contracts and MoUs to negotiate respect, dignity and understanding, to compensate lacks and absences, and to deviolate transgressions. And when you do that, you come into your own, because you have posted your rights.

You are young, hopeful, heady adults. Education is your inheritance. The nation has subsidised it for you, and your caretakers have paid for your tuition. Go for it. Make your world. Assert your agenda. And remember, we are all stakeholders, for what you do with your education determines Indian civic society. What happens at the end of the three year gestation period of undergraduate study? Have you sensed the differences that exist between persons in the classroom? Have these provided you with pointers about the person you may be? Have you begun to understand that there is no universal "I"? That objectivity is a myth? That it is your values and belies that make up your world? That it is unnatural for a class of 70 to look alike, think alike, move alike and perform alike? Have you wondered that homogeneous groups may be manipulated products, and that standardisation, approximating order, may well destroy the very gain of your existence? Have you thought about India's innumerable varieties of rice and marvelled at nature's life principle of genetic diversity; have you speculated that in diversity lies the basic law of equity?

Our classes are overwhelming in size and multiplicity. The potential therefore for dialogue is huge. Claim your classrooms as sites of contestation. Approach your student community with humility. Try to understand the magnitude of the archaeology of knowledge. You will soon begin to see configurations of power and abjectness. You will also begin to understand that exclusive mastery over data is an exercise in futility, its only culmination, grades.

Widen your process of learning. Include the world that you live in; ask of the world you do not understand, perspectives. And learn to apprehend that the earth does not turn by majority resolutions, and that fair play lies in derecognising notions of privilege. Trust your instincts. Make your analyses. Fashion your models. Give us your samples.

You are young and raring to go. Infect the system with your laughter and passion that the classroom may take on the energy, hope and promise that you symbolise. There is hope yet. Have a wonderful year.

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