Wednesday, October 26, 2016
17TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE INDIAN ASSOCIATION OF SOCIAL SCIENCE INSTITUTIONS (IASSI) FOR THE YEAR 2016-17.
Dates: 9-10 December 2016.Venue: Centre for Research in Rural and Industrial Development (CRRID), Chandigarh.
Theme: “Education and Development: Issues, Challenges and Opportunities”.
Organisors: Professor Sucha Singh Gill, Professor and Former Director General, CRRID, Chandigarh is the Organising Secretary of the Conference.
Registration:
- The registration fee for the conference includes payment towards a conference kit (comprising summaries of all papers presented at the Conference, a CD of the papers presented at the Conference, a Conference bag, stationery etc.) and meals during the conference. Due to financial constraints, it would not be possible for the organisers to meet the travel costs of all the paper presenters but modest accommodation will be arranged for some limited conference participants. For some select participants and resource persons, who are either superannuated or cannot manage their travel costs from their own institutions, the Association will make efforts to meet their travel costs.
| Category | Amount (Rs.) | Dates to Remember |
| IASSI Members Non IASSI Members Spouse/ Accompanying Person | 1500 2500 2000 | • Dates of the Conference: 9-10 December 2016 • Last Date for Submission of Papers: 7 November 2016 • Communication about Acceptance of Papers: 15 November 2016 (Those who would like to receive early communication of the acceptance of their papers should request for early information in this regard while sending their papers). • Last date of Registration: 30 November 2016 |
Organising Secretary, IASSI Annual Conference 2016
Centre for Research in Rural and Industrial Development,
2-A, Madhya Marg, Sector 19, Chandigarh-160019
Phones: 0172-2784133, 2725406
Email: gsuchasingh@gmail.com/sscrrid@hub.nic.in
Meet the EduTubers
Teaching and learning have now taken on a new dimension. Talented educators are reaching out to thousands of students through their YouTube channels.
The era of free education has begun, and access to quality education has never been easier. From Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to IIT Madras, the list of colleges offering free online courses keeps increasing every year. YouTube, one of the most popular video-sharing websites, has proved to be an excellent medium for this purpose. Several talented persons have utilised this platform phenomenally to impart knowledge to students. Dubbed EduTubers, these individuals have created a niche for themselves through creative videos on their YouTube channels that students have become hooked to.
Take the example of Unacademy, founded by Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini, Hemesh Singh and Sachin Gupta. Started around five years ago with the aim of helping students get past various academic hurdles, the quartet began by uploading videos on computer science and java. “Two months later, there were thousands of people watching these videos, which gave us the inspiration to continue working on more,” recalls Gaurav.
Today, Unacademy’s YouTube channel has more than three lakh subscribers, more than 20 million views, and around 729 videos that cater to medical, civil service and computer programming aspirants as well as students planning to become foreign language experts.
“Unacademy has become a platform for other teachers to teach. We are a team of 15 people and have more than 100 educators from all across the country helping us with the content,” says Roman.
Working on similar lines with focus on English language learning is Aakash Kadam, founder and creator of YouTube channel Learnex, Let’s Talk. He also runs an institute in Mumbai that gives training on business English, personality development, IELTS, TOEFL, skill development, and so on. “We train around 11,000 students at our institute every year and we wanted to give them something additional. That’s how the idea of YouTube classes was born. Now we post videos almost every alternate day,” explains Aakash.
Most of the videos on Learnex are related to learning communicative English for situations such as how to introduce oneself at a job interview and answer various questions asked by the interviewer, among several others. “Our videos are presented with a lot of examples, illustrations and props to make them interesting,” he adds.
However, creating videos to capture the interest of the audience comes with its own set of challenges. “Content creation is not easy. Writing the script, editing it and coming up with new strategies to present things differently so that the audience can absorb it faster is a tough process,” says Aakash.
Thankfully, one doesn’t always require a big budget to run a success channel. Navin Khambhala, hailing from a small town in Gujarat, has done exceptionally well through his YouTube channel #crazyNK that focuses on making the “best from waste.”
“I have always been interested in building gadgets and have been playing with wires and batteries since my childhood. I used to watch DIY YouTube videos which made me realise that I could do this too,” says Navin. With this in mind, he began his YouTube channel in March last year and has come a long way. With more than 5,90,000 subscribers and 8 million views, #crazyNK’s popularity is evident. Some of the popular videos on his channel include making a hover-board, a vacuum cleaner using a plastic bottle and a speaker using an old CD. He makes it look so simple that by the end of the video, you would burst out laughing, marvelling at its simplicity. “The videos can help students get ideas for their projects. They also learn the real time application of various things that they come across everyday,” says Navin.
Another successful EduTuber is Roshni Mukherjee who runs the channel Exam Fear. Her journey as an EduTuber began more than five years back when she was working in an IT company. “I have always been passionate about teaching and used to keep thinking of ways to get into it,” she says. Her resolve was strengthened when she came to know of her domestic help’s plight. “She was from a small village in Tamil Nadu and often used to complain that her kids were studying in a government school and could never clear the exams because the quality of education was not good. Sometimes, people staying in metro cities face problems as well as they cannot afford expensive schools for their kids. This is why I decided to upload video lessons on physics, maths, chemistry and biology for class VIII to XII,” she explains.
At a time when everyone has access to Internet and a smartphone, YouTube proved to be an apt medium for Roshni to impart knowledge. “I uploaded the first few videos as a trial. What motivated me to continue was the constant flow of comments and feedback from people requesting for videos on different topics and subjects,” she recalls.
Online learning has its own advantages. “It gives students their own personal space to study and enables them to take as much time as they want to grasp the concept,” says Roshni. The fact that it is free and can be accessed by everyone adds to its appeal. With the help of animations and real life examples, students are able to understand concepts better than ever.
Keywords: Teaching and learning, new media, youtube lessons, online teaching, edutubers, Aakash Kadam, Navin Khambhala, Roshni Mukherjee
Source: The Hindu, 22-10-2016
Double-talk on free speech
The colonial government imposed harsh punishment for sedition, but when it came to non-political speech like art and literature, British India and England, Briton and Indian, were treated alike
It is intuitive to think that Indians did not enjoy the right to free speech in British India. After all, the law of sedition heavily discriminated against us. In 19th century England, for example, sedition was a mere “misdemeanour” or lesser offence which attracted a maximum sentence of only two years in prison, but a person convicted of sedition under the Indian Penal Code could be sent off or “transported” to an overseas prison for life. However, not all speech-related laws in British India were repressive. The colonial law of obscenity, for instance, was very similar to its counterpart in the metropole. While subversive speech was heavily restrained in British India, non-political art and literature were assessed through the same legal lens as they would have been in England at the time.
The Hicklin test
In 19th century England, obscenity was punishable with a maximum sentence of three months in prison. What was obscene there was authoritatively defined in a case decided in 1868, Regina v. Hicklin. The question in this case was whether a pamphlet called “The confessional unmasked” was obscene. The pamphlet attacked Roman Catholicism and contained extracts of instructions given to Roman Catholic priests. About half of it dealt with subjects which were sexually explicit, for example: “How women may commit adultery with impunity”, “How they may afterwards deceive their husbands”. While finding the pamphlet to be obscene, Chief Justice Cockburn laid down the classic test that something would be considered obscene if its tendency was “to deprave and corrupt” or excite “thoughts of a most impure and libidinous character” in “those whose minds are open to such immoral influences”.
The ‘Hicklin test’ of obscenity, as it came to be known, was particularly regressive for two reasons. First, while judging whether a work was obscene or not, a court did not have to consider the work as a whole, but it could look merely at isolated passages within it. As one commentator later wrote, the Hicklin test made four words count for more than four hundred pages. Second, to decide whether something was obscene, a court had to place itself in the shoes of the most immature adolescent, or the most hypersensitive or perverted adult. Unlike other legal tests, the Hicklin test did not look at art or literature from the standpoint of the “reasonable person”.
In England, the Hicklin test underwent modification in the 1950s. In R v. Warburg (1954), for example, Justice Stable informed the jury that a work could not be considered obscene merely because it dealt with acts of sexual passion. Had it not been for sex, he said, “the human race would have ceased to exist thousands of years ago.”
Like England, the offence of obscenity in British India attracted a maximum sentence of three months’ imprisonment. The Hicklin test was also readily followed by the High Courts here. For example, inPublic Prosecutor v. Mantripragada (1916), the Madras High Court found a Telugu booklet called “Vidi Natakam”, originally written by the 15th century writer Srinadha, obscene. The 37th stanza of this booklet was found “calculated to excite lust and to instil improper ideas into the minds of the reader.”
However, not all obscenity cases in British India resulted in convictions. For example, in Emperor v. Harnam Das (1947), the Lahore High Court was concerned with an Urdu book which provided sexual advice for married couples. The High Court held that the book was not obscene. It was found to be “undoubtedly a serious work intended to give advice to married people, and particularly husbands, on how to regulate the sexual side of their lives to the best advantage”. Crudeness, the court said, was not the same as obscenity.
In Kherode v. Emperor (1912), the Calcutta High Court was considering whether a book containing a story on the lives of Radha and Krishna was obscene. While applying the Hicklin test, Justice Chatterjea held that Hindus generally did not think of Krishna and Radha as human beings, and did not “judge their doings by the standard of human conduct”. For this reason, the book did not “raise immoral thoughts in people”, and was not obscene.
The Hicklin test was at times also sensibly modified by courts in British India. For example, in one of the first cases to deal with obscenity, the Allahabad High Court in Empress v. Indarman (1881) held that obscenity must be judged from the standpoint of “ordinary and decent-minded persons”. In other words, contrary to the Hicklin test, it was the reasonable person, not the perverted adult or immature adolescent, from whose eyes the obscenity of a work was to be assessed. Eventually, most of the Hicklin test has been discarded by the Supreme Court of independent India.
Non-political speech
Sedition was subversive. It called into question the legitimacy of the British Empire and threatened the foundations of the colonial state. It was therefore natural for the colonial government to heavily crack down on seditious speech. Political writings were heavily penalised in “vernacular” or Indian language newspapers, newspapers like Lokmanya Tilak’s Kesari, because colonial courts unfairly presumed that those who read them were ignorant and unintelligent, and therefore more susceptible to seditious influences. However, when it came to non-political speech like art and literature, British India and England, Briton and Indian, were surprisingly treated alike.
Abhinav Chandrachud is an advocate at the Bombay High Court.
Source: The Hindu, 25-10-2016
Existentialism Is Living In The Present Moment
Sumit Paul
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Intellectuals as well as sciolists (pretenders to knowledge) all over the world are familiar with two words: Existentialism and Kafka.Whether or not they've understood existentialism is inconsequential. The same can be said about Franz Kafka and his Kafkasque philosophy .The very concept of existentialism evokes negative feelings and some even term it as cynical philosophy and equate it with negativism or nihilism. But this perception is totally flawed.
Says Bimal Krishna Matilal of Oxford University where he was the Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics “Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Jaspers ... is perhaps the only philosophical and ideological assertion of positive individuality.“
No other philosophy has put so much emphasis on man and his actions. Sartre states in his `Being and Nothingness' that, “We need an idea that's not fatalistic“ and that way , existentialism makes a man directly responsible for his actions. He has no room or excuse to ascribe his failures and misfortune to an imaginative higher agency , force or fate.
The 20th century had been very significant in the sense that it witnessed contradictory belief systems and philosophies grow simultaneously . Nietzsche's audacious proclamation, `God is dead' engendered existentialism.And the two World Wars made people, especially philosophers, question the very existence and purpose of human beings and their life on earth. It is in such hard and confounding times, that both faith and agnosticism grow. And agnosticism culminated in existentialism.
Camus wrote in the prelude to his novel `The Rebel', “Until an individual rebels against the established notions of fatalism and creates his own destiny , his existence on earth will be like that of a crawling worm, likely to be trampled over any moment.“ From this perspective, existentialism is a celebration of individuality and a reminder in the words of Robert Browning's Andrea del Sarto', “Ah, but a ` man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a Heaven for?“ Existentialism exhorts human beings to examine and re-examine the rigid patterns and ossified ideas of life.Existentialism is the reassessment of life and its purpose. To go against all that's viewed as sacrosanct or an established truth, is the key to existentialism. Existentialism believes that there're no facts, only interpretations. It's an open-end philosophy .
When Anais Nin wrote, “I must be a mermaid, Rango. I've no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living,“ the essence of existentialism made its presence felt. Because existentialism is delving into life and human issues like a pragmatic seer and not as an indolent, lotuseating saint or a priest. The very moment you live in, is the moment that exists for you. This is the crux of existentialism. All other things don't exist or matter.
American poet and T S Eliot's friend Ezra Pound emphatically said, “Just this moment is for you ... the past is lost and the future is unknown.“ Some readers and scholars may feel and find the echoes of the Bhagwad Gita's Karma Siddhanta and Purushartha in existentialism: Kshanam Vadanti Just this moment, nothing else. This is the philosophy of pragmatism and sagacity because it urges man to own up the responsibility of his success and failure and it precludes him from imputing his highs and lows to his fate and a fabricated god.
Says Bimal Krishna Matilal of Oxford University where he was the Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics “Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Jaspers ... is perhaps the only philosophical and ideological assertion of positive individuality.“
No other philosophy has put so much emphasis on man and his actions. Sartre states in his `Being and Nothingness' that, “We need an idea that's not fatalistic“ and that way , existentialism makes a man directly responsible for his actions. He has no room or excuse to ascribe his failures and misfortune to an imaginative higher agency , force or fate.
The 20th century had been very significant in the sense that it witnessed contradictory belief systems and philosophies grow simultaneously . Nietzsche's audacious proclamation, `God is dead' engendered existentialism.And the two World Wars made people, especially philosophers, question the very existence and purpose of human beings and their life on earth. It is in such hard and confounding times, that both faith and agnosticism grow. And agnosticism culminated in existentialism.
Camus wrote in the prelude to his novel `The Rebel', “Until an individual rebels against the established notions of fatalism and creates his own destiny , his existence on earth will be like that of a crawling worm, likely to be trampled over any moment.“ From this perspective, existentialism is a celebration of individuality and a reminder in the words of Robert Browning's Andrea del Sarto', “Ah, but a ` man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a Heaven for?“ Existentialism exhorts human beings to examine and re-examine the rigid patterns and ossified ideas of life.Existentialism is the reassessment of life and its purpose. To go against all that's viewed as sacrosanct or an established truth, is the key to existentialism. Existentialism believes that there're no facts, only interpretations. It's an open-end philosophy .
When Anais Nin wrote, “I must be a mermaid, Rango. I've no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living,“ the essence of existentialism made its presence felt. Because existentialism is delving into life and human issues like a pragmatic seer and not as an indolent, lotuseating saint or a priest. The very moment you live in, is the moment that exists for you. This is the crux of existentialism. All other things don't exist or matter.
American poet and T S Eliot's friend Ezra Pound emphatically said, “Just this moment is for you ... the past is lost and the future is unknown.“ Some readers and scholars may feel and find the echoes of the Bhagwad Gita's Karma Siddhanta and Purushartha in existentialism: Kshanam Vadanti Just this moment, nothing else. This is the philosophy of pragmatism and sagacity because it urges man to own up the responsibility of his success and failure and it precludes him from imputing his highs and lows to his fate and a fabricated god.
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