Sayamindu’s Ramblings

Some­time back, I was read­ing an arti­cle about the some­what uglier side of coder cul­ture. I per­son­ally feel that the arti­cle gen­er­al­izes a bit too much, though I have def­i­nitely, on occa­sion, have had to deal with very aggres­sive and annoy­ing behav­ior from fel­low coders. How­ever, this post it not about those inci­dents — this is about some­thing of the oppo­site nature.

Way back in 2002, I was just get­ting started con­tribut­ing to FOSS, and one of the things I was excited about was local lan­guage com­put­ing, espe­cially sup­port­ing Bangla in Free and Open Source Soft­ware. I had very lit­tle clue about what had to be done, but it was an excit­ing and mean­ing­ful project to work on, and I had found peo­ple from other parts of the world who were inter­ested in col­lab­o­rat­ing with me over email and IRC, so we were slowly mak­ing some progress. I was still in high-school. In August 2002, I sud­denly got con­tacted by a group of peo­ple (among whom was Venky Har­i­ha­ran), invit­ing me to join a Indic Com­put­ing Work­shop in Ban­ga­lore. After a bit of back and forth which looked like “oh, but I’m just a high-school stu­dent”, “that’s fine, we want you to be here”, etc. I finally found myself in a plane to Ban­ga­lore (tick­ets cour­tesy the orga­niz­ers). Once in the work­shop though, I started to have a major attack of what I would now prob­a­bly describe as impos­tor com­plex. I was def­i­nitely the youngest attendee in the work­shop — most of the other par­tic­i­pants were either pro­fes­sional devel­op­ers, or estab­lished mem­bers of the open source com­mu­nity. There were a sig­nif­i­cant pres­ence from acad­e­mia as well. The anx­i­ety eased a bit over the next cou­ple of days — it was an incred­i­bly fun and friendly com­mu­nity, and I was glad to find peo­ple who shared the same pas­sion around Indic Com­put­ing that I did at that time. How­ever, the nicest moment came when I was leav­ing. I had an early flight, so I was leav­ing in the mid­dle of a ses­sion and I sud­denly noticed Karunakar, who was already quite a “rock­star” in the local-language com­put­ing space, run­ning towards me. He stopped me as I was leav­ing, shook my hands, and in his usual quiet style, men­tioned that he was really glad to have met me face-to-face, and that he hoped to con­tinue our inter­ac­tions online. It was a small ges­ture, but a very sig­nif­i­cant one for me per­son­ally. It made me feel much more wel­come and com­fort­able in the com­mu­nity, and ulti­mately, made me much more enthu­si­as­tic about being a participant.

So, after nearly 10 years, to Karunakar, a long over­due thanks!

The sit­u­a­tion in West Ben­gal (the state in India I come from) is get­ting scary. A Uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sor was arrested (and beaten up, though not by the police) for for­ward­ing emails con­tain­ing car­toons that were crit­i­cal of the chief min­is­ter. While it’s wor­ry­ing and sad­den­ing to see this kind of bla­tant repres­sion of dis­sent and intol­er­ance towards crit­i­cism, to me, it is even more wor­ry­ing (and scary) to see the pre­text of the arrest. Accord­ing to news reports, a clause involv­ing “deroga­tory images” of the Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy act was invoked for the arrest. It is debat­able whether the images in the car­toon in ques­tion were deroga­tory or not, and also, it raises fur­ther ques­tion about the use of the some­what vague term to sur­press dis­sent and crit­i­cism of any kind. News­pa­per car­toons has been around for cen­turies, and it is wor­ry­ing to see a very dif­fer­ent bar being set for what hap­pens online. More­over, it also looks like the crime inves­ti­ga­tion bureau of the state (the CID) has asked for IP addresses from Facebookto fig­ure out the orig­i­nal uploader of the images. Again, very scary, since IP addresses rarely tell the com­plete story, and given the his­tory of the knee-jerk reac­tion of Indian law-enforcement, I wouldn’t be sur­prised if some­one gets harassed with­out valid rea­sons (assum­ing the some­what remote pos­si­bil­ity of Face­book actu­ally divulging the IP addresses).

Over the last cou­ple of weeks, there has been a num­ber of arti­cles (1, 2) in Kolkata news­pa­pers about the messy state of affairs in the pass­port issuance sys­tem in the city. To sum­ma­rize the prob­lem — recently, parts of the pass­port issuance sys­tem was out­sourced to a large Indian IT com­pany, with the hope that dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies would make the process more effi­cient and faster (and also, poten­tially, that cor­rup­tion would be less­ened). While the back-office pro­cess­ing was still to be done through the gov­ern­ment agen­cies (pass­port author­i­ties, police, etc), the entire work­flow was redesigned, and in this new work­flow, the citizen-facing tasks would be car­ried out by employ­ees of the IT com­pany. The sys­tem was inau­gu­rated with a fancy new office build­ing, etc, but within a few months, the entire infra­struc­ture seems to have been brought to its knees. With the Kolkata pass­port office cater­ing to a sig­nif­i­cant area of East­ern India, the impli­ca­tions of this sys­tem break-down is pretty grave.

When I was in India ear­lier this year, I tried to renew my pass­port, and while using the new sys­tem, it was clear that things were not work­ing out as expected.

Lack of clear com­mu­ni­ca­tion
To begin with, there was no clear com­mu­ni­ca­tion about the new sys­tem. The offi­cial pass­port depart­ment web­site had very lit­tle infor­ma­tion about the new sys­tem — I dis­cov­ered that there was a sep­a­rate web­site almost by acci­dent through a link hid­den away deep in the web­pages of the old site. The new web­site, for some mys­te­ri­ous rea­son, only allowed access to the online appli­ca­tion between 6:00 to 7:00 PM in the evening, and it wasn’t very clearly stated any­where. Later I fig­ured out that it was a way to throt­tle appli­ca­tion sub­mis­sion — I’m still not sure why that was done through a time-limit instead of set­ting a per day quota. The result of this how­ever was, the site would be DOS-ed every­day from 6:00 – 7:00, and I had to use quite a few tricks to “jump the line” and get my appli­ca­tion in.

Lack of a fall­back sys­tem
It wasn’t very clear to me how peo­ple with­out access to com­put­ers would fill up the appli­ca­tion. I was not the only one — on the day I went to phys­i­cally sub­mit my doc­u­ments, I saw a num­ber of peo­ple, some of whom had prob­a­bly never touched a com­puter before, lined up at the infor­ma­tion counter, try­ing to under­stand how they could get their pass­port appli­ca­tions in. I’m still not sure what the archi­tects and engi­neers behind the sys­tem were think­ing dur­ing their design process.

Lack of train­ing of the staff
The staff were cour­te­ous and nice, and tried to be help­ful, but it was painfully evi­dent that they had received inad­e­quate train­ing. They got con­fused with any any sort of devi­a­tion from the absolute basic sce­nario and went off to ask their col­leagues and seniors. As they were enter­ing my address data — I noticed that they put my entire address in the city field. I asked them about it — and they said it wouldn’t mat­ter. I won­der how lookups are done in that sys­tem. They also took the pho­to­graph for the pass­port them­selves, and the qual­ity of the pho­to­graph was sub­stan­dard, to put it mildly. For the next ten years I need to worry about being denied entry at some bor­der cross­ing because my pass­port photo is hazy and does not resem­ble me.

Lack of coör­di­na­tion between the gov­ern­ment agen­cies and the out­sourc­ing com­pany
When the process was fin­ished, I asked the offi­cer about the time it would take for my new pass­port to be mailed to me. I had applied through the expe­dited (“tatkal”) sys­tem, where the stated time required was three work­ing days. The response, to my sur­prise and alarm (I was fly­ing back to the US the week after) was, two weeks. In the end, I did get the pass­port in three days, so it seemed that there was some­thing wrong with the com­mu­ni­ca­tion hap­pen­ing between the back-end pro­cess­ing office and the citizen-service center.

Over­all though, I was pretty happy with the ser­vice I had got (despite the tem­po­rary anx­i­ety it had caused me). Things were smoother, and I really hoped that the prob­lems out­lined above would be resolved with time. How­ever, from the recent news­pa­per reports, it looks like things have taken a turn for the worse, and that’s a real pity. It goes on to show how for most ICT sys­tems software/hardware is only a very small part of the prob­lem. The human fac­tors are as, if not more, impor­tant as the tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tions that goes into a project, and sadly, that’s some­thing a lot of us often tend to forget.

Last Fri­day I accepted the admis­sion offer for the PhD pro­gram at the MIT Media Lab — which means I’ll be con­tin­u­ing in the Life­long Kinder­garten research group for four more years. The last two years of the Mas­ters pro­gram have been an amaz­ing ride. Ini­tially it took me a while to reg­is­ter that I was, in fact, in grad-school, but once I did, and after hav­ing had the chance to work with Mitch and the other won­der­ful mem­bers of the group (and beyond), it was an easy deci­sion to accept the admis­sion offer. I still do not know for sure what direc­tion I’ll take in terms of research after the Mas­ters the­sis process is over — I’ll def­i­nitely con­tinue to explore the space of pro­gram­ming with data, but there are some other things in the pipeline as well which I would like to try. The next four years look exciting!

App Inven­tor re-appeared last week, now hosted by MIT, and I have been fol­low­ing some of the dis­cus­sions in var­i­ous online forums fol­low­ing the (re)launch. I’m a bit sur­prised by the intense debate that seems to be going on among the com­ments about the value of block based pro­gram­ming. While fig­ur­ing out the inner work­ings of how your computer/mobile device works, and writ­ing low-level (assem­bly?) code is cer­tainly valu­able, that is not the goal of tools like App Inven­tor or Scratch. These tools uti­lize pro­gram­ming, but the larger, big pic­ture goal is to engage young peo­ple in acts of cre­ativ­ity that are also per­son­ally mean­ing­ful. Not every­one likes to cal­cu­late fac­to­ri­als after six months of learn­ing how to pro­gram. There’s a sig­nif­i­cant amount of value of hav­ing low bar­ri­ers to entry, and that, com­bined with the per­sonal mean­ing­ful­ness can cre­ate an extremely pow­er­ful medium for young learn­ers to engage in acts of cre­ativ­ity. Being able to cre­ate a mobile app, how­ever kludgy it might be, gives you immense sat­is­fac­tion, much more than being able to detect palin­dromes (at least for a major­ity). Pro­gram­ming has become more and more com­pli­cated over the years, slowly mov­ing any mean­ing­ful project out of reach of begin­ners — draw­ing a sin­gle line on a screen can require tens of lines of code. Tools like Scratch, App Inven­tor try to reverse the trend. That’s some­thing which most peo­ple seem to forget.

All this is noth­ing new for my usual cir­cle of friends and co-workers. How­ever, see­ing the com­ments and dis­cus­sions online reminded me that we need to do a bet­ter job of spread­ing these ideas.

Ever since I came to Cam­bridge, I have been get­ting a steady stream of friends from my high-school vis­it­ing the greater Boston area. My friends and col­leagues at the Media Lab are often sur­prised by the fre­quency of instances where I intro­duce a vis­i­tor as a high-school friend. By the end of this year, I would even have two close high-school friends liv­ing within a cou­ple of hours of dri­ving distance.

These meet­ings, half-way around the world from where we grew up and became friends, makes me happy (it’s always fun to catch up, and have long adda ses­sions), but also makes me reflect about how peo­ple are migrat­ing away from West Ben­gal and India. Grow­ing up, I used to hear about the “brain-drain”, and over the last 3 – 4 years, I encoun­tered the term “reverse brain-drain” a num­ber of times. How­ever, my per­sonal expe­ri­ence still points towards an over­all brain drain, espe­cially for friends who have gone or are going for advanced (post-graduate) stud­ies. It’s entirely pos­si­ble that this is too early to make a com­ment, and per­haps many of us will return (and con­tribute to the “reverse brain-drain”), but I’m not that opti­mistic. I guess only time will tell…

I came to know about the Lions Book soon after I had started to use GNU/Linux dur­ing the final years of my high-school. Although I had a PDF copy of it (along with another PDF of the source code), I wanted to have a phys­i­cal copy of the book as well. I had to wait for quite a few years before that could hap­pen, because the printed book wasn’t avail­able in India. Finally, in late 2006, after get­ting paid for my first con­sul­tant job, I got a copy shipped from the United States to Kolkata.

The rea­son I was reminded of the inci­dent is the recent news about the shut­down of library.nu, a pop­u­lar ebook down­load­ing por­tal. Before going into the details, I should state upfront that I do not endorse or sup­port the way library.nu oper­ated. I would cer­tainly want to see pub­lish­ers and authors and book­sellers fairly com­pen­sated for their efforts. How­ever, the basic prob­lem here was (and still is), that many pub­lish­ers sim­ply did not and do not care about cer­tain mar­kets, and I’m sure, if library.nu’s access logs were to be ana­lyzed, these mar­kets would come out in over­whelm­ing majority.

“We will not tol­er­ate free-loaders who make unearned prof­its by depriv­ing authors and pub­lish­ers of their due com­pen­sa­tion. This is an impor­tant step towards more trans­par­ent, hon­est, and fair trade of dig­i­tal con­tent on the Internet.“

This was a part of a state­ment from Jens Bam­mel of the Inter­na­tional Pub­lish­ers Asso­ci­a­tion. What Mr Bam­mel (and many oth­ers) seem to con­ve­niently ignore is the fact that some­times pub­lish­ers sim­ply do not have their con­tent in dig­i­tal for­mats, or even if they do, the con­tent is restricted to lim­ited geo­gra­phies, effec­tively depriv­ing bil­lions (the so-called “free-loaders”) of access to cre­ativ­ity, knowl­edge and infor­ma­tion. When I was read­ing the Lions Book, mass-market ebook-readers did not exist. Now they do — and I feel incred­i­bly frus­trated when I rec­om­mend a book to my friends in India (many of whom own ebook-readers), only to find that a ebook ver­sion does not exist, or even if it does, it is not avail­able to cus­tomers out­side of a cer­tain geo­graph­i­cal region (usu­ally the United States). A case in point would be Sey­mour Papert’s The Children’s Machine: Rethink­ing School In The Age Of The Com­puter — the book that pushed me to apply to grad-school at MIT. There’s no ebook edi­tion of that book — at least not for the most pop­u­lar ebook-reader brand that’s out there. For some­one in India, this would mean pay­ing the rupee-equivalent of the US dol­lar price of the book (which would be quite expen­sive — espe­cially if you are a stu­dent) and then wait­ing for quite a bit of time before get­ting it. In such a sit­u­a­tion, isn’t it nat­ural for some­one to just go to one of these ebook down­load por­tals, and then down­load a “pirated” copy instead of going through all the has­sle? And it is not just India, in fact, the sit­u­a­tion in India is a lot bet­ter than many other coun­tries in the world. One of the most vivid mem­o­ries of my trip to Birm­ing­ham, UK for GUADEC 2007 is the visual of the stacks of O’Reilly books that Dul­man­dakh Sukhbaatar, the GNOME devel­oper from Mon­go­lia had bought to carry back home. He didn’t get O’Reilly books in Mon­go­lia, he said, and wanted to carry back as much as he could. (I should prob­a­bly men­tion here that as far as my per­sonal expe­ri­ence goes, O’Reilly is one of the pub­lish­ers who do a much bet­ter job of reach­ing out to non US/Western mar­kets — and I would also say that it goes on to prove that there is a mar­ket for legit­i­mate copies of books out­side of the West­ern hemi­sphere, and not every­one in the rest of the world is a “free-loader”.)

Of course — all this is noth­ing new. The story is largely sim­i­lar with movies. It’s just that I feel more pas­sion­ately about books, and I feel sad, that after what hap­pened last week, a lot of peo­ple out there lost their only viable option for access­ing a large chunk of human cre­ativ­ity and knowl­edge. Part (2) of arti­cle 27 of the UN Uni­ver­sal dec­la­ra­tion of Human Rights states:

Every­one has the right to the pro­tec­tion of the moral and mate­r­ial inter­ests result­ing from any sci­en­tific, lit­er­ary or artis­tic pro­duc­tion of which he is the author.

while part (1) states:

Every­one has the right freely to par­tic­i­pate in the cul­tural life of the com­mu­nity, to enjoy the arts and to share in sci­en­tific advance­ment and its benefits.

Indeed, it is a sad sit­u­a­tion when the two state­ments above are pitched against each other.

My advi­sor Mitch Resnick sent out an email today, with a Youtube link to a recent talk on edu­ca­tion by Noam Chom­sky. I had noticed a Wired UK arti­cle on the talk ear­lier, and was happy to hear it in its entirety. When I read the Wired arti­cle, Chomsky’s dis­tinc­tion about edu­ca­tion for help­ing “peo­ple to deter­mine to learn on their own” vs. edu­ca­tion for “indoc­tri­na­tion” reminded of Tagore’s শিক্ষা-সংস্কার (Sikkha San­gashkar, or Reform in Education):

”নিজে চিন্তা করিবে, নিজে সন্ধান করিবে, নিজে কাজ করিবে, এমনতরো মানুষ তৈরি করবার প্রণালী এক, আর পরের হুকুম মানিয়া চলিবে, পরের মতের প্রতিবাদ করিবে না, ও পরের কাজে জোগানদার হইয়া থাকিবে মাত্র, এমন মানুষ তৈরির বিধান অন্যরূপ।“

Trans­lated roughly into Eng­lish, this would be, “the process for enabling a per­son for inde­pen­dent thought, inde­pen­dent inquiry and inde­pen­dent work is dif­fer­ent from the rules for build­ing some­one who fol­lows orders, does not protest some­one else’s opin­ions and is only a con­trib­u­tor to some­one else’s work.”

How­ever, towards the end of the talk, Chom­sky men­tions an inci­dent that reminded me of my own expe­ri­ences grow­ing up — he men­tions a teacher who had to dis­cour­age a stu­dent from pur­su­ing a spe­cific sub-area that she was inter­ested in, as that would poten­tially inter­fere with her prepa­ra­tions for the upcom­ing national exams. I went through a very sim­i­lar expe­ri­ence in the final years of high-school. I had man­aged to find my own inter­est and pas­sion in com­put­ers, and even a com­mu­nity that could sup­port me (the Free/Open Source Soft­ware com­mu­nity), but I was faced with poten­tially dis­as­trous results in my school leav­ing exam­i­na­tions. I chose to fol­low my inter­ests, and as expected, my school leav­ing exam­i­na­tion scores were ter­ri­ble. I some­how man­aged to keep doing what­ever I was inter­ested in, and through var­i­ous twists and turns, found myself in a place that cel­e­brates the idea of fol­low­ing one’s own pas­sions and inter­ests. But I think I have been lucky — lucky to have peo­ple around me who did not freak out when my test results came in (though under­stand­ably, they were wor­ried), lucky to have a sup­port­ive com­mu­nity, both local and global, who shared my inter­ests, and lucky to have a few incred­i­ble men­tors and super­vi­sors along the way. I won­der how many peo­ple are that lucky.

Update: I had a short chat with Mitch about this, and I real­ized, that I was also lucky to have a pas­sion that could be trans­lated into employ­able skills. A lot of peo­ple are inter­ested in things which do not bring in easy employ­ment, and the sit­u­a­tion is much more worse for them.

Towards the begin­ning of Novem­ber last year, I got an email from J. Nathan Matias, ask­ing if I would be inter­ested in help­ing orga­nize an event at the Media Lab dur­ing Jan­u­ary. In his email, he described the event as an oppor­tu­nity for peo­ple to teach each other things that they feel pas­sion­ate about, cov­er­ing top­ics both aca­d­e­mic and non-academic. There was no spe­cific for­mat for the ses­sions, and ses­sion leads could choose what­ever struc­ture they thought would be most suit­able, from one-on-one chats to large work­shops to more tra­di­tional lec­tures. I thought it was a great idea, and signed up, along with a few other (mostly) MIT grad stu­dents. Over the next cou­ple of months, we designed and planned this event, which we called the “Fes­ti­val of Learn­ing”, and it finally came together and hap­pened over yes­ter­day and the day before (27-28^th Jan­u­ary). The ses­sion top­ics formed, as we had expected, an inter­est­ing mix, rang­ing from build­ing card­board forts to explor­ing the fron­tier of physics (“fire­hose style”), from mak­ing mochi to research method­ol­ogy 101. As Jason Haas, a mem­ber of the orga­niz­ing team pointed out, the “fes­ti­val” aspect of the event was not for­got­ten either, and an enthu­si­as­tic group of stu­dents filled up an entire con­fer­ence room with nearly 1,500 balloons.

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Through­out the event, the balloon-room, as we called it, turned out to be a place for peo­ple to go back to their child­hood, run around, dance, laugh, hide, and occa­sion­ally, pop a bal­loon or two.

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There were other trans­for­ma­tive expe­ri­ences as well — Scott Nichol­son, vis­it­ing pro­fes­sor at Com­par­a­tive Media Stud­ies sta­tioned him­self in the E14 atrium through­out the event, paint­ing faces of every­one who asked.

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Jenny Broutin, a grad­u­ate stu­dent in the Media Arts and Sci­ences pro­gram con­ducted what she called “idea chats”, one-on-one con­ver­sa­tions with peo­ple about any idea that they wanted to talk about. The venue that she chose for the chats made it even more inter­est­ing — a large scale card­board pop-up book that one can walk into.

Another deci­sion that we as orga­niz­ers took was to do away with fur­ni­ture for lunch/afternoon snacks, and instead have blan­kets inside the large Media Lab atrium, so that peo­ple could have their food pic­nic style. This changed the fun­da­men­tal char­ac­ter­is­tic of the atrium space — some­thing that had a very for­mal and almost ster­ile atmos­phere turned into a very inti­mate gath­er­ing place for a com­mu­nity. Com­ing from India, gath­er­ings where every­one sits on the floor is noth­ing new to me, but with this explicit “design inter­ven­tion” I real­ized how a seem­ingly sim­ple tweak to the way peo­ple share a phys­i­cal space can lead to mag­i­cal effects.

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Cer­tain trans­for­ma­tions emerged from the atten­dees as well — through­out the sec­ond day, for exam­ple, we had a helium filled radio con­trolled shark float around in the atrium space, caus­ing occa­sional moments of hilarity.

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For me per­son­ally, the there were a num­ber of high­lights dur­ing the event. Through­out the plan­ning stage, it was an amaz­ing and hum­bling expe­ri­ence to work with peo­ple who were pas­sion­ate about ideas of learn­ing, peo­ple who rec­og­nized and cel­e­brated the fact that learn­ing can hap­pen in a vari­ety of set­tings, con­texts and for­mats. It was also one of my first expe­ri­ence with col­lab­o­rat­ing with a peo­ple from across the Media Lab and beyond — I had pre­vi­ously col­lab­o­rated on research projects with other Media Lab and MIT groups, but this was a very dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence alto­gether. Dur­ing the event, I led a ses­sion on mak­ing South Asian kites, and it was my first expe­ri­ence lead­ing a craft-workshop style ses­sion. The ses­sion con­cluded with peo­ple run­ning around in the MIT cam­pus, try­ing to get their kites to fly, which was a lot of fun.

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I also led a ses­sion on mak­ing Masala Coke, and the range of reac­tions that I got after peo­ple drank what they pre­pared was absolutely hilar­i­ous. I also got my face painted by Scott Nichol­son, again, some­thing I would prob­a­bly not do in nor­mal circumstances.

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Dur­ing the plan­ning stage, we also dis­cov­ered that there’s no Free/Open Source web app to man­age user reg­is­tra­tion and sign-up for this type of event. So with some help from oth­ers, I quickly hacked together a Django app to address our needs. I plan to shortly release this app under a FOSS license so that it can be remixed and reused for other sim­i­lar events.

As a final bit of reflec­tion, the Fes­ti­val of Learn­ing was an won­der­ful event, show­cas­ing what the com­mu­nity at Media Lab and beyond can achieve in terms of energy and cre­ativ­ity if they decide to come together. It was won­der­ful to work with the orga­niz­ing team, with peo­ple who have such infec­tious pas­sion, cre­ativ­ity and energy. It was amaz­ing to see peo­ple from all over the com­mu­nity come up and pro­pose ses­sions — and then teach them with so much thought­ful­ness, pas­sion and ded­i­ca­tion. Dur­ing the con­clud­ing ses­sion, Joi Ito, direc­tor of the Media Lab com­mented, “do it again”. We would cer­tainly love to!

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The Cal­cutta Tele­graph had an arti­cle a few days ago about the St Xaviers Col­lege, Kolkata mov­ing to a more flex­i­ble sub­ject reg­i­men that closely resem­bles the Amer­i­can sys­tem of hav­ing a “major” and a “minor”. This is in stark con­trast with the usual Indian sys­tem, where one has to choose one’s spe­cial­iza­tion (or “stream”) in high-school (typ­i­cally at the age of 16). In high school, a stu­dent can go for one of sci­ence, arts or com­merce “streams”, and more often than not, the choice is not made by the stu­dent, but by the par­ents of the stu­dent (some­thing, as I have seen, that can lead to dis­as­trous results). Stu­dents who score more in tests typ­i­cally go in for sci­ence, and the rest are del­e­gated to either arts or com­merce. When it comes to apply­ing to col­lege, high-school stu­dents who have stud­ied sci­ence have the option of apply­ing for either science/engineering sub­jects or human­i­ties sub­jects (the Indian col­lege sys­tem makes one choose one’s spe­cial­iza­tion right from the start). The “lesser” arts/commerce stu­dents do not have an option, and con­tinue study­ing the sub­jects they chose in the begin­ning of high school. Given this very rigid sub­ject seg­re­ga­tion, I would cer­tainly say that St Xaviers has taken a bold and poten­tially trans­for­ma­tive step, though it remains to be seen whether the stu­dents, who are com­ing in from the already seg­re­gated sys­tem in school, take advan­tage of the flexibility.

In my opin­ion, the stream sys­tem forces stu­dents to make a choice too early. This has two major effects:

• Unless a stu­dent makes an active effort to look beyond the sub­jects and the syl­labus, the sys­tem gives rise to a very nar­row world-view.
• In some cases, the choice made by the stu­dent (or more likely, the student’s par­ents) does not work out well, lead­ing to the stu­dent los­ing con­fi­dence in him­self, and in some cases, even drop­ping out of school or college

Of course, a school stu­dent might have a par­tic­u­lar fas­ci­na­tion or inter­est towards a given sub­ject or area, but mak­ing every­one spe­cial­ize at the age of 16 does not make any sense. Some­thing like the Advanced Place­ment sys­tem in Amer­i­can schools, or even some­thing like the “addi­tional sub­ject” sys­tem in Indian sec­ondary schools is a much bet­ter solu­tion that allows moti­vated stu­dents to learn more, but at the same time, in the end, give every­one an equal chance to not just fol­low, but dis­cover their pas­sion. I really hope that the St Xaviers exper­i­ment trick­les down to the school system.