We started a new journey, Vijay Chahriyar; from IIT Delhi is teaching us
Human Centred design. Till now it has turned out to be the most
productive course for me as he connected us to people who are working
for the grassroots. It is usually a late realization in everybody’s
life; we keep reading stuff, all that in our rooms and we tend to evade
human interactions or take people and environment around us for
granted.
We try to limit ourselves inside closed spaces, we read articles or
books, and however, what one should do is to engage in lively
conversations with people out there in the real world. I mean, most of
us happily read about endemic of leper in and around our social spaces
on books and research papers and we keep ignoring the colony living
nearby where there are real humans suffering from this deadly disease.
We humans are the walking books; our interactions are as rich as
scholarly papers.
Our professor took an alternate road to teaching. The historical,
institutional, deeply wired dominating pedagogic methods demand lot of
physical hard work from us. We qualify as good students insofar if we
produce lots of assignments in the form of oppressive outputs like;
PPTs, academic papers. He gave us freedom; freedom to learn or grasp
things as the way we wanted. He even went to say that we can produce
our final assignments in the form of street show, a Qawali, or
any other possible output. We were also shown a Canadian short film
with the title: the necktie.
The protagonist was completely lost in the world of responsibilities,
job and performance. He had a monotonous, programmatic lifestyle
whereby he had to reach his office strictly on the time, sit on the
desk for hours and then again walk to his home. He had a passion yet
his mindset didn’t allow him to pursue that. He wanted to be an
accordion player and eventually, he mustered courage and followed his
passion.
All our life we tend to work on the dreams or so to say desires of
people who don’t understand us, who just want something material output
from of us or to put it politely, who expect us to be independent and
self-sufficient. Their intention may be to help us or make us
independent but as it turns out we lose ourselves in picking their
aspirations as our life projects.
Not only do we suffer entire life but we completely destroy our
identity.
Vijay sir, unlike other instructors gave less PPTs. He thinks this
method constitutes as the most oppressive form of pedagogy. As a matter
of coincidence, I have been reading Pedagogy of Oppressed, which
basically has this underpinning that our educational setup has rendered
whole population of students to mere passive recipients of knowledge. A
species who is asked to remain shut until the PPT is finished. To
include my experience: it is highly cumbersome to remain utterly fixed
to a lecture whereby PPT is used as a method of instruction. Student
fakes seriousness, masquerades attentiveness in order to appease
teacher, a knowledge seeker does that to maybe get good grades, but it
never helps the root cause of that PPT being there in the first place
and that is to enlighten, to add value.
All said, we were, after three days, introduced to the world of PPT
again. This time it was full of philosophical, intellectually enriching
stuff. There were only four slides, and it was about how to go about
various incidents that happen in our lives.
The mantra read EASE, whereby ‘E’ stood for enjoy the
process, ‘A’ was about to accept what is currently
unpleasant, ‘S’ meant to sip the inner silence, and ‘E’
meant evolve to integration at the level of being.
