 to give a talk at HBCAC, to give a more to most of us he's quite familiar because he has been the senior professor and director of TIFR from 2002 to 2007 and he continues to be a distinguished professor at TIFR. His educational qualification is BSc Physics Honours from Presidency College University of Calcutta, MSc Physics from University of Delhi and PhD Physics from Northwestern University. He has a postdoctoral, he did his postdoctoral research at the National Magnet Laboratory at MIT and he was the James Frank Distinguished Fellow at the University of Chicago. He serves in various organizations and he has held many positions. Currently the latest one which he held was also the Acharya JC Bose Distinguished University Professor at the Presidency University Calcutta. He is also on the editorial board of the Reports on Progress in Physics, the Technology Advisory Council of the British Petroleum and the IIT Council of the Ministry of Human Resources Development and the Council of IIT, Mumbai and the Mentor Group of Presidency University Calcutta. He most of us know Professor Shobu Bhattacharya for for his interest beyond physics also and therefore the topic today is the crisis in India's higher education. What is to be done? We would really love to hear his views on this topic and I invite Professor Bhattacharya to give his talk. Thank you. Can you hear me? Is this working? No. Oops. How about now? Is that okay? Great. Thank you very much. And it's always a great pleasure to be here and I realize that I haven't been here for quite a while. And it's great to see faces of people I have known for more than a decade and also faces of people whom I have never seen before and so this talk I should begin by saying that this is to the memory of Professor B.M. Udkankar who used to usually sit there at most occasions I had come and he was one of the few people through who's not directly but through whose writings and because of what I heard from him this my subject, today's subject, became of some interest to me and eventually has turned into a bit of a bit of an obsession. So what I'll do today, I mean one of the great things of no longer being no longer being part of an institution is you can speak bluntly and frankly and it has no consequence. So therefore what I'd like to tell you is what I think of it but I'm an old man, so I would like to actually take you through what I'd like to call a personal story. So here is the story. The story is that I left India when I was about 21 years old and I spent 30 years outside the country and then I came back when I was 51. So you can see that most of my adult life was spent elsewhere and then I came back as the head of one of India's greatest scientific institution and I have to admit that I was clueless. I couldn't understand anything as to how the institution functioned or how anything functioned. So if you're a physicist, you want to have a simple picture with everything fixed and this simple picture was not easy. So what I have come up with is if there are sometimes historians in the room and they get very annoyed with my version of facts and so I'll tell you about the story and this will be mostly stories. There was a Hungarian physicist named Leo Zillard. I don't know how many of you have heard of him. He is one of these great Hungarian physicists like Teller and Von Neumann and so on and Zillard carried, he was most known for carried that letter from Einstein to F.D. Roosevelt to get the Manhattan Project, the nuclear weapon program started and then after he saw the first explosion he was horrified and he decided it must never be used. By the time American military decided that he couldn't speak in public and put a gag order and then he wrote a book and a manuscript form and the old cyclostyle form and I've seen the cyclostyle form in the University of Chicago library. It was not published at the time now it is and the name of the book was the facts according to Leo Zillard. And so somebody said that Leo, why are you spending all this time writing this book? Nobody's going to read it. So he said I'm writing it for God and and then people said don't you think God knows the facts and he said not this version of the facts. So it is in that sense you should listen to the rest of my talk that this is a version of the facts may not be the version of the fact or may not even be a defensible version of the facts but this is my facts. Okay, so here's a picture and I normally show this picture and I ask people to guess where this is. I showed it in Calcutta and that tells you where it is likely to be. It is in Calcutta and so I'll tell you you know later more about this picture. I think this is a rather interesting picture. The everything else that I'll tell you is you know much of the inspiration for most things I'll tell you comes from this great institution known as the West Hantine in TIFR and I'll tell you pictures, quotes, anecdotes and incorrect stories. Some of it is real. Some of it is imagined. So just take it in that spirit. Don't take it very seriously. It's in the spirit of a tea table, coffee table conversation. Okay, so so here is the outline. So the outline is that I'll have a preamble. I will go through a very what I call a brief history of time. Then I'll speak about something and I'll tell you why I'm speaking about that is something that has come to be known as the Bengali Renaissance. Then something I'll call a twist in the tail. Then everything else will follow, but because I'm talking here I thought that I'll end this talk with some speculation and that speculation will involve TIFR and Homibaba Center and I'll tell you a fantastic story with some of you know probably very few of know maybe two three people I can see who know and it's true. Now what if anything is to be done what is to be done is is the name of an article that Lenin wrote during the Bolshevik Revolution and those of us who were young enough to be in Calcutta in the 1960s whatever Lenin wrote had to be read. So we had read it and this is the first time I'm using it for something. Now the other thing is is Joan Robinson a very very famous economist in Cambridge and she said this that anything one can rightly say about India its opposite is also true. So everything I tell you its opposite could also be true. Okay, so what's this picture? So it is a picture taken in about 1870s and this is a picture in Calcutta in a place called College Street and those of you. Is there anybody here from Calcutta? Okay, can you recognize? Barely, right. Okay, so let me orient you. It says Presidency College. Now this man has doesn't know what Presidency College is. So I'll show you. This is Presidency College where I went to study. This is a school called Hair School named after David Hair. This is the Senate Hall of the University of Calcutta. This is the edges of the Sanskrit College. This is what used to be known as the Hindu School and in between is the Sanskrit College School. What is most interesting is not this. You know you see this structure and as you can see that this pond which is called College Square that these buildings are very incongruous with this pond. Or won't you think so? I would think so. That this architecture and this pond doesn't belong. What really doesn't belong is these two characters. Okay, now politically incorrect. Now we are going to be politically incorrect and you can see without my telling you is that there is an impression that is going to be created is that these institutions have nothing to do with these two people. Or if you want to turn it around you say that these institutions are going to be created so that someday they or their children or their grandchildren will enter there. So this is part of the colonial program. So who is this man? His name is Francis Frith. This is his time. He took all these pictures and he managed to take these. You know these are 4221, 4212. These are his plates and he has managed to misname every single thing. Hindu, this Presidency College is actually the University of Calcutta. This is called University of Calcutta. This is Presidency College. This is he calls Presidency College. This is the Sanskrit College. Hindu College is the Sanskrit College and this is the Hindu School. What it is, I suspect that these are very famous pictures, but what it is it's you can see the plan of the imperial design of educating the natives. So what one has to remember is that the beginning of what we call our higher education built not out of a desire from the inside to create a higher education program, but it was built as a program of the colonial masters to run a program. Now it couldn't just be that. It must be much else. But this was essentially the plan and the way I prove it is this. You see the picture that you saw of those two characters have now been moved here. Okay, so they have been moved along one edge. So the photographer is deliberately using these two characters as a prop. Okay, and they're being moved from one side to another to another. So that he wants to ensure that when he sent them back to the Parliament of England, it is understood who it is, where it is and you know what it's likely that would be. So our beginnings were steeped in this colonial background, which is good to remember because I think that it is kind of a hint to many of the incongruities that will hit one, it hits one later. Okay, so let me tell you very quickly. I'll go through this and some of you have heard this talk and apologize. I'll go through these things very quickly. First is Midnight's children. Now, why Midnight's children? You know of this novel by Salman Rashid called Midnight's Children. So this is 19, this is 2017 and Midnight was Midnight of August the 15th, 1947. So what that means is this is the 70th anniversary of Midnight. So what it also means is that anybody who was born on that Midnight this year will no longer be a member of any academic institution in the country. Okay, so this is a changing of God whether we like it or not. The Midnight's children are going to leave the scene and I'm part of it. I'm kind of a middle of it, but I'm part of the Midnight's children if you you know add plus or minus five years and that matters and we will come to why it matters. Then I'll tell you about some other stories. So the first story I love very much. It's called the Leiden University story told me by this man named John Midosh. If he lives long enough, he will win a Nobel Prize for having discovered something called spin glasses. He told me the story and I don't know if the story is right. I tried to find it on the web, but not clear that the entire version is right. But the story is so lovely. I want to tell you. So Leiden was a city state and it was attacked by the Spanish army during the Inquisition. You know about the Inquisition, the Spanish Inquisition. So they attacked Leiden and the citizens of Leiden fought very bravely and held off the army for days and weeks and suffered incredible losses, some to the battle, some to starvation, some some to malnutrition till the William of Orange came to their rescue, defeated the Inquisition army and freed them, liberated them and he said I'll give you two choices for your bravery. You are so brave. Either you will pay no taxes ever, ever. He really meant ever or I build you a university and the citizens of Leiden said build us a university. Now this I think is a very heartwarming story because I don't think there's any place on this planet where if you give the citizens this choice, this would be the outcome. But there was a notion of what university could do around that period of time which has come to be known as the period of enlightenment. I like the story so I just want to tell you is that this story it helped you know it happened somewhere else but during the early days of the Indian Higher Education University story this was in the background this kind of notion was in the background. Now I want to show you this set of names that kids really like. So when I used to come here for the Olympiad program I don't know if I showed this list here before. I'm sure none of the kids are here. So in when the year 2000 came there was a survey done, very complicated survey of the most important 100 people of the previous 1000 years. And I like to show you the top 20 because the top 20 was done by very complicated algorithm. Who are the top 20? So start from the bottom. Don't look at the top. Adam Smith, the economist, Michael Angelo, the painter and sculptor John Locke. Here is Mahatma Gandhi. By the way this is the only person who will show up in the 100 from outside of Europe and Western. This was obviously very western centric. Strangely Hitler just ranks above him. And it is because important people, not good people, not famous people, not richest people, not popular people, but important people. Then Thomas Jefferson, Edison, Pasteur, Freud, Da Vinci and they put it here for science. Galileo Galilei, Copernicus, Einstein, Marx and so on and so on. And to my great disappointment this man came in number two. I couldn't have conceived of anybody exceeding him and nobody did. What happened was they gave this instrument, this machine called printing press number one and Gutenberg got it for that. What is remarkable about this list, if you just go through this, couple of things I want to, because it will come back. First of all you notice how many of these people are scientists. It's a remarkably large number. And the people who explained it said that the last 1000 years actually belonged to science. The most important, remember, 1000 years. So this is not the time of Christ, not of Buddha, nor of Muhammad, none of these people. This is from the previous 1000 years. The other very, very interesting thing that I found extremely interesting, but you don't have to agree. This will be recorded and this will be available. What you can do is you can make your own list of 20 and compare and see where you differ, where you agree and so on. It's Martin Luther. Martin Luther is not Martin Luther King by the way. This is Martin Luther. He is the Protestant Reformation that he came up that high. And this is something to think about and I'll just leave it there. You can chew on this fact. Why did he come only after Newton? You know, I'm just discounting this. This is not a man. This is not a human being. Newton. And then Luther. All right. So now I will show you some pictures and I like to show these pictures because this talk was entirely, you know, the result of wisdom that I have gotten from many of my friends and colleagues during my days in TIFR. And I bookended with Prasam Jike Menon, who first actually got me actually into this program, and Arvind Kumar here and I'm very glad he's in the audience. And these are the two bookends. I deliberately put them in these two corners because between them I think that most of what I would like to tell you I got. By the way, they are not responsible for my opinions. They are responsible for the knowledge they put me in it. Does everybody know who these people are? I'll just go very quickly. Govind Swaroop, T.V. Ramakrishnan, Radha Krishnan, Chitre, Obed Siddiqui, Girjesh Govil, this is Mathai Joseph, Dhani Raghunathan, Raja Ram Nithyananda, Kakotkar, Virendra Singh, Pal Ram and Arvind Kumar. So these are people who have given me through their work and through their version some ideas about what we now call the India's education. And all of this began with a book and this book was given to me by Prasam Menon and there's an article by him in this book and interestingly this book's cover is Nehru and I'll come back to Nehru, repeatedly. Some other people were responsible for it. Inadvertently I wrote an article at the urging of this man. He's an anthropologist. He's a Bombay person from, you know, he studied in Bombay. This is a historian. This is a classicist named Sheldon Pollock whom you might know about the Murti. He's the editor general. He's a classicist, basically a scholar of Sanskrit and the economist Amartya Singh. And what was interesting about it, which both of us felt interesting, is that he wrote an article called Crisis in the Classics and I wrote an article about Crisis in Indian Science and you could just read one for the other. So this was rather odd. Okay, so what do people think about universities? And I give you three quotations. Disraeli, who used to be the chief prime minister of England, said the university should be a place of light, of liberty and of learning. So apart from their literation, this is a rather lofty notion of what university ought to be. Now here is a tongue-in-cheek from an upper-class smart alec person in Max Birbaum. He says, I was a modest, good, humid boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable. But in the end, this is where all knowledge resides and Wikipedia and it tells you in great detail the definition of university. So the university can come in all these three various formats. And all of them are important in how we think of the university. And I'll spend a bit of time with universities. So now let's go very quickly through modern times. And I like this quotation. The past is never dead. It is not even past. Okay, by Faulkner. And so I'll tell you what modern times in my reading is. So I'll start with the West. I'll start with the European Renaissance. Printing press. Then Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Galileo, Copernicus, et cetera, et cetera. Then I put this Protestant definition. And this is very important. And I'll come back. Martin Luther's document. Then of course Newton, Dalton, Faraday, Darwin. Industrial revolution. Then steam engine. And then this absolutely amazing thing happens known as thermodynamics. And the modern age is launched in some sense. Now if you compare this period with what happens in India, Aurangzeb dies 1707 at that point GDP of India is 24% of the world. Now I checked this number many, many times. And the number is 24, folks. It's not 25. It's not 23. Which means there is only one source which says the number is 24 and everybody else is copying it. But roughly a quarter. The quarter of GDP of the entire planet is in India. So you have seen these pictures of Thomas Rowe at the court of Jahangir. Why is he there? 24%. That's why he's there. Then Plessy. Then Bengal famine. This is where I come from. One third of the population die in a country which owns 24% of the GDP. Mutiny of 1857, independence movement begins. And during independence GDP is 3% of the world. That doesn't mean 3 and 24 is a factor of 10 roughly. So it's order-magnitude drop. And we could have an argument as to what that 3% really means. What led to this drop from 24 to 3. Okay. I'm just going back to history of this brief history of time I told you. Now brief history of physics. Now this again I got it from internet. I don't have a separate source. And this number I found very interesting. It lists ideas of physics. And 250 BCE is Archimedes' principle. And the next idea that it lists from at least Europe is 1514 Copernicus. So that's about 2,000 years, 1,700, 1,800 years. There is no idea of physics that is generated from the continent of Europe. However, not true about Arabia. Arabia generated plenty. China did some. India did some and so on. But at least what this says is the ideas don't come every five years on a five-year plan that you know you make progress. 1,000 years, more than 1,000 years go by. But what is interesting is the range. You know then there is Copernicus, then Galileo's feather and coin. And you know this goes and then of course this incredible thing happens. Newton. Then but you see the pace at which the discoveries are going on. I'm not going to go through the discoveries. I stopped at the discovery of the electron at the turn of the 19th century. So this is the pace at which the modern age is beginning. That science, knowledge of science is moving as rapidly as it is. I had to put this in because I think this is one of the most incredible feet of mankind. So all of this happens. India does participate here. Jagdish Chandra Bose with Tesla and Marconi. He does do. He takes part in this discovery. Okay. Now let's come back to politics. 1757 to 64 is when East India Company. You know I go through this history as if people don't know. But I have noticed that frequently younger people don't quite know this. This was drilled into us when we were young. So I can if you put me to sleep I can tell you these numbers. But just it's an interesting idea to go through. 1784 Asiatic Society then Hindu College Presidency College was founded by here and Ram Mohan Rai. Wilson College is the oldest college in Bombay. Madras Presidency College Root Key First College of Engineering Arts and Craft. Then the Mutiny. The year of the Mutiny the three universities are founded in Calcutta Bombay Madras. JJ School also starts in Bombay. The British Crown takes control. Then a watershed event, Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science. The first research institution in the country is founded. By Mahendra Lal Sarkar, a doctor. And Eugene Lafont who is a physics professor is Jesuit priest. A physics professor of Saint Xavier's College. Whose students included Jagdish Chandra Bose. Independence movement begins. Bengal is partitioned. Tata steel. You know these numbers and these events I'm just putting in to suggest something to you. These are not you know very it's not that they are not there without a plot. I'm plotting that you will see it the way I see it. Tata Steel in Bihar, 1909 Hinswaraj is published. And IISC is founded in Bangalore. Again I'm not suggesting they are connected. I'm just saying these are the times. So we have to remember the times. What is interesting and this for this enough evidence exists. I have seen some of it. Is that this is a result between Swami Vivekananda and Jain Tata being on the same boat going to Japan. And Vivekananda says that why don't you build a place for science. And Tata builds it writes to him says Swami Jai built this. No record that he replied but he wrote an editorial saying that these are the temples of modern India. And young people should flock to these places in large numbers. The only reason I'm making a point is that these days you know with here of you know science education somehow as a separate thing from education in all other things. What I'm just trying to say that a monk comes up with the idea that there should be a science institution. Okay so the Nobel Prize, University College of Science, this and PC Ray. So University College of Science is basically the Ditto copy of the University College London. But this is the first I'll come back to it. Then I put this because in middle of all of this this also happens Jali Anvalabhag massacre. Is there anybody who doesn't know what Jali Anvalabhag massacre is? Alright. Then Raman. Miraculous event. Statistical Institute. Mahalana base CSIR labs. Then very rapidly science institutions became very very quickly. TIFR then Institute of Nuclear Physics which is today called Science Institute and Partition Independence. At partition 300 million people at 17 universities. So I'm just going to take you very quickly through a different glass. And this glass I'll call the Bengal Renaissance. And it begins in 1817, 1829. It is due to Raja Ram Mohan Roy. This is a statue in front of Bristol Cathedral. By the way his house is nearly dilapidated in Calcutta. So all of this that I'll tell you here is an article. This is for some Annan's article. You can read it. When this gentleman died, do you know who he is? Anybody who doesn't know? His name is Satya Jitre. He is a film director. He died in 1992 and the next day in times of India. I was in Bombay at the time. Mr. Shyam Benegal was asked what was his opinion. He said well you know it's rather clear. Bengal Renaissance began with Raja Ram Mohan Roy. It just ended yesterday. So it was a rather stark statement. But because you know the starkness of the statement I confirmed with him that he indeed said that. He said that there was a long period and it has ended. So that it has ended. If you believe that it has ended or at least it's in the final dregs are there. One could look at it and one could try and see if that had anything to do with what we call higher education today. So I just did this comparison. And this comparison is where it will bring us back to Martin Luther. Now general knowledge. This is who is this? Raja Ram Mohan Roy. This is Dasagar. I won't ask. This is Galileo. I won't tell you. Find out. This Martin Luther. So what I tried to do a kind of one to one. So the trouble was that there is only one Da Vinci and there is only Dasagar. And it's very difficult to put somebody else. But this man, his name is Erasmus. So the point I'm trying to make is that this is religious reform which is followed by an incredible flowering that happened. Now I'm not suggesting I'm not anti-religious. Please don't report me to the government. All I'm suggesting is that theological control in society, once one is freed, good things happen. And it happened in both cases. Science institutions. Presidency college was founded by Ram Mohan Roy and his friend is a Scotsman and David Hare. And this is a statue which still hangs there. Cultivation of science. But his friend Eugene Lafont. A Jesuit priest. This is Bose Institute, Jagdish Chandra Bose and Margaret Noble, alternatively known as Sister Nivedita. These people were involved. So the story of the colonial experience is not as simple as one would think. And many people point out that none of these people is an Englishman. There's a Scot, there's an Irish and this is a Belgian Jesuit. But three is a small number for statistics. So we won't go there. But nevertheless these were the beginnings of Indian research and science education. What I want to do since this is going to be recorded and presumably PDF will exist, you can read it at your leisure. What I want to say is that I have put in three different quotations from these three different people. And what I'd like you to understand is that there is no until after independence, it will be impossible for you to find any quotation which evokes any sentiment that's evoked here. And this is unlikely to be an accident. This man says that until men learn to respect each other's honest convictions and until they are free from all prejudices, until they are fearless of the consequences of discoveries in the fields of knowledge. Fearless about the consequences of discoveries in the fields of knowledge, they cannot be said to have become civilized men. And he says knowledge comes from that. Similar thing Rajendra Lal Mitra, an Orientalist, he says that let every step of science education be explained by experiments. For science to be learnt should be learnt in the laboratory. But do not attempt to make your institution a school of technical education and industry alerts under the misnomer of practical science. This we will hear again later. And finally I find the most extraordinary statement. Then this is Lafont. He is saying the agency is talking about Sarkar after Sarkar died. He says the agents of the colonial power wanted to transform the Hindus into a number of mechanics requiring forever European supervision. But Sarkar's object was to emancipate in the long run his countrymen from this humiliating bondage. And the notion that education of science leads to emancipation is an idea which was articulated at that time. And I submit to you has never articulated since. This picture sends every physicist to Nirvana. This picture is called the Solvay Congress picture. And everybody knows this picture. If you are a physicist you know this picture, it probably hangs in your office. This is 1927 a place called Solvay where everybody who was anybody gathered and a photograph was taken. I'll just show you a few. The front has an odd number of people, 11, which means there is a center. And the center is this bus. I'm just making it up folks. I'm just thinking that it was not an accident. They said, Haranstein, this is your place. And he sat there. And you can see that he's happy sitting there. Madan Curie. In the back the youngster. This is Heisenberg, Pauli, Schrodinger, Compton, Dirac, Bohr, everybody. I showed this in TIFR. I asked is there anybody who has not seen this picture? Nobody raised his hand. So I said how many of you have seen this picture? Not one hand went up. You have seen it. Very good. Does anybody know who these people are? You have seen it. So you don't count. Can you guess? It's roughly the same time. So these are Dhoti clad people. So you can guess these are Bengalis. This is Jagdish Chandra Bose. This is Meghnath Sahar. This is Chandra Bose, D.M. Bose, who nearly discovered the pion. Just missed it by a glitch. Had a student, a woman named Vibhacha Uddhuri, who later worked in TIFR. This is J.C. Ghosh, the first principal of IIT Kharagpur. The first IIT. And at the same time, not in this picture, in the city, Raman and Krishnan. So there are 29 people here. There are six people here. Who could easily be there? So again, you know, it comes back to give you this weird notion of 25-4%. So this is, you know, 6 out of 29. And I can easily place these people there and take some of them out. This gentleman named Fowler had two very famous Indian students. One is Homi Baba, the other is Subramaniam Chandrasekhar. And Fowler became famous by working on the extension of the Sahinization equation. So these people were there. And where were they? They were here. In this one city, it's a British city. We have to remember it's a British city. And this is where all the colleges are. Presidency College, Medical College, Sanskrit College, University of Calcutta. The picture I showed you. Cultivation is there. St. Xavier's College is there. Roy's residence. The University College of Science. Both institutes next to each other. Vivekananda's home, Thakurbari. It goes home. And very interestingly recently, they fly over at the corner of Vivekananda Road. And there suddenly collapsed. You know. Okay. I won't, I'll just let it go. Okay. So what is, this is Baba just written in 1928. This is where Raman discovers Raman effect. And I don't know if you have read G. Venkatraman's book called Discovery Journey into Light. If you haven't, please read it. Even if you're not a physicist, you have tons of physics. He has a little book. But I would like you to read the big book. You don't have to read everything. Just read about 20 pages around the discovery. And I just want to say that it is an extraordinary account because it comes from Krishnan's diary. Krishnan kept a diary. Krishnan, you know, was Raman's student when the discovery was made. Please, please read it. I'll come back to this. This is rather, if anybody is interested, this is Chandrasekhar's book. This is a book on Chandrasekhar where he says he calls all of this the entire thing a miracle. He says the advancement in physics gave a false picture that making discoveries is easy. Then he says, you know, then he says that but going to England was a shattering experience. This is Chandrasekhar talking. Why is he saying this? You may in your off time mull over it. What is, what does he mean? Now, I just want to, I don't want to go too far. I just want to say a little bit about this man. His name is Ashutosh Mukherjee. Have you heard of this man? Yeah, okay. So he was a jurist and a mathematician and he gave up both to become the vice chancellor of Calcutta University. And what he did was he created the first research university in the country. And there is no evidence that he had gone to America to find the American model. So today if you describe this model of the university, you are, you are told that it's an American model. Nobody tells you it's a Mukherjee model. What he did was he did many things. You know, he started, he decided, remember Indian universities were only conducting examinations. No teaching, no research, nothing, just conducting examination. Calcutta University had colleges from Lahore to Rangoon under its own wing. So he just conducted exams. He changed all this. He, you know, got applied psychology, industrial chemistry, ancient Indian history, anthropology, whatever. Pali, Sanskrit, Bengali, Hindi, all sorts of things. And he was one of the first people to recognize Raman Uchand. He hired a few people. He recruited P.C. Ray. He went to Maharajas and rich people to give them endowments, lectures. He got Ray as the first Pali professor of chemistry. Raman is the first Pali professor of physics when he didn't find a good, good philosopher. He went to Tamil Nadu to get Sarapalli Radhakrishnan. Then he also got Bhandarkar's son Bhandarkar to become the head of history and anthropology. So he built a pan-Indian national university and even got Jewish emigrates to run away from England, from, you know, the looming clouds of Nazism to come to India. So this was all done. So, you know, there are all sorts of things he had done. His classmates included Prahulachandra Ray and Narendra Nath Dutta, who later becomes Swami Vivekananda. And he did lots and lots of different things. I'll forget personal anecdotes. Now, here is something I don't like to say very much. It's there for you to read. There is a book by a man named Robert Anderson who spent a lot of time in TIFR. He's a Canadian. He has written a book on Baba and Sahaja as two persons who tried to build institutions in India in two different ways. And the story he tells is a very sad one. Andre Boyle, one of the great mathematicians of the last century, came to Aligar to run away from Nazi Germany. Max Born went to the Indian Institute of Science to run away from Nazi Germany. There are things written about it. And what it tells you is that these great people, these great scientists did not like one another and went at each other with the vengeance, with vengeance. I mean, they were enemies of each other. And I do not have an understanding except I can tell you that this happened. And this is to great detriment of the country that these towering figures could not get along. And we have, we have, this country has three academies. One is Krishnan's, one is Raman's, one is Haas. And even today we have it because they didn't get along. And this is a period which are greatly stated in Born rather for letters which are available. You can read them. I won't read them. It makes me very unhappy to read them. You can read them. It just says how these people just, just undercut each other. And what we had ended up at independence is something very, very different. And this previous great period where essentially undercut by a tribal warfare within the ranks of the great scientist who could not manage a good government. So we can get into this. One man who wrote wonderfully about this is J.A.B.S. Haldane. He left England, came to India. He hated the periodist policies and he decided he would come to India, lived in Calcutta, died there. He has written a lot of things. And the other thing that has been written by is John Maddox, which some of you will remember, was the very famous editor of the magazine Nature. And he, you know, these were people who expected, based on this miraculous period of India, to burst open in this world of science as, you know, nobody's business and you will just leapfrog everybody. And that didn't happen. Okay. So, so this is the twist in the tale that education serving an empire to education serving a nation are different. And this difference was not managed very well in our country. So I'll go, I'll go fast. I just want to show you couple of pictures and to give you a sense of where we stand today in our education. So these are, you know, I've taken a bunch of people in various combination, Nehru with Tagore, Nehru with Bose. This is Gandhi with Bose, Nehru with Gandhi, Bose with Tagore, all combinations. These two people were without a doubt the two most important people in modern Indian politics. And they did not always get along. I'm imagining that here they're getting along and here they are not. And they have entirely different idea of what India's future should look like. You have all seen this picture. What do you think this is? Anybody know the name? As soon as I tell you the name, you'll say, oh, yeah. Can you see the similarity? It's called the spinning Jenny. This begins the industrial revolution in Manchester. And this is a cotton mill. And you can see that you can see two things. One, this is a formidable opponent for a charkha. It also tells you why the charkha is a symbol. So both are there in this notion. So this remains in the background of Indian education post-independence, particularly in the mind of the only man who survived Indian independence really. Gandhi Day is 30th of January, 1948. It's left to Nehru. And Nehru basically crafts everything that we today know as Indian science policy. One man. And what I'll do is I'm just giving you a story. I think that, you know, I'm just suggesting to you that once I began to read this story, you cannot stop reading it. You want to read more and more and more. I'm just giving you glimpses of sources that I found extraordinary. I hope you do too. And if you read what Nehru writes in jail, when he is in jail, he writes, and he says the future belongs to science and those who make friends with science. 1946 in the British jail. He writes a science policy resolution of 1958, goes to the parliament. Please read it. It's in DST website. Please read it. It's two pages. I can guarantee you that you have never read a better argued document on why a poor country should do the science. It wasn't obvious, but he wanted. He didn't want. He remembered what Indian Industrial Revolution did. And that's what that was the driving force. So these are pictures. You know, this is famous pictures of Nehru at TIFR. These are the three men that we often like to show. What we don't often like to show is this tallest gentleman. He has recently passed away, K. Chandrasekharan, who built the TIFR School of Mathematics. Okay, so I call this the man who would be king. So post-Indian independent science was run by Bhatnagar, Bhabha, Raman, Sarabhai, Mahulana Bis. You won't see a single university represented here. So post-Indian independence is a policy that India's progress must happen through specially created university institutes, which is as far as possible from students. Now, I'm sure nobody said that it has to be as far away from students, but this is in effect the date. And this, I think, is the crux of... I like this series of things. So Bhabha is without a doubt an incredibly, incredibly bright man, had amazingly good understanding of building institutions, was a great scientist. He says, long-range research would appear in general best carried out universities, special institutes attached to the universities. Its development and trend should be entirely unhampered by any thought of immediate utility. And this is exactly what Rajendra Al-Mitra says about 100 years ago. But look what he says afterwards. He talks about building TIFR. He says, creating close ties between teaching and research is the right way to progress. But such a program would need a very widespread vision of our university system in India, where research facilities are inadequate and the staff overburdened with teaching duty. 44. By the time... So he says that it will be very good. TIFR will be very good to the university. By 1960, he has given up. He has indeed given up. And everything that you read of his in 1960, he doesn't think the university is workable. So in universities, people tend to stagnate. In science, stagnation should be avoided on costs. So what has happened by the mid-1960s? Well, remember, this is the time when an extraordinary expansion of research universities is happening in the West, most importantly in the United States. And it is this time that India abandons universities. Literally. Humanities also was abandoned, not much funding because it was not part of the industrial revolution, was not going to be part of emancipation. Whatever money there was, went to institutes, like where people like me worked. So I would like to say to you, this is just more of it, that what is the policy? The policy is a trickle-down policy, that India has a little bit of money, and this money should go where it makes a difference. If you give it to everybody, you will get nowhere. So give it to the institutes, support them as well as you can, and from there it will trickle down. But what doesn't happen, and we can talk about this, is India is a very peculiar society. It's a caste society. And the caste imposes its will on the institutions, not the other way around. And therefore, my judgment is that the institutes, the supported institutes did not think of themselves as part of the overall academic structure, including the colleges and the universities. They were the towers where the Brahmins sat, and everybody bowed. This is at, you know, at my old age, this is what I think has resulted in the peculiar situation that we find ourselves in, that as soon as we get on the airplane, we go to university. Once we are back in this country, we won't step inside the university, and this is true of our students. All right, so there are these documents. You can read that it gets worse and worse and worse, and eventually becomes unreadable. This is magnificent. This is not so bad. This is quite awful, and this is just unreadable. So what has happened is all of this, this bureaucracy is now handed over to bureaucrats written not by visionaries, by committees. Committees have to put in everything to satisfy every lobby, and so a total bureaucratization, de-flowering of the greatness that had happened during a time when we were colonies. So this is a worrisome thing. If you look at this, INSA in 2010 got about 30, 40 of our best scientists and asked them to write a report, and this is the INSA report. And what it says is that our science is in very bad state, and it says everything quite correctly. Although what it doesn't say, what it doesn't say is how intricately connected the activity of research and teaching are, and the whole world knows it, and why is it that we still do not know it? Now the creation of the ISAS is probably a step in the right direction, but there too we won't go all the way. We will say science, but you know you will study science, but you should not know any history, because it will take you away from that part of your brain that will go in learning history or literature or philosophy or political science. So you must do science and engineering. This hangover of the industrial revolution, that having missed the industrial revolution, still is very, very deep in our psyche, and our education people still haven't understood what the rest of the world has known for at least 400, 500 years, that you best thing happens in universities. So these are people in the vision group. You read who these people are, and they are not trivial people. These are the best and brightest of our young people, and I call them young because they are much younger than I am, but they are getting up there in the late 40s, early 50s, and I look at it, I said, well, this is the future of the country, and if this is their judgment, then we old guys should worry. What are we leaving them behind with? Here is more things that I want to say. Nehru says this in Indian Science Congress in 47 that science must think in terms of a few million persons in India. In 2012, Manmohan Singh says in the Centenary of Indian Science Congress, I submit to this August audience that our government has invested as never before in Indian science. For many years, the capacities in our highly scientific and technical infrastructure were stagnant. We built world-class institutions that created islands of excellence, that created new knowledge, but we did not use science and technology in our development processes as much as we should have. By the way, I mean we have kept a division between science and technology, but what it says is that it's an indictment of what we have achieved. You might say, well, Prime Ministers, what do they know? But Prime Ministers don't give speeches lightly. Lots of people help them write something. So what is to be done? So I go back to Lenin's question. What is to be done? So many things happened. Many things happened in between. Other wars happened. Politics changed. Ex-colonies to become client states. Underdeveloped change to calling developing, as if by just changing the name, you change their status. We got into games of names and words and so on. I have my own opinions we can go. So there are two quick things. One is I went to a meeting in Delhi where the minister says that 9% of high school graduates go to college. Next 10 years, the number went 20%. So we will be 1,000 universities. So I couldn't take it anymore. As a physicist, I said that means two universities per week. Then everybody laughs. Next year, I'm out of the committee. But the point I'm making here is that these are not serious statements. This is not understanding what our problems are. These are just random things that people are saying. So here is my Chatur Varna. This is our caste structure of universities. I institute. What I think the main problem is our governance structure is western, but our governance culture is Swadeshi. So we have done this Nehru Gandhi thing. Nehru's modern and Gandhi's Swadeshi was put in the worst combination possible and we are working that out. Low emphasis on humanity because they are not useful somehow. All right. So I'll just keep all of this. So I just have, you know, I decided to make up some morals. You know, can one think of Ahutosh Mukherjee models universities? Excellence is not an enemy of access. This is what you hear all the time. Elitism without exclusion has some virtues. Perfection is an enemy of progress. This we are perfect at. We will, as soon as I tell you something, you will tell me why mine is perfect, is not perfect, which absolves you of doing anything at all. Flexibility is not an enemy or rigor. And again, back. That the service of an empire is not the same as the service of a nation. So, you know, I thought since I'm coming here in HBCSE, I'll just end by saying this. Perhaps this is for you to think about. Supposing, supposing. Because I tried this experiment a long time ago. With longer memory. You may remember what happened with that part. If suppose you wanted to redo ATIFR today, what would it look like? Would it look like what it looks like? If you could do an HBCSE today, what would it look like? Just the way it looks like. So what I, I'm not going to say everything that should be a, you know, discussion. But I thought that what I'll do today, I'm going over my time, is that, you know, what about the university? Is the university such a, is a thing that we will not consider? Why won't we do universities? Why are universities in our country doomed to be bad, unlike universities elsewhere? Would we even think of it? And so I, you know, in the abstract, I promised that I will, you know, talk extensively about, you know, what one might do with a TIFR and the Homibaba Center today if you were there. I'll just say one thing that I had said this here in this room when I first came here. That when I look at as an outsider, and I was a rank outsider. If I look at TIFR as an outsider, and I'll say what part of TIFR will never, ever under any circumstance, not any, I can think of some circumstance, hope those circumstances don't come. What part of TIFR is the most solid part of TIFR that nobody will question is the Homibaba Center? Today somebody was telling me that you don't have, you know, easy access to getting faculty. And it's an extraordinary thing if you think what the needs of the country is. And, you know, I just throw it out to, for you to think, you know, is there a formulation possible of a new system in a new era, in a new millennium where the organizational structure of the entire system is different, that you create a center not vertically but horizontally. And at the center of that horizontal structure in a TIFR system is the Homibaba Center. So I'll end there. Sorry I went over. Thank you very much. Thank you Professor Bhattacharya for a very comprehensive and historical background to this entire educational scenario in the country. We'll now take some questions after which we'll have tea outside, so if there are any questions. It seems to me you're putting the entire thing, all the problems of Indian education system to this basic organizational problem, you know. The fact that universities were neglected and centers. My personal feeling it is only a small part of the problem because there is this, you know, we keep on making these statements that India has islands of excellence and then say the universities are not very good, etc. And I have never found anyone including in your talk also that anybody questioning that are they really islands of excellence. We have been just taken this statement for granted for as long as I have remembered, I have heard this that these are islands and then the other thing is very unremarkable and actually these so-called islands of excellence to my mind are really not islands of excellence. Islands though, you will agree they are islands. Yeah, they are isolated from other, that part is alright. But so no, this connected to my point that it's not that they remain isolated and excellent and the others got neglected and the universities got doomed to whatever state they are right now. There is something basic to the what it is only a what is it called cultural anthropologist or somebody can tell I would not be able to articulate it. But there is something different because even if these things are getting, you know, corrected a little bit Isers, etc. and TFR also has become a university. So these points have been recognized for a long time and some small efforts have been done to take care of them. But I don't think they seem they really don't really address the real cultural problem of the something about it. So, I mean, what was it in Bengal and a sign? Was it just an exception or is something deeper in Indian culture that doesn't let us go to excellence at least as far as science is concerned? Okay, so several questions. See, in an hour, I don't think I could tell you all problems of Indian education. And if you say that there are others, I would not disagree. What I wanted to get across is this mostly higher education. I'm not talking about primary, secondary education problem either. What I'm trying to focus on is something where I can get my head around a conflict between a group of people acting rather differently in two different epochs of time. Now, Islands of Excellence is a relative statement. And this Islands of Excellence by world standards are not excellent as you know very well. The Islands of Excellence, there is an article which will appear in EPW where somebody points out that, you know, Raja Ramnithyananda is very fond of saying it and you must have heard is that the four things that you readily come to mind after three things that readily come to mind after independence is Ramachandran plot, Rajodhuri equation, what's the third one? And they are all done in universities. Is Chandra perhaps? Or did he into a... Yeah, so he moved to IISC after Ramachandran plot and collagen. But these are against statistics of small numbers. What I'm trying to get at is not that this is be all and end all of Indian, you know, education. I'm also not claiming that I know everything everybody has ever said in the past and whether mine is a completely novel idea of where India's education problems start. What I'm suggesting to you, if you ask me what is one central thing missing between the Renaissance and now, I think the missing thing is an absence of a national project. There was independence and the freedom movement had created in some sense a force, an inspiration cause of, you know, that kind has never come back. What has happened is business is usual after independence. So if you look at articles and I even, you know, my generation has seen people like Rajodhuri. If you listen to and read what these people had written, you know, they are not looking after the next fellowship of an academy, the next nod from Delhi. Their ambitions are far, far greater and this notion of an emancipation is a very broad idea. So these great things that happened in a very poor, riot-torn, terribly, terribly devastated country from 24% to 3% is a peculiar combination of not abandoning a structure that's foreign, not internalizing institutions that were built to run an empire and insisting that our governance culture will be sedition. And the basic conflict of these two modes of a structure that's different from the culture is in my mind one of the key difficulties of, you know, this is the first thing that struck me when I came here that my first early years of difficulty rose from the fact that I did not understand that although dean is a dean and director is a director, they operate in different universes than the ones I knew. So this is just one person's view and I'm not suggesting that you buy what I'm saying as the rule but there should be many options and if you look at my abstract, you know, I'm just saying that my, what I'm telling you is that there should not be holy cows, we still have too many holy cows. And, you know, Raman was a great physicist, so was Sahab. That doesn't mean what they did later in life with respect to each other is to be worshipped and glorified. But they didn't, what they did was quite awful. And, you know, in our culture that, you know, Newton was a terrible fellow, right? We all know and the Brits know too. So anyway, I mean, I think I have some passion. I completely agree that this is not a whole story. This is my story as I told you. Hello, sir. I have some questions to ask you because when you just started your lecture, you saw, you just projected some pictures of Presidency College and in early 80s, 100 and etc. So I want to ask you that you were projecting these pictures only to describe the education system of that time according to the Europeans view or otherwise you want to, you know, to show us the pictures. At that time that India's education system go to the eventually low and after many years of glorified... No, no. Then I have completely failed. Okay. So let me see what did I want to say. What I wanted to show you is that if you are a student of architecture, you will recognize immediately those architectures have no parallel in Indian architecture. These architectures are European architecture. In the city of Mumbai, if you go to the Old Prince of Wales Museum, you will see a different kind of architecture which was a mixture of kind of Mughal and European called Indus Arsenic. But these things, oh, it's gone. So the architecture in these pictures, Fritz picture, you just go to internet and just type Francis Fritz, you will get these pictures. So these pictures, you know, the Hindu College, beginning of Hindu College had something to do with the... So you see, there is a huge amount of literature and in five minutes I cannot tell you all this. This takes a lifetime for people to study such things. These photographs, I think in my mind, you know, where in India have you seen anything like this? No, this was British architecture. So every single thing is. So what I'm saying is that, you know, if this were to be in Padua or, you know, I don't know, Cambridge, they will be of their time, of their culture, of their people. Here, you know, there is very good literature about how photography, early photography of 19th century India was a very important political tool by the British East India Company to keep convincing the British government to let them continue to run India. And these were their good deeds. You know, these two people don't look like, even I will agree with political correctness aside, is that they are incongruous with respect to the building. So you can look upon this as two different kind of political purpose. One is that they have no business being there, but someday some offspring might. And the other look up, look at this, in this vast, you know, people, large people, miserable people, we are bringing ideals of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and Shakespeare and all that. So what I'm trying to say here is a little, I'm being a bit quarrelsome. I'm just saying that these beginnings were not a wholesome development of India. India is also a highly, highly caste based system. And if you look at the initial student population of these institutions, they were mostly upper caste people. And so, you know, I mean, British ruled India not by themselves, but by active collaboration of the people who bought into all of this. And my worry is that if you talk to people who live in the northeast, and if you, you know, if they trust you, they will tell you little has changed. So it is in that sense. So I didn't mean, I just meant you to look at it as a matter of irony. In the previous days, I was talking with my roommate and he used to say that the British has done all the things that was appropriate for India to spread the education in the times of early 80s and 90s and etc. But I was telling him that no, they had done nothing. So do you think that if British has done anything in order to spread the modern education in India for the only purpose and for the sake of education and proper education, like establishing universities and etc. Because I know that they had all done it for their own purposes only in order to educate some people to be some clerk and to do their own jobs. I'm sorry, truth lies somewhere in between as usual. I mean it's not that. See, it's a very long answer to your question. My straight answer is please don't make absolutely extreme judgment. I mean it is because of the British we have a railroad. Now you say they did it for a bad reason. But you know if you start wondering about motivation of people for having done good things then good things don't have much value either. So it is certainly not true that the British did nothing good for India. But the point is we don't live history over again. History happens once and we can't say where India would be if the British didn't come. Modern education suddenly came to India because of the British. We were not so extraordinarily, you know, I mean modern in some sense. Why did we miss this 24% to 3% okay? One version of it is that the British exploited us so much that we went for 20% to 3%. Another factor you know like Professor Ardind Kumar was saying that simple minded extrapolations are likely to be wrong. One major part was the United States had joined industrial production in the post-industrial revolution. So they became a huge, huge player which they were not in during Aurangzeb's time. So the answers are not so simple but the answers are still contained key of truth. And what I was trying to get at is one of our difficulties even today. You know I now work at university and I see undergraduates. Undergraduates come to study something which have usually rather little to do with what they want to do. It has a lot to do with the neighbor wants to do, parents want to do, you know, grand uncle wants to do and so on and so forth. So this tells you that this education is not an internalized system. It is still an attempt to say what will give me a job rather than what will give me fulfillment. So nobody is saying that I'll be emancipated by my education. I don't hear the word emancipation even conceived of in the discussion about your career. You know I saw this, I told somebody, I saw this in New York Subways. Somebody said never do anything you don't like because you don't like it, you will be no good at it. In India it will be do something that you will, you are no good at it because it will get you a good job. So I'm saying that to say that this is a culture, then you know we have nothing to say. Okay, then we are doomed to this. I'm saying that perhaps there is a reason for this culture. And this culture is the disjunction between the origin of our modern education system and an internalized cultural evolution. Now the great people during Renaissance, were they not great people? They were. And these events, these great events in history bring up the great people because it's a time of tumult. But my, you know I come back to this question that was Arvind Kumar correctly pointed out. What is the big difference? And I think we have not had a cause in the country since independence. There is no great cause. And perhaps we need causes to rise. I don't know. That's just a great question. Do we need kind of Protestant reformation? Because the way you showed it, I mean the equivalent of that. I mean we probably thought that the freedom movement would be equivalent of that. But I think Protestant reformation went beyond that. In a certain sense it brought in a cultural revolution in which science grew in Europe. Say that one more time. I didn't quite get it. The Protestant revolution. Oh the protest? Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. I think they really, they changed Europe culturally. Absolutely. And the equivalent of that doesn't happen in Indian history. Yeah, so the Brahma Samaj was in some sense, at least if you grow up in Bengal. Now Arun Grover whom you both, you and I know is now the champion of this Brahma Samaj business. He has learnt in Punjab that Brahma Samaj influence went very far to Punjab. Bhatnagar was a Brahma Samaj. I didn't know that. So Brahma Samaj, if you like, is a reform movement. During Ram Mohan Roy's time it was very much like Christianity. Because you know these are very bright people who have been, I mean imagine you are 18 year old and you are running into Newton and you have never known that. You know what is your thinking? You know it has to be a huge shock to your system. That somebody tells you that you know things here do the same way as things up there. It's just one law. You know, must be an extraordinary experience. So these people are trying to come to, I'm imagining, grips with this extraordinary phenomenon. Learning things that they didn't know. Not because they were stupid, but just because they didn't know. So Protestant revolution, I think, was, it seems to me, is the forerunner of Renaissance. That Renaissance needed getting out of the clams of the Vatican. You know, you know what happened to Galileo. I mean here is a man which says, you know, Earth goes around the sun and they put him in jail and nearly lynched him or killed him. Eventually he said, sorry, sorry, I'm wrong and they let him live. So a similar, and I don't want to become politically explosive, I would say that these civilizations which have not had good reform movement need to have them. And it is in that sense, the Protestant revolution was very, very essential because it wasn't until much later, you know, after Italian Renaissance, for example, most of the development in science and technology came out of England, Germany, Netherlands, non-Catholic countries, you know, and the Europeans still, you know, if they are comfortable with you, say that that is still true. I don't know, Fermi was not a, Fermi was not a, not a, yeah. No, I think Protestant revolution was an extremely large event. And we, the, I mean, when, the Brahma Samaj thing, I had a very long conversation with, with Shyam Benegal over his comment about this end-uping of Renaissance. And he points out that, you know, he has thought this through and he thinks that this really is a change, that, that, you know, this man was the last person you could call a Renaissance figure and since him there is none. And, you know, whether, you know, you take it, maybe there is one other who died three years later, but it is rather clear there isn't anybody whom you call a Renaissance figure now. So, I think, yeah, I mean, I'm a great believer of the Protestant Revolution, Protestant affirmation being a major event, major event. Although you remember that Newton also in his Principia had to make sure that the thing happened to Galileo didn't happen to him. So he was very clever and devious, in fact, trying to stay on the right side of the church. But these are, you know, these are things we should chat over and think about and argue and disagree. Any other question? Are there any other questions? Or we will chat over it over tea. Yes. Thank you. That's best. Thank you.