Why this?why now?....an Introduction to my world....

I never thought that someday I would be owning a blog. But my contradicting experiences with Education as an independent entity, education as politics and education as empowerment, have led me today to present myself before you guys and organize my thoughts, so that they can be effectively put into the framework of 'action'.

Like any other student living in one of the cosmopolitan cities of India, I was the regular Indian. Going to college, chilling out with friends, watching movies, pursuing my hobbies and following an educational system that dismissed my existence as a passive object and made me an inactive part of a system of "Banking education" being followed in our country. Not to say that I am something extraordinary right now, but in the words of Paulo Freire, I was a 'receptacle' or a 'depository' just like all other students, which would be filled by a depositor-the teacher, and I no longer consider myself to be that.

Not that I was then completely satisfied with the way things functioned within the framework of higher education , but I never thought that those experiences would matter so much to me. But hell no!..I was wrong! Before I even realized it, these experiences and the anguish, hatred, frustration related to these experiences and more than anything, the realization of my rights being stamped upon robbed me of a good nights sleep. I became restless. I felt as if this whole new person had emerged out of despair and more appropriately put, out of the desperate outcry for 'change' in our educational system, who could not take anymore of the "shit" happening around me.

I rebelled...I fought for my right. In what technically should have been a collective fight by 40 people of the same department for their rights in Education, the fight witnessed only two participants. One of them was me and the other; a dear friend. We went up to our authorities and demanded our rights. But to our frustration, not surprisingly though, this whole system turned out to be nothing but a heap of crabs, pulling on each others' legs and sharing an expertise in playing the 'blame-game'. Our questions were left unanswered; our demands unfulfilled. Helplessness dragged us to our examination halls and compelled us to write a final TYBA examination. I felt like a puppet...a guinea-pig being tortured, harassed and experimented on without any regard for my existence as an end in itself.

There came a point and time in my life, when everything around me had started becoming unbearable. I fell in my own eyes, each time I saw and experienced ‘ignorance’ to be the third-party winner in a battle between the priorities of my fellow colleagues (today’s youth) and their willingness to do something for their rights. All my encounters, all my experiences and all my hatred only surmounted to give birth to the path of life I am now following...and to give birth to a new identity that I am now nurturing.

Hi….I’m Namita Joshi, a student at the University of Leeds, UK, currently pursuing an MA in Education and Democracy. Why I changed my academic path from Psychology to studying something as inter-disciplinary as this course, can only be explained by the restless and sleepless nights of anguish, frustration and guilt. Citizenship education, Democratic participation, Higher Education and student participation, Politics, Good Governance, Pedagogy, Consensus decision-making, “Awareness”, Multi-culturalism, Philosophy and ethics, Meta-physics, Generalism, Reasoning, Science and Rationality are entities that I shall talk, advocate and debate about in this blog and entities which I believe are fantastically intertwined. My efforts shall be directed towards providing relevant, research-based, verified, rational data and links between these entities to create a unanimously agreed upon theory of Welfare. A theory which can lead to an elevated status of India economically and socially if we all join hands and free ourselves from the self-inflicted obstacles standing in the way of a ‘harmonious life’ in India.

India has achieved excellence in the functioning of technical minds….but excellence in the functioning of its citizens as ‘human beings’ is yet to be achieved. I’m making a start…..I hope you guys join me!