FLIPPED CLASSROOM 2: A Very Brief Sketch of Evolution of the Idea

Can Politics Empathise?

E. M. Forster wrote about the need for ‘tolerance’ and argued that the real force which can help rebuild the world after the World Wars will be not love or forgiveness, but 'tolerance'. Though I read that essay long back during student days, as it was ‘taught’ as part of curricular requirement, it was 'studied' and then abandoned, in a way. But still the argument of the essay kept coming back, as it does now. I didn't grasp quickly the inherent link between empathy and tolerance, but there sure is a reason why Forster showed up. There are many ways the two, tolerance and empathy, complement each other and the presence of the former can surely help build the other. Empathy is the capacity to know and experience how others feel, putting yourself in another's position. But is there something like political empathy? Why is it not there, generally speaking? I would like to explain political empathy as the capacity of one politica...

On Foregrounding the Backdrops

On Foregrounding the Backdrops Much of my liking for large pictures has lot to do with the backdrops and the 'others' in the frames. By others I mean the also-rans, in a way! But this is more about the past when pictures were not so common, when not everything could be shot and framed, as we do now. Magazines with photos were a premium then and colour pics even harder to come by. Rather than the ones who were the focus, meant to be the focus, my eyes would involuntarily wander off to the rest of the things and people who have been caught by the camera. It is their looks, expressions, postures, feels, appearance, that my senses will work on. The man in the middle, or men, those on whom the story is supposed to zero in, will fade out and the backdrop will zoom in. Imagination tracking those to their illogical conclusions constituted my act of reading the pictures. It was such a delight as it helped one keep the trivial off and enjoy the core of the margins. When o...

NAAC Accreditation and Quality Shift in HEIs

Recently, in a get-together of Principals, a colleague of mine stated loudly that NAAC accreditation doesn’t really help improve quality of practices in a college. For reasons known to him best, he also said that I may not agree with what he said. Even before this colleague stated thus the thought has been around. It has become common place to run into fellow academicians who ask the what-has-accreditation-got-to- do-with-quality question. If one happens to be part of the college level Higher Education leadership, the question seems to make a lot of sense. This is so because during such leadership encounters, more often than not, one is reminded of umpteen instances of disconnect between the practices of many Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and the NAAC-scores. The performance bubble which was fully blown up to scale with the accreditation criteria shrinks back to the facts of the non-accredited past reality. In other words, the affairs at the HEIs drop back to the...

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