Looking Inside Through the Window

 

Looking Inside Through the Window

As I have truthfully claimed elsewhere that I am musically deaf, I may not be the right person to comment on what Mr. T. M. Krishna is reported to have said. At the same time, what he did say about who should be able to criticize any tradition – only insiders to the tradition –rubs me the wrong way.

I set (shorthand for refer to) side by side two articles that refer to two separate and distinct discussions in the newspaper I subscribe to in which Mr. T. M. Krishna was a participant. In one, the discussions were about music and in the other, about language imposition through school education.

In music, Mr. Krishna is conveniently and comfortably ensconced inside the room. In the other, though it is added in the short profile offered in the article that he is an author, readers are not privy to the topics on which he authors whatever he does author. Knowing the discussants’ potential bias helps the reader filter his thoughts through that lens.

If combined, the two articles locate Mr. Krishna simultaneously inside one room–music (“It is important for each person to speak about [social] location they exist in”; emphasis in the original)–and definitively outside another–school education and principles of polity.

In one, he is looking outside through the window, and as the heading of this post implies and my frank admission of my ignorance in things music, I will say nothing more exclusively on it.

In the other, I have over the years developed my own sense of how one shall (a moral imperative, though I am nowhere as qualified as Moses to prescribe such things) lean on a number of points leading to fairness in a polity (and I appreciate Mr. Krishna’s stance in some of them that align with my thinking), I do go out on a limb and say that he could not be much more aware of school education, even if his family includes a kid, than I am, as I seriously indulge in retrospection and introspection. Readers may punt on my claim.

Nowhere in the article on school education does Mr. Krishna indicate even ever so briefly whether he has any conflict of interest in the issue, whether he has shifted his position as he became more aware of the issue or similar points that would go a long way towards the readers appreciating him more, or less; I guess that he would have definitely been more appreciated.

Perhaps I am barking on the wrong tree. In the discussion he very well could have cleared such a miasma but the paper may not have had enough space. And, I did not have the patience to read the discussion on the Net, no space constraint (?), or listen to the podcast, time constraint (?).

My bad.

Raghuram Ekambaram