Fillers that Don't Fill Anything

 

Fillers that Don’t Fill Anything

You know ... I mean ... er ... um ...

When I was teaching in a private university, I realized that students wanted to express themselves in English fluently, but went about it in the egregiously wrong way ... could not distinguish between speaking fast and speaking fluently.

When one speaks fast, they tend to use filler words to complete their thoughts that they started blurting out, expressing inchoate ideas; fluency, on the other hand, has the idea formed in the mind completely and only then finds expression through the mouth.

I have my own metric–of course, tailor-made for me–for speaking fluently: You do not change horse in mid-stream. OK, I got in a cliché there, but to explain–Open your mouth only after you have created a full sentence in your mind.

I really do not know when, where and how I fixed within myself this mode of organization of thoughts. The idea must have emerged, rightly or wrongly, that organization of thoughts in a language is the mark of one’s fluency in the language. Maybe, I should blame Noam Chomsky.

Perhaps it dawned on me when I was reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. She seemed to write in paragraphs, like one sentence per paragraph, no matter the number of words. It tested my patience and I had to go through the sentence again and again to catch her meaning. If Ayn Rand did this to me, you may well understand my difficulties with all the other luminaries, say, Steinbeck, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Rushdie, Arundhati Roy et al. There could have been other reasons (like their philosophical underpinnings) but I put it down to the typical length of their sentences.

Yet, I did not go as far as Ayn Rand went on this; I limited myself to in the range of no more than 15 to 30 words, give or take a few. Please note I am not comparing myself to literary high priests. This was in the manner of just an example.

During my days of formal class-room teaching, maybe sub-consciously, I put the above word limits on my lecture expositions. This became a matter of habit, not of any conscious restrictions. My students, after about a couple of weeks, realized that there is a price to pay if their concentration was diverted, even if only briefly–they could lose the train of thought: catching, if they would at all, the tiger only by the tail. I also used extensive hand gesticulations (including emulating toddler running around in a big hall, to explain trains and planes tilt towards the inside of the arc of a curve) as the subjects I taught were amenable to visual learning, reasonably mathematical though they were.

 It did have an effect on the pace of my delivery, but quite not discernibly so. I was never behind colleagues who were also teaching their students in the other sections in this multi-section course. After about ten or fifteen lectures, I would draw the students into a discussion of this habit of mine. Invariably they pointed out to this characteristic of my lecture delivery and said that it took time for them to adjust to it. They expected breaks in mid-stream in the delivery and there were none!

No fillers, I mean!

Oops, there was this filler, in this post, in the above sentence!

Over the past few years I have developed the habit of watching American news on YouTube podcasts, so that I myself can judge the bias of the podcaster. Whether I am successful or not in my chosen useless effort, I realize that the presenters are full of these filler words and beat Ayn Rand in posing questions to their guests, in which conjunctions galore. I hate conjunctions.

This grates on my nerves! I lose the continuity of my thought as my mind wanders through the extensive, common place hand gestures and eye-rolling etc. they engage in. These are true fillers, carrying hardly any meaning. Sometimes I believe that this is my deficiency and not the fault of the presenters, as they are into the presentation zeitgeist (possibly underwritten by PowerPoint Presentations) and I am of the old school. Possibly this is taught in our universities under the rubric of Soft skills. Let me tell you, these skills are to be developed by oneself and not taught by others in a rigid class room setting.

When someone is telling a story (a class room lecture ought to bring about this ambience), soft skills do emerge involuntarily. Just listen to yourself as you carry on a conversation with your family members. Your soft skills are there ready for you to invoke them. It need not be taught. And, these filler-words are not in your universe. You are conditioned to use them and if you do not, you do not belong. The zeitgeist has bypassed you, like it did me!

If you wish to get through to your listeners, slow down, do not interrupt yourself by starting out on an inchoate thought, form your thought as completely as you think it needs to be delivered and then, open your mouth. I have not tested this idea for its efficiency, but I am sure I am on solid ground on effectiveness.

You know ... I mean ... er ... um ... – Avoid these as plague.

Raghuram Ekambaram

Americans’ Problem of Pronunciation

Americans’ Problem of Pronunciation

Americans have a problem with English pronunciation. Do not pounce on me; hear me out.

It is all a matter of aspirating consonants p, t, and k. I had severe problems getting Americans NOT to aspirate the consonants in my name - Raghuram Ekambaram. The ‘gh’ in my first name should be aspirated (as written in Sanskrit) and the ‘k’ not. OK, the aspirated ‘k’, despite my pronouncing it always unaspirated, occurred very infrequently, but not so the ‘gh’.

I just gave up and accepted my name as “Ragu”. The problem was it made my name identical to “Ragu”, the spaghetti sauce that came with the wrap line, “That’s Italian!” in TV advertisements! This is how I, a TamBrahm (Tamil Brahmin) from the then Madras, became an Italian!

There was a female graduate student, also a TamBrahm from Pune, whose name became, “YOUsha”, like Utah. Her husband, a white American, must be still be calling her the same. At that time, the North Korean dictator Kim Jon Un was not in currency then. That could have made things better for Usha.   

Why all this now, after returning to India in 1991?

Oh, the context is how the Democrat nominee for the President of the United States (POTUS) is being called on American TV. Aspirating the initial ‘K’; ouch.

It is not impossible, but Kamala’s (கமலா) father is a Jamaican and must have taken to his American friends’ pronunciation. It is also possible, that கமலா just got frustrated trying to correct her friends’ pronunciation (with aspirated ‘K’) and gave up and adopted the pronunciation (just like I did).  

In general, Americans CANNOT pronounce a name (that is not a normal Anglo-Saxon name) the way a native pronounces. They cannot pronounce the name of the one-time president of South Africa – Thabo Mbeki. They would not take the effort to roll their ‘r’s in Barrack Obama. God, do not let letters ‘s’ and ‘r’ come together, as in, ‘Sridhar’; this combination is “weird” (the current cuss word in political speech!) they would say. They would not have aspirated the ‘gh’ in my name even if the sky were to fall. I wonder how Chinese and Japanese proper nouns are mangled by Americans.

I believe I have made the case I mentioned at the start.

Raghuram Ekambaram 

Life Line Structure and Kerala Landslide

 

Wayanad Land Slide and Lifeline Structures

The landslide disaster in Wayanad along the western slopes of the Western Ghats brings one issue of civil structural design – Lifeline Structures.

If a natural disaster strikes an area, agencies entrusted effective disaster response would know what are the available lifelines including mobile phone towers, power lines, and bridges. Why are they called lifelines? For this the readers may wish to take a sharp look at the “rescue” of a person struggling to keep afloat in water.

The rope winding down from the “rescuer’s” waist to the floatation device, the red thing clutched by “struggling swimmer” (I know she doesn’t look either like struggling at all or clutching; maybe she has struggled out!) carries the agency of the lifeline, and is called, you guessed it, lifeline. With this contraption in place, the rescuer knows that the person being saved is not sinking, and her head is above the waterline. This is the lifeline, and the meaning is evident – you do not allow an event to become a full-fledged disaster by being prepared for it.

Did the landslide area have any of these lifelines? I do not want to answer these in stark terms, but it does appear that there was at least one deficient lifeline – a bridge. From an article in Frontline (September 6^th), I learn that “[T]he sole bridge that connected the village to nearby Chooralmala and the rest of the world was destroyed in the landslide...”

Out of my own interest I have read upon lifeline structures, initiated into it by a clause in the Indian Standard IS 875 (Part 3) on wind loads.   It is too technical a matter – so technical that I could not explain it to my post-graduate students at their level of comprehension – that I would stop elaborating further. Wind load calculation is a probabilistic endeavour, and those who compiled the code referred above stopped explaining it beyond what is required for efficient design (though there is an explanation on probability orientation), that is, going into efficient design. Lifeline design should also be treated on the philosophy of having the necessary infrastructure in place to enable maximum rescue efforts under a scenario (plotline, say).

The first priority is to save lives, of humans and cattle. To save lives, you need to communicate to people in the affected area – hence, operating mobile towers with multiple antennae of various connectivity providers. Then, you need dependable power supply and hence transmission line towers. Next comes reaching the people as bad as the situation maybe expected to be (hence probability) and also to give the rescuers as clear a path to disaster location as possible – hence, bridges. Note the plural.

Yes, we can, given the budgetary constraints, and have to assign a low probability to two bridges collapsing simultaneously. We cannot – emphasize, cannot – leave any community in a vulnerable area dependant on a “sole bridge”, like it was done at the landslide location, per the newspaper article (referred above).

The disaster prone areas have been mapped by the national disaster response agency, I am sure. Yet, they had not located the need for a lifeline structure, an extra bridge, for the communities along the ecologically sensitive western face of the Western Ghats slopes. The reason could be that road building ministry did not have the resources (money) for this “luxury” item!

Western Ghats is not the Himalayas, perhaps more prone to earthquakes and landslides. If you are asking for two routes to Gangotri, Yamunothri, Kedarnath, Badrinath etc., I can understand the need for a double look before going for an additional connectivity – the cost would be prohibitive.

Yet, foundation stone has been laid in December 2016 for a minimum 10m wide National Highway with long bridges and tunnels; and a railway line too. I am sure that the planned expansion has been vetted for its environmental (neoclassical economics) and ecological (Sustainable Development Goal) imprints. This is for the future, catering to the expected demand-supply.

No matter how federal a Union government is, its actions will always be tuned to resonate with the requirements of the dominant constituent of the governing coalition. This is par for the natural course of politics and governance, but could not be for natural disasters.

The most effective pathway is for the State Government of Kerala to locate its own resources and not go to the Union Government with a begging bowl in hand. That is the most effective lifeline.

Every swimming pool must have its own lifeguard.

Think national but live local.

Raghuram Ekambaram

 

Yoga Demoted to being a Sport

Yoga does not anymore pave the way to spiritual freedom. It has now been devalued to a sport. I have to make the case. Here I go:

I am not saying this, but one Raja Randhir Singh is reported to have said, if not directly and also not taking a very complicated path – the Buddha's Middle-way. He has so far had a tenure of more than 33 years in the Olympic Council of Asia as a member. So, you know that he has a voice. This is a matter of concern.

He is quoted in an article in The Hindu of September 6, 2024 entitled “Randhir confident of yoga becoming an Asian sport”: “Every country works hard to promote their (sic) sports – China did for wushu, Japan for Karate, we also brought in kabadi in 1990.” Oh, by the way, we have “Rhythmic Gymnastics”, which does involve athleticism!

The above is the justification for making yoga, already approved by the OCA sports committee and the executive board, and “...on the 8^th [of July], I am confident of yoga being recognized as an Asian Games sport.” He adds, per the news item, “yoga has become a global sport”.

So, yoga (note the lower case letter), on the way to becoming an Olympic event, is to have a quantitative measurement system, as do events like diving, gymnastics with accurate, not necessarily precise, metrics. So, the asanas (italics in the original) have to have a system of points, degree of difficulty for each posture (or, whatever it may be called) and the duration of sustaining that posture and on and on ...

Of course, in due course, the west would hijack it and there would be a competitive market in the sports apparel business for, beyond yoga wear, to yoga mats, their bounciness (rather, their stiffness) and even postures may be copyrighted or trademarked (depending on it being an expression of a thought process, or physical body). Of course, it is a short jump to yoga sports medicines, yoga sports doctors...

Forget about mental stability, acuity, looking within oneself  etc. that were seen to be the by-products of yoga; now, it is purely competitive and commercial. And that is a demotion, from the so-called spiritual realm to the truly material.

Buddha, you may as well go and hide yourself!

Raghuram Ekambaram

 

 

Neither English Nor Thamizh is Helpful in Reading the Name of a Street

I have made Srirangam my town of residence in my retired life. This town comes under the municipal corporation of the city of Tiruchirappalli, in the central region of the state of Tamil Nadu (as officially accepted; but I rebel – Thamizh Nadu). The town is anchored by Lord Sriranganathan. There are supposed to be seven circumambulatory pathways, with only four of them within the boundary walls. Beyond that the roads are almost continuous around the temple but features of civilian life abound more. The land value on these corridors must be sky high. Why so, I haven’t a clue.

It is on one of the outer circumambulation streets, I came across street name boards on either side of the street, at the middle of the stretch of a street, about half kilometre long. That in itself is strange – normally, the street names are indicated at the ends of a street. In this case one had to walk half the length of the street before it can be identified – yet, there are stranger things on this road.

The signboard is on the western edge of the road (beyond the unmarked pedestrian pathway; maybe I am demanding too much) that runs North-South.

Let that be. Its ownership/maintenance is prominently displayed (in Thamizh) as the corporation of the city of Tiruchirappalli. The signboard is double arrowed, each pointed towards the opposite of the other, which must confirm what I wrote earlier.

Now, let us see the situation across the street, on the eastern edge of the same North-South street. Pay special attention to the first word of each of the four lines of the signboard naming the street.

The top line in each is in Thamizh. Even an illiterate in Tamizh would notice that the first word carries two letters, whereas it is four letters long, from the same alphabet, in the second photo. Of course, the rest of the lettering is the same in both, we may infer that the two words mean the same thing.

That is கீழெ, means கிழக்கு. கீழெ also means “below”, but in the context we can safely ignore that meaning. Now, looking at the Thamizh markings on both the boards you have figured out that both the name boards are objectively the same.

Now, we come to the English line on the sign boards. You cannot match the first words of the second lines of the two words. “Keela” cannot be found in any Englishà Tamizh or Thamizh à  English dictionary. YOU CANNOT. No tourist can make any sense of the name board if she had only an English à Thamizh dictionary; so sad.

In Tamizh கீழெ means East(ern). Therefore, on both the boards, the English name of the street should be the same – “Chithira Veedhi East”. The change from “thi” to “dhi” differentiates the “th” and the “dhi” sound in Thamizh. On both the boards, the name of the street should sound as close to each other possible “கிழக்கு சித்திரை வீதி” and in English, it should be, “East Chitthirai Veedhi” or “Chitthirai Veedhi East”.

The photo below is on the circumambulatory street but one level closer to the sacred enclosure but exactly on the other side of the temple yards. The Thamizh name is given as மேல உத்திர வீதி, wherein மேல indicates the western side, or “upwards”.

Here again, the Thamizh word that should have been used is மேற்க்கு, instead of மேல. The municipal and/or temple authorities for the sake of making directions meaningful should use not the local lingo but the true conversational forms of the impugned words.

The English name would translate into English as மேல உதிர வீதி, whereas it should have been painted “West Utthira Veedhi” or “Utthira Veedhi West”.

Pointing out the delicate nature of the language my mother tongue, makes me happy. My father did not like Thamizh, just normal for a Brahmin brought up in Mandaiveli in the then Madras. I just wish he had just a bit more respect for the language that is in use in the locality he was born and raised. C’est la vie.

By the way, I learned all of the above on my own, self-congratulations, of course, yet well deserved.

Raghuram Ekambaram

 

 

Why I Hate Multiple Choice Question Papers and the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy

In one sentence I have put two things that I hate. By this, do I mean that the two are related, parallel or orthogonal or in some oblique angle (you do not mention two things in one sentence unless there is a commonality or there are identifiable distinctions between the two). This post is about the commonality, in the main, between Multiple Choice Question Papers (MCP) and Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy (RBT).

Both MCP and RBT have found their way into the assessment of students in a class, though RBT is perhaps a step removed. Yet they come from the same genome. The name – assessing faculty performance.

When a question paper is submitted to the examination cell in a university, faculty members are to assign the RBT level for each question. It so happened that during the COVID 19 pandemic, there were no classroom instructions, and Zoom or Google Class Rooms ran away with the loot.

For the easily perceptible reason – a long answer typed out/written on a paper by a student, then photographed/scanned on the student’s mobile will consume so much time. There was no consideration for this time factor, at least formally.

On the side of the faculty, the additional effort was wider. From end to end, if it was decided that all the questions will be in MCQ format, and there would be no relaxation in assigning an RBT level to each question (though students are not to be aware of this).

The above is to set the context in which MCQs were to be operable. The following takes the second topic I hate, RBT, first. It is very strongly associated with the term, “Learning Outcome”, obviously created by a management guru.

The word “Taxonomy” comes from biology/zoology, meaning something like “Law of Arrangement”.  In 1956, a group of educators felt the need to create a model of comparison of graduates from different universities as regards their potential professional performance. This group was headed by one Benjamin Bloom; hence, Bloom’s Taxonomy

I have a technical paper from the American Society of Civil Engineers authored by three professors teaching a course on concrete design with same syllabus. One must understand that designs in civil engineering are strait-jacketed as the consequences of a failure are bound to be unimaginably high and varied. Just imagine the Three Gorges Dam in China, that has a 600 km long reservoir failing! Therefore, students’ answers to the questions cannot differ very much (you have to arrive at the optimum design – a commercial consideration and not an academic one). But, in assessing the RBT level of each question (identical question papers were given to the three classes), the three academicians did assign different RBT levels o the same questions, varying, if I remember right, two to four. That is, RBT is subjective. The same point would be made from a different perspective later.

One easily notices that the diagrammatic representation is a pyramid, and more importantly the objectives are nouns, like “knowledge”, “comprehension”, “application” ... There is nothing wrong with that. Yet, as the teacher says here, it is better to use the verb as the anchor in the sentence that even native English speakers do not do as much as they should. Therefore the taxonomy of learning has to be changed, wholesale. This change is indicated in the figure below:

“Knowledge” has become “Remember”, “Comprehension” is changed to “Understand”, “Analysis” to “Analyze” and so on; yet, note the position reversal between ”Synthesis” and above it, “Evaluation” in the original taxonomy. In the revised verb oriented taxonomy, “Synthesis” at the level below the crest in the original becomes “Create” at the apex in the revision. This forces “Evaluation” to take on the action-role of “Evaluate”, a down-grade. In general, though nouns are taught in English 101 before verbs, in the RBT, it is verbs that take the pole position.

The figure below shows RBT and the supposedly corresponding verbs.

This is where, when RBT was discussed over two days (simultaneously in more than 20 sections with two people in charge of a room), the level of comprehension – sorry, “understand”ing – of the faculty members in the section that I was in charge of came to light.

To set the stage, the question was to name the agency that is the predecessor of the current agency, NASA. The answer, in my words, is the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), transmuting itself to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. I believe this change enabled the agency to be one with executive power and not merely one of advising, under the Department of Defence perhaps. But, what do I know?

One faculty member had written down the question in which the verb was at the level of “remember”, the lowest. He, following the suggested list of verbs at level III, and used interpret. The altered question, as I recall some six or seven years later, was Interpret NASA. And, I am not joking. What is there to interpret in a proper noun? It is like asking anyone to interpret my name, Raghuram Ekambaram! What I do can, of course, be interpreted but I myself cannot be. It is ever changing. The moment I hit the “Create” button in my blog space, I would be a changed “I”!

One more point that I am posing as a question to the readers. Are double promotions in RBT allowed? There are faculty members, most senior and the next level down who think they can! Remember, the bottom most level is “Remember”. The next higher level is “Understand” and the third level is “Apply”. If a problem demands nothing more than solving a simple equation with only one unknown, can it ever be anything other than “Remember”?

I have another bone to pick with RBT. It does not take into consideration the time taken to answer a question. I showed in that session a problem and told the attendees that if the student “understands” the problem, she would take less than one minute. YES. If a student used the appropriate formula, it may take as much as 15 minutes (because the equation contains trigonometric function at inconvenient places!). The question cared two hoots for the verbs suggested. So, I asked the faculty whether and how they would differentiate the two ways to the answer. It was silence, all around.

The point that I am making is, if the question paper setter has an idea in mind to be transformed into an MCQ and the correct response is also known, is it easy to compile the three wrong answers without inducing ambiguity or obviousness and demoting the RBT level? The answer is a resounding NO.

If there are four possible answers, one may allow one answer to be perceived to be wrong immediately. But, creating the other two possible answers have to give no clue as to their wrongness. Even, if the right answer appears correct, the remaining two statements cannot appear to be wrong without brain work. Then, how would you rank this MCQ on RBT? By the correct answer, by the two brain-twisting yet wrong answers or the obviously wrong answer (if it is a choice)?

RBT is not objective as it cannot be independent of the student’s mental processes, which show up as the time factor. What, the, is the use of RBT? I find none.

Now I come to MCQs. Unless the teacher wants to make it easy for the student, framing the question, including the choices to be given, is not an easy task. One can make an MCQ easy to answer in two ways: one, refer to any of the many books and memorize the short-answer questions and the answers given at the end of a chapter while preparing. There was one such question paper in which out of 13 questions, twelve required at the most one equation (including the 10 mark questions) and included only one unknown. All the questions were given by the question paper setter an RBT level of “Analyze”, tut, tut...

Two, make the wrong answers appear to be correct. The student would then tell herself that she could not spend more than three minutes and 36 seconds for a two-mark question (assuming 100 marks to be answered in 180 minutes). That is, change the metric to include a time component. This realization would fire a newer set of neurons in distinctly different directions and the answer would emerge as it did to Saul on the Road to Damascus. Students’ brains, particularly their synapses, are ever changing. This should be the purpose of teaching in the class. Creating newer pathways for communication between students’ synapses. Perhaps this has already been done, but not in the university I was employed.

Questions demanding calculations or longer explanations (as I did for a test in Transport Economics), the solution lies in burying the substantive part of the question in the woods of unnecessary statements in the question. (The questions were 30 words long.) It is only the well prepared student who would catch the crux and respond appropriately and within the time. The others will be lost in the woods, perhaps forever.

The question paper has to consider the above while making a question as MCQ. This aspect of setting of a question paper for an MCQ was not discussed except in the set of faculty I was interacting with (don’t complete a sentence with a preposition. I felt a numbing pain in my knuckles when I finished my sentence).

It is not my loss, but the students would feel the loss. And I know one instance, the faculty member could not convince some students of his class that their answer is wrong and succumbed to granting the undeserved additional marks. He failed in differentiating between the students to some extent.

What is the obligation of the teacher to the profession? There are two: differentiate students based on the knowledge they have absorbed and be able to use in a given situation. Try one’s level best to reduce the level difference between the students’ comprehension.

With the above, I believe, I have convinced myself that my arguments are water-tight. I am under no obligation to convince others; they can go their own way.

Raghuram Ekambaram

 

 

 

What I understood about Things Others Said

 

The following are a few statements I picked up from books, newspapers, magazines YouTube lectures, etc. I found meanings possibly lying below the surface, not necessarily agreeing or countering the meaning in the context the statements were made. I am avoiding stating the authorship of the statements as that could amount to name-dropping.

‘We should teach by questions and not answers’

This is how one may understand the achievements of a great physicist of the 20^th century – thinking hard on the subject matter and proceeding in his own way; not for him what others had done earlier. I almost agree, with some caveats. One, talking about teaching in a classroom, the questions that would teach have to be melded smoothly yet be distinct with concepts that have been discussed in class. Two, I still believe in the power of the minds that preceded mine. So, to me “thinking hard” means addressing those students, without leaving others behind, who are attentive in class and make them ready to tackle the questions in their tests–go back to Isaac Newton, D’Alembert, Fleming, Amonton Castigliano… Yet, I do not teach to test. What I do is try to make students understand ideas barely outside of the “syllabus” after focusing on the foundational ideas. This does not come out of the part of the statement.

To vouch for myself, over the past nine years and a few months, I spent a significant share of my lecture hours on concepts, fewer on problems, asking questions on why such and such a thing allows you to solve a problem, or can we solve the problem any other way. Perhaps, about a quarter of the students liked my teaching.

‘[A] way of defining simplicity. Perhaps a thing is simple if you can describe it fully in that several different ways without immediately knowing you are describing the same thing’

I use this trick in classes in a number of instances as I teach solid mechanics from first year solid mechanics to PG level. My favorite one – first year mechanics class – is to start off describing the path, over beach sand and water, a lifeguard takes to reach a swimmer struggling in water – more on sand, more in water, or a straight line between the swimmer and the life guard. I ask the students which of the above paths the lifeguard would take, keeping in mind that the critical parameter is the time it takes for the lifeguard to reach the swimmer. The actual path would be determined by the relative speeds of the lifeguard – obviously, more on sand and less in water. This is exactly the path a light ray would take between the two points if the medium of transmission encounters a discontinuity, like between air and glass in a classroom demonstration in high school. The speed of light in glass is less than that in air. I have taught refractive index of glass through a seemingly unrelated physical phenomenon, taught in high school and forgotten by engineering students in an engineering college.

‘[T]he victors would emerge from a conflict inevitably resembling their defeated opponents far more than anyone today is willing to admit or able to imagine’

The above refers, I believe, in a physical fight or in warfare. In the Hindu tale of Mahabharata, after the war, did the Pandavs behave like the defeated Kauravs? I don’t know.

But, what if the disputants are involved in a logical argument? I do not agree with the quoted statement. Of course, the disputants have to start at the same point, and agree at every step. I believe that this is why neither atheists nor theists/deists can ever reach a common destination. Of course, they may, “Agree to disagree”, so unctuous.

‘Until we ourselves are students ready to learn, are we eligible to be teachers?’

I believe in this completely. I take the phrase “ready to learn” to mean “challenge oneself” in the case of the teacher. I have tried to instill this ethos in my colleagues at the university, but with minimal effect. I have seen enough number of Ph.D dissertations that do not indicate that the researcher has learnt anything at all, except getting experience in some statistical software package. Sad.

‘If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t’

This begs the question that, at whatever level of difficulty, we should be able to (human hubris) understand the workings of our brain. What we may do at best is to try to understand the working of the brain incrementally, but with the understanding that if we fail, that really is not a failure.

Raghuram Ekambaram