Today, we mark Vasant Panchami. Vasant is spring. Although we are in the cold days of January, this day is celebrated in the hope of the arrival of spring 40 days later. We pay homage to Goddess Saraswati, that fount of knowledge and learning. She flows from the locks of Brahma, draped in yellow.

That yellow.
Golden yellow of the morning sun
Amber yellow, that pure chroma, that nostalgia of headlights of old cars
Safety yellow of our school bus
Imperial yellow of Gustav Klimt and the fifth emperor of the Ming dynasty
Moccasin yellow of the worn out leather shoes
Saffron yellow of the bounty of mountains of Kashmir
Mustard yellow of the Eucalyptus lined fields of Northern India
Jasmine yellow, the colour of that fragrance of childhood
Kesar yellow of the Mangoes of Raga that trace direct lineage to heaven
Sunset yellow of the momentarily dying sun
Sunglow yellow of the Sal trees in forests, when sunlight breaches canopies.
And
Northstar yellow
The colour of the days of our lives
Drenched in Northstar yellow
I dream of all colours.

10 years of Northstar
A decade of discovering my Svabhava
A century of subjective time, of collective lives
A millennium of despair and exaltation and rapture and damnation and salvation.

It is not uncommon to see schools use a test as a filter for admissions. A test or an interview is used to decide who gets in and who stays out. At Northstar, we see it differently. For us, the admission process isn't a gate, it is a bridge. For early childhood (preschool and early primary grades) we have designed a unique, multi-modal process that we call Bridging Interpretation (BI).

Preamble

To begin an interpretation process, we must establish some first principles and ‘givens’ - things that we believe are foundational to any outcome of the interpretive process. Principles that we keep in consideration are as follows:

1. Quality of life experienced during infancy and early childhood has a significant effect on subsequent development
2. Serious medical, biological, and environmental problems demand swift attention and remediation
3. Early identification of children whose developmental trajectory is delayed or atypical is essential in order to institute timely action to correct or attenuate problems. 
4. It is possible to make a distinction between children whose development is uneventful and children who are facing serious and persistent developmental challenges.

These four principles form the basis of assessment, evaluation and eventual interpretation of the child’s developmental trajectory. 

Our assessment is divided into three parts: 

1. Interpretation of Developmental Indicators, 
2. Interpretation of Social-Emotional Learning
3. Personal interaction with senior educators

Process

We believe that any diagnostic process that we adopt needs to be a scientific, research-backed approach. We also believe that early and accurate identification of infants and young children who have developmental delays or disorders is key to the timely delivery of early intervention services. Our goal is to establish a comprehensive, first-level interpretation program that can be further extended in a medical, professional setting, if the need be. 

We have learnt from our close classroom observations, and also substantiated by research, that:

• Development in most children proceeds at a predictable rate and in a predictable fashion. Most children learn to roll over before they crawl and pull to stand before they walk; however, within such developmental sequences, extensive variations across children can occur (e.g., some children never learn to crawl but do learn to walk without problem)
• If a medical problem occurs when a child is 9 months old, then the condition may have a brief or a lasting effect on the child’s subsequent development.
• The Nature of physiological or environmental conditions cannot be predicted over time. One cannot assume that because a child’s developmental trajectory is on target at 9 months, it will remain on target as the child ages. Similarly, one cannot assume that an infant developing poorly at 4 months will continue to develop poorly over time. 

We implement our interpretation process for kids who are planning to join our early childhood programs, from Play Stage all the way to Grade 1. In the interpretation process, we rely heavily on the involvement of parents. Parents know what their children can do. Honest and reliable information from parents forms the key source for our interpretation. We understand that an assessment that takes place outside the home in a relatively short period of time may not yield accurate results on its own because the child’s full range of abilities have not been assessed due to time constraints or the child being in an unfamiliar location. Given this, it is all the more important for parents to provide accurate information to the interpretation team. 

The screening assesses a child's development across five key developmental areas:  

• Communication
  • Example: How the child babbles, talks, and understands language. 
• Gross Motor
  • Example: Child's large muscle movements, such as running, jumping, and walking up/downstairs. 
• Fine Motor
  • Example: Child's hand and finger small muscle coordination, such as picking up objects or drawing. 
• Problem Solving
  • Example: How the child plays with toys and solves simple problems. 
• Personal-Social
  • Example: The child's social skills and independence, such as eating or getting dressed.  

These results help us to identify a child's strengths and potential areas of concern, ensuring that if a child needs a different kind of support, we recognize it immediately. An additional set of questions about the child’s overall health and development are also included to ascertain healthy development of hearing, vision, etc. 

In addition to interpretation of the development areas mentioned above, we have designed a process to interpret the child’s social and emotional developmental trajectory. We believe that a child’s ability to regulate their emotions, interact with others, and develop autonomy is just as important as their ability to solve maths problems. We look at:

• Autonomy
• Self-Regulation
• Interaction
• Affect
• Adaptation

Early identification of social-emotional challenges isn't about labelling a child. It’s about identifying behaviours of concern during their most critical years so we can support the parents in providing a supportive and nurturing environment.

Finally, interacting with our senior educators gives insights that cannot be obtained through structure questions or activities. This is the time to understand the subtleties of a child's nature. 

Conclusion

Our interpretation team evaluates all the areas based on the child's demonstration and responses to probing questions or activities, and also on parent testimony. Based on all data, we are able to provide a comprehensive interpretation that the parent can use to further support the child. Our Bridging Interpretation is so well-designed and rigorous that it forms an important tool for paediatricians, psychologists and counsellors. 

We live in an era where knowing is easy, but being is hard. By focusing on the social and emotional health of a child from day one, we aren't just preparing them for school, we are preparing them for life. We aren't just looking at where a child is today. We are looking at the person they are becoming.

We mark this day each year. The Day of the Teachers. Twice a year. Once on Guru Purnima and once again on S. Radhakrishnan's birth anniversary. We 'pay' respects to teachers on the day and then duly disregard them, put them in the their place of the barely respected lower rung of our social and consequently economic ladder. But this barely affects teachers. The have a bent of mind which does not align with societal norms. A true teacher is a potential vagabond, a wanderer, a dissenter, someone who rattles and renegades.

S. Radhakrishans himself said, "Again and again... when traditionally accepted beliefs become inadequate, nay false, on account of changed times, and the age grows out of patience with them, the insight of a new teacher, a Buddha or a Mahāvira, a Vyāsa or a Śaṁkara supervenes.... when at the summons of the spirit's breath, blowing where it listeth and coming whence no one knows, the soul of man makes a fresh start and goes forth on a new venture.."

Chesterton would say that every remedy is a desperate remedy, every cure is a miraculous cure. In the same vein every walk is a pilgrimage and every line a poetry and every utterance a song. So I would think that every teacher is a potential Buddha and Mahāvira. Only if that potential is accepted, not the actual realisation, only the possibility, then we might have a chance, a very small one, to leave the world better than we found it.

A room in my school is named "The Sunrise Hymn". Here is a poem for that and for teachers.

A hymn to the sun
A hymn to the rising
To the birds who sing
Upon the east-rising
To the leaves of the Saman
Waking up, uprising.

A hymn of congregation
A hymn of reflection
A hymn of contemplation
A hymn of meditation
A hymn of insurrection.

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), the German American philosopher of the twentieth century, has quietly, almost imperceptibly influenced my thinking on education. Many years ago I came across the following line which I have thought about deeply and frequently, always failing to explain it to myself and others, while also feeling moved by its immanent truth.

"Education is not just a matter of growing up, it is a matter of growing up in the world. Therefore, teachers and educators should represent the world."

I found the emphasis on "in the world" both obvious and mysterious. How else and where else do kids grow up? I will try to explore this more fully. This line comes from "The Crisis in Education" (1954). Arendt begins by a forceful axiom:

"The essence of education is natality, the fact that human beings are born into the world."

To be clear, natality here does not mean the birthrate of a population. She is referring to the all too obvious fact of being born. The emphasis on "into the world" will come later. But the primordial fact of being born is itself the beginning of anything at all, that includes education. The whole enterprise of education rests on the premise that a new generation is arriving, and that new generation will have to be protected and made ready for the world that is coming into their hands.

"He who seriously wants to create a new political order through education, that is, neither through force and constraint nor through persuasion, must draw the dreadful Platonic conclusion: the banishment of all older people from the state that is to be founded.
For the phrase “New World” gains its meaning from the Old World."

A new world becomes new only when something is or is made old. This making of something old is oxymoronic, similar to creating future histories. The Platonic idea of banishing all older people for the new state does sound dreadful, indeed. Who else is going to gift the world to the new arrivals? And in the process of this assignation, the old generation is made old. It becomes old in the process of handing over, not unlike the wasp who dies in the ficus tree fruit without ever seeing the world outside.

"...nowhere else have the most modern theories in the realm of pedagogy been so uncritically and slavishly accepted. Thus, the crisis in American education, on the one hand, announces the bankruptcy of progressive education and, on the other, presents a problem of immense difficulty because it has arisen under the conditions and in response to the demands of a mass society."

All too frequently have the institutions of education, sometimes willingly and sometimes by policy, been subjected to the glimmer and the conceit of the "new" - teaching practices, technological tools, et al. The current AI hysteria is perhaps the apogee of institutional subjugation. The total myopia around new educational practices, sometimes fuelled by latest neuroimaging techniques and sometimes by plain old scientism, is novel only at first.

While it is enticing to embrace progressive for forceful naturality and obvious sensibility, one would do well to remember Theodore Brameld's words: "Progressivism is strong in scientific method: weak in concerns for the concrete and comprehensive outcome of that method. Strong in teaching as how to think, weak in teaching as what to think for. Strong in encouraging active intelligence; weak in estimating and counteracting those forces and restrictions as block its effective operation. Strong in encouraging individual self-expression and individual action; weak in integrating these successfully, powerfully with group self-expression and group action. String in tolerance towards varying beliefs; weak in conviction to needed positive beliefs...Strong in believing that present and important and real; weak in believing that the future is equally important and real. Strong in delineating the complexities and pluralities of experience; weak in fusing these into comprehensive, appealing, purposeful designs. In short progressivism is strong in all the ways liberalism is strong; weak in all ways liberalism is weak."

"Under the influence of modern psychology and the tenets of pragmatism, pedagogy has developed into a science of teaching in general in such a way as to be wholly emancipated from the actual material to be taught."

While I have learnt a lot from John Dewey, William Heard Kilpatrick, and William James and other pragmatists, the declining value of actual domain knowledge in a teacher's toolbox is a trend I would stay guarded against. The extreme example of the detachment of pedagogical knowledge and domain knowledge is seen in approaches like constructivism (particularly the extreme variant of it, which emphasises on most work being done by students under minimal guidance and intervention).

Normally the child is first introduced to the world in school. Now school is by no means the world and must not pretend to be; it is rather the institution that we interpose between the private domain of home and the world in order to make the transition from the family to the world possible at all.The responsibility for the development of the child turns in a certain sense against the world: the child requires special protection and care so that nothing destructive may happen to him from the world. But the world, too, needs protection to keep it from being overrun and destroyed by the onslaught of the new that bursts upon it with each new generation.

I could not have found a better formulation of what I believe a school or any educational institution must be. How often have we heard that schools are not representing the "real" world and the militant calls for introducing real world topics like financial literacy and such. It would be hard to quantify how much I detest this line of thinking. Schools are an abstraction of the world, there is no other way to introduce the world to a child. The school is perhaps the most important institution of the society because of the fact that it is here that the child first encounters the world that is not immediate to her. The zone of knowledge spreads out from the core of immediate personal and familial awareness to local and national communities, to places further away and eventually to the world of ideas of past and present. School is this liminal "in-between" space, wedged between the personal domain (consisting of family and immediate neighbourhood) and the limitless outer world. This realm of between is crushed daily by the forces on the outsides of either side - the family on one side and the professional, brutal world of the real on the side. This realm, hence, must become the refuge of protection from both. A place where the new generation first encounters the real world in a gentle, partially digested way and also re-evaluates the private domain that she has come from. The school becomes a cell wall, permeable but selectively. The wall allows certain beneficial elements of the world to enter, but not without changing them, morphing them in to something that makes the new generation want to belong to that wondrous but mechanical, and beautiful but brutal world.
One cannot ascribe all that is good to the new generation only. This new generation is full of possibilities, including that of the destructing the world that exists. So this realm of between is not only protect the new generation, it must also protect the world from it.

It seems that the world we live in is increasingly being reconfigured and rearranged to create a sense of urgency and speed. Institutions like Raga Svara are hard to place on the spectrum of hospitality. Hospitality (as a luxury hotel) is indeed a part of our identity and function. However, we are much more than that. It is the combination of hospitality, cuisine, Ayurveda, Yoga, our design approach and one particular thing which is hard to define. That thing is "a particular approach or bent of mind" that one adopts during their stay at Raga. This approach must be one of intention, questioning and will for change.

I would like to turn to Kabir (perhaps the most famous of all saints of the Bhakti movement in India). Like Henri Bergson, Kabir (500 years before Bergson) emphasised on public discourse and philosophy in simple language, out of academia and into the city bazaar.
I have chosen two dohas in particular because they contain the word "Raga" used in two different contexts.

Raga Raam ko roop hai, aur Raam raga ke maanhi
Sambhaar ke suna karo, aur dikhne mein kachhu naahin.

Melody is the form of Raam
And Raam resides in melody
Listen with great attention
And there is nothing for the sight.

In this instance, raga means a melody. When Kabir mention Raam, he is referring to the essence of Raam, which is the sound (in this case). And sound is meditation. Raam, the word, is used as a mantra or chant to focus the mind, for Dharana (one-pointed focus).

Raga, in different contexts, also means to colour, to dye, to tint.

Jaagan hi mein sovna, sovan hi mein raga
Ek to ban mein ghar kare, doojo ghar mein rahe beraag

Sleep within walking
Attachment within sleep
One makes a home in the forest
Another stays at home and is detached.

In this couplet, the word "raga" means attachment. Raga is one of the kleshas (affliction or cause of suffering). This comes from Yoga philosophy (as mentioned in Patajali's Yoga Sutras). In characteristic Kabir style, he compares two extremes. These extremes are not to be looked as a duality, but rather this duality is the path to ultimate unity.

Coming back to the idea of a retreat, as Kabir says, one can find peace (through detachment) either in the forest or even in one's own home. So Raga Svara is an in-between space. It is neither a forest (a place for hermits) neither one's own home. Perhaps, one can be truly oneself, absolutely authentic, in an in-between space.

tadā draṣṭuḥ svarūpe-avasthānam
Then the seer abides in its own character.

Yet another class graduates from Northstar and yet another occasion to feel excited about the new lives they will begin and, simultaneously, gathering the memories they leave behind. With a smile on our faces when they leave, the next day and forever, we go around with a small pail, sifting through remnants of love and loss and missed conversations and heated arguments, and a thousand things they did not tell us, and we did not hear.

Look up in the dark sky, in your moments of darkness, up the horizon towards due north. Whichever latitude (in the Northern Hemisphere) you are in, look that many degrees up. There you will find a star, unmoving, always present through the seasons. That is the North Star. That is us.

I will try to address what I have been observing and experiencing in the past few years. Since the complete domination over attention and will was established by the techno-hegemony of social media and its ilk, the act of conversation has either vanished or has taken on a sinister shape of constant stimulation and provocation.

I am primarily referring to the pedagogic act of conversation, or teaching. A constant need has emerged for 'engagement' in class, through activities, and make-believe scenarios, and movement, and song, and dance, and a hundred other ways to do anything but engage in a dialectic of ideas. Yes, there is a need for 'activities', but anything that is done as an escape for the harder (and richer) experience eventually turns in to a habit of lethargy. While activities and movement suggest energy and vitality, they can be a garb, a patina - so thin that a few minutes of silence breaks the illusion of learning.

Before the invasion of social media, television played a similar role and began the disease that I now talk about.
Pierre Bourdieu in his book “On Television” says:

In a world ruled by the fear of being boring and anxiety about being amusing at all costs, politics is bound to be unappealing, better kept out of prime time as much as possible. So, insofar as it does have to be addressed, this not very exciting and even depressing spectacle, which is so difficult to deal with, has to be made interesting. .....there is a tendency to shunt aside serious commentators and investigative reporters in favor of the talk show host.

I propose replacing the word “politics” with “teaching” and “prime time” with “classroom” in the above quotation in our attempt to examine the state of teaching.
One must give special attention to the word spectacle. This singular tendency to look for and seek out spectacle in everything that one encounters in one's waking life (perhaps even in dreams) is the malaise of our times which has, without any surprise, infected the classroom and the school as well. Perhaps with even more potency to cause harm than any other human pursuit, for what can be more dangerous than to seek spectacle in the classroom. Every act of pedagogic intent has to be tuned to 11, every word has to be dramatised, every image has to be a moving image, saturated beyond the visual range of perception. A teacher must dance, figuratively, to hold the attention of students.

What must be a solemn act, made in earnest by the teacher, that of the pedagogic intent, must become a polemic. Model United Nations, meant, I hope, to build the ability to listen, and empathise, and negotiate, are a cacophony of unthought, unfelt barrage of shouts over one another - the winner being the one who shouts the loudest. That, of course, counts for entertainment.

I am jaded enough to realise that there is no going back. I will be made to dance, just like all teachers do. But I will find my groove - slow ambient, downtempo, a jazz ballad.

And here is one stanza from my poem “Consummate Fangs”:

In the consummate fangs
Of the fiddle device
Everything is a spectacle
A performance, a caprice
His voyeuristic instincts
Blindingly perverse
Not unlike my doggerel verse.

M S Valiathan wrote a great document titled “Towards Ayurvedic Biology: A Decadal Vision Document - 2006”. Valiathan is one of those extremely few thinkers who can straddle between different epistemic categories, in his case between modern biology/medical science and Ayurveda. We live in a dogmatic era of militant scientism, which pervades all scientific (even non-scientific) discourse. Valiathan was a cardiac surgeon, and the president of Indian National Science Academy. He also served as faculty at Georgetown University, PGIMER and IIT Madras.

I was surprised to find his trilogy on the Three Greats of Ayurveda: Caraka, Vagbhata and Sushruta. Unfortunately, since the publication of the decadal document, not much seems to have happened in terms of the methodological and ontological basis of Ayurveda. Epistemic shame is put on traditional forms of knowledge, in all fields, whether it is medicine, history, mathematics, sciences, etc. The “scientific” method usurps other forms of experience and investigation. I recommend Hayek's writing on scientism.

Read also this passage from Sabira Zaidi:

Scientism, I must point out at the outset, is not to be confused with the spirit or temper of science, which is a most valuable asset of man. Scientism is rather an aberration in the sense of being a patently unscientific attempt to apply wholesale and uncritically the methodology and conceptual models of physical sciences to the study of human existence and experience. It holds the mistaken belief that all phenomena must ultimately be expressed in 'physical language', studies empirically, and presented quantitatively - a thing which cannot be put in the categorical test tube is suspect. In other words, it postulates that higher and more complex entities, can and should be explained in their lower, baser, or simpler elements, and the latter, being more tangible, are also more real. This may be described as the reductive fallacy.

Valiathan once wrote:

At this time there is no common ground where physicists, chemists, immunologists and molecular biologists can interact with Ayurvedic physicians. Ayurveda is not only the mother of medicine but also of all life sciences in India. In spite of it, science has been completely divorced from Ayurveda... But these are the interdisciplinary areas where advances will take place.

Earlier in another article, he had written:

"To ignore the testimony of thousands of patients over many decades is reminiscent of the derisive attitude of Edward Jenner's contemporaries in Gloucestershire who despised the claim of milkmaids that cow pox gave them protection from small pox! When Jenner wrote to his mentor John Hunter on the observed facts and the arguments against it, Hunter gave his reply, "Why think? Why not experiment?". That applies to Ayurveda whose time to experiment has arrived.

Returning to the document, here are some key points that one can do well to think about:

...the soul of Ayurveda, suppressed for hundreds of years, found expression after India gained freedom.
....epidemiological transition in the developed world led to the realization that the elimination of infectious diseases by antibiotics was hindered by the development of bacterial resistance and more importantly, non-communicable diseases such as atherosclerosis, cancer and mental disorders were multifactorial in origin and not amenable to “one antibiotic – one microbe” approach."

A hymn to be chanted during the treatment of jaundice follows:
Let them (both) go up toward the sun, thy heartburn and yellowness;
with the colour of the red bull, with that we enclose thee
With red colours we enclose thee, in order to lengthen life;
that this man may be free from complaints, also may become not yellow.
They that have the red one for divinity, and the kine that are red –
form after form, vigour after vigour, with them we enclose thee
‘In the parrots, in the ropanâkâs, we put thy illness;
likewise in the haridravas we deposit thy yellowness.

At least the ancients knew that poetry can heal (and also wound).

He (Buddha) was venerated as the supreme physician by Vagbhata because he could remove the sorrow (dukha) originating from birth, senility, and disease.

"Caraka’s House for Treatment (based on Caraka’s description and the design of houses in the Kusana period when Caraka lived: the house had rooms for patients, physicians, attendants, medications, procedures, musicians, story tellers and friends. It was located in serene surroundings."

This, more than most other things, demonstrates the truly integrated approach to getting well. It is hard to imagine, in a modern hospital, a room for musicians and storytellers and friends.

In the Ayurvedic view, countless causes exist within the body and outside, but they are innocuous so long as they remain in equilibrium with the body constituents. They cause disease only when the equilibrium is breached by the individual’s imprudent use of his sensory and motor organs. As a corollary, the Ayurvedic management of diseases laid more stress on the restoration of equilibrium by a variety of measures, and less on the elimination of a cause.

Here is the full document.

Let us put aside the questionable clinical and functional gains of multiple therapists. I simply want to focus on one thing - attention. In the most bodily, corporeal function of relaxation, one desires overabundance, excess. Four hands or six hands to forget the sensation of hands altogether. To be drowned in the overload. To be saved from giving attention to one. This is antithetical to Raga philosophy. It is a reversal of attentive relaxation.

It stems from the deep-seated understanding of what hospitality means. A subversion where the consumer or hegemon of service desires such gluttony of sensation that he forgets to pay the only thing he truly possesses, attention.

At Raga, we are all equals, the ones on this side of the threshold and those who enter our home as guests. What is the aesthetic at Raga? Aesthetic in design, in experience and relationship? It is a combination of ease and asceticism; of austerity, restraint, reserve, and quietude.

I can think of no better phrase than by Derrida, who said, “An act of hospitality can only be poetic.” It is difficult for Raga Nivasis (our guests) to have this new/different perspective on hospitality. We do not wish to be mere service providers as subservient hosts. The guest must partake in the ritual of learning to receive and give as a student. This is a new relationship.

These activities happen daily at Northstar, still they surprise me with the absolute joy and wonder that kids experience during such activities. Some adults wonder what happens in school at Play Stage (2 years and above). I can only say what happens at Northstar. Still, I find it hard to truly make anyone feel what play means at this age (or any).

Simple acts of aimless play are children's right. I have seen how constrained kids are in their play within modern societies - social media addiction, risk-averse parents and society, lack of play spaces, disconnect from outdoor spaces and natural environment, etc.

Playing with objects and materials is one of the first things kids innately do, which then leads to more complex forms of play such as socio-dramatic play, pretend play, and formal games with rules.

Playing with objects is primary. Aimless, open, free.

I think about Chesterton's question, “How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?”

My recent photo exhibit made me think about and revisit some ideas that I have about images and text. Roland Barthes had much to say about text and image. I have been thinking about text as technology and photograph as a medium, alchemical almost, for imagination. The photograph, or the image, presents itself non-linearly unlike the text, which is sequential and cumulative. While both these mediums differ, sometimes they are used together. In that case, the structure of the photograph does not remain an isolated structure; it communicates with text. In school and education, text takes precedence over everything else. It blots out all other modes of reception and processing. Another question that arises concerns about the primacy of substantiation. Does the text substantiate the photo, or is it the other way around? In our learning materials, the photo is always a second class citizen that needs substantiation by text. In many cases that is warranted. But we must be open to image centred exploration as well, where text adds context to the image.

Barthes says, "these two structures are co-operative but, since their units are heterogeneous, necessarily remain separate from one another." Text is made of smaller units such as paragraphs, sentences, words, and letters. The corresponding elements in an image would be lines, surfaces, colours, textures, and shades. In some instance, such as the Rebus format, words and images are awkwardly fused in to a single line of reading.

There is a reduction in fidelity from the object to its image representation, such as in proportion, perspective, colour, etc. But this reduction is never a transformation in symbolic form, such as it is for textual representation. A text is a code-symbol system of representation, while an image is a high fidelity analogue (even if there is an artistic flourish of post-processing) of the reality.

Barthes further says, "All 'imitative' arts - drawings, paintings, cinema, theatre - comprise two messages: a denoted message, which is the analogon itself, and a connoted message, which is the manner in which the society to a certain extent communicates what it thinks of it."

Some photographs (even styles or genres of photography) are mechanical analogues of reality. The first order message, a near perfect representation of reality, dominates a viewer's perception, such as press photographs. Whereas some images leave room for, or even encourage, second-order message. This involves active participation of the viewer to draw out a personal and shared meaning from the image.

Marshall McLuhan once said that “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium. The content of print is writing, which is another medium itself. The content of writing is speech, which is yet another medium. All mediums exercise an epistemic framework on the 'reader'. We must be aware of the medium and what it does to our understanding of the phenomenon or concept it tries to present to us. The content of the photograph is the act of seeing, which is the most fundamental act we perform for engaging with the world.
As a photographer, my intent is to move toward images that make it possible for the new meanings and interpretations to emerge.

Consider these:

Here are some images from the exhibit.

At Raga Svara, we think deeply about what it means and signifies to be healthy, primarily for one's own self but also as a projection in the 'world'. Post-Covid, there seems to be more discussion and intent for seeking 'wellness'. This trend presupposes that health or wellness can be packaged and delivered to those who want it. At Raga, one of our fundamental principles is that the seeker of this illusive thing called 'health' is an equal partner in achieving this state of wellness. We exist in this constant dialectic of illness and wellness.

Health, well-being, and illness are deeply experiential phenomena, rooted in the subjective experience of a person. We would do well to broaden our conception of what such complex phenomena mean. Limiting its exploration and understanding to a 'scientific' methodology, verging on 'scientism' and reductionist, statistical empiricism, makes for a myopic view and conception. Understanding well-being as a collection of biomarkers, such as weight in kilograms, robs us of fully understanding the conception of body image and psychological impact of weight. Giving the legitimacy of existence only to those conceptions that are amenable to scientific method, such as statistical empiricism or reductionism, limits our understanding of the experiential and lived reality of well-being and health.

If we reduce the concept of 'being' to markers, tests, and reports, then we enter a realm of the forgetfulness of being. When we talk of being mindful, what we really mean is mindfulness of being, giving weight and meaning to the idea of being itself. 'Mindfulness of being' involves being subjected to "urgent experiences", "jolting experiences" and amongst all these "limit" situations, death is nonpareil. While death or the idea of imminent arrival of death is jolting, the experience of illness, in varying degrees of severity, acts as a 'limit' situation, a wake-up call. This situation must be understood in its phenomenological sense if we are to fully 'live' it and transcend it to enter a state of well-being. According to Hans Georg Gadamer, "illness make us aware of our bodily nature, which otherwise is hidden. Only when there arise some disturbances, when deficiencies manifest to cripple us, that we are aware of the lack of a healthy body. Thus, though health has ontological primacy over illness, methodologically illness gains primacy over health."

Gadamer says, ‘The limits of what can be measured and, above all, of what can be effected through human intervention reach deep into the realm of health care. Health is not something that can simply be made or produced.’ Ultimately, all our care must be manifested as a participation in the 'wonderful capacity of life to renew itself, to set itself alright.' As Thakaran suggests, 'Despite the obsession with health in the contemporary cultures, wherein one feels complacent amidst diverse technological and ‘spiritual’ means that assure physical and mental ‘fitness’, sanity and longevity, health still ‘evades’ us.'

In the modern system of medical treatment, there is no space of the lived reality of the patient to be expressed and acknowledged, let alone be factored in the line of treatment. This reminds of the dying child Amal, in Rabindranath Tagore's The Post Office, who is prescribed total isolation, 'quarantine', in his home.

There must be a greater representation of the phenomenological truth of a given situation in the pursuit of health, for as Heidegger claimed, 'mood is the fundamental ground from which life develops.'

We must work, together, hand in hand, to restore to patients their own sense of self-identity. This can be done only when the 'unwell' are able to return to and take up again their own particular way of life and are able to exercise their own particular abilities.

I am also reminded of Hannah Arendt, who said that “the most intense feeling we know of, intense to the point of blotting out all other experiences, namely, the experience of great bodily pain, is at the same time the most private and least communicable of all.”

So we are left with a situation where, to centralise the lived experience of a person, we must turn to that most incommunicable of experiences. Perhaps, ability to listen and acknowledge the life-world of each person can show us the way. Ultimately, we must also come to the realisation that there is perhaps no strict boundary between illness and wellness, that these states are not exclusionary, but overlap and co-exist.

It feels surreal to realise that the people who I admired some years ago, seem so distant from my current thinking and understanding of the world. How much must have I known and experienced in the intervening time? How ignorant must have I been then, or perhaps, how ignorant I am to prove to be later again.

This passage from Seymour Papert's Mind Storms:

The model of successful learning is the way a child learns to talk, a process that takes place without deliberate and organized teaching. I see the classroom as an artificial and inefficient learning environment . . . [and] I believe that the computer presence will . . . [mean] that much if not all the knowledge schools presently try to teach with such pain and expense and such limited success will be learned, as the child learns to talk, painlessly, successfully, and without organized instruction.

Programming a computer means nothing more or less than communicating to it in a language that it and the human user can both ‘understand.’ And learning languages is one of the things children do best. Every normal child learns to talk. Why then should a child not learn to ‘talk’ to a computer?

It seems terribly myopic, almost misanthropic to think that computers are as capable as, nay better than, human teachers. This cybernetic thinking that teaching, learning and education is fundamentally an information exchange mechanism was, continues to be, and will remain the foundation of failed educational thinking, policy and implementation.

I believe languages are fundamentally fluid, mutating and multi-modal. Whereas computer 'language' is fundamentally unimodal and inflexible. Once again, it is terribly mistaken to think that human languages are similar to computer 'language' simply because the latter comprehends the stunted inputs given by humans. I am not saying they are not languages in the broadest sense of the word. What I disagree with is the comparison.

After months and months of production process, the book is finally available.

Noema

Price: INR 2000 (shipping extra)
Author: Mohit Khodidas
Publisher: Laya Press
Pages: 128, Hardcover

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Poems in this book have been written over many years. I never intended to put them in public. Photographs are landscapes of Saurashtra, the land I have been given and that I love for all its eccentricities and tragedies.

I have so many people to thank. My friends and family, the centre of my life. I am a golem, among many other things, and they make me in their image, every day.

From the preface of the book:
"I have imagined this book of poetry and images as a dialectical work; between images and text, between text and you, and hopefully between you and others, including me. Personal reading must also be an internal dialogue. Understanding is to be built together."

We are reading The Circular Ruins for the next class of my course “Labyrinthine Dreams: A walk into the dreamscapes of stories and poetry by Jorge Luis Borges”
This story is a part of Labyrinths - Selected Stories & Other Writings. Edited by Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby.

Here is the reading.