As the principal of the college to which Rahul Gandhi referred, while expressing his unhappiness about higher education, I decided to interact with him to get a clear idea of what he said and what he did not mean. I did not teach Rahul while he was in St. Stephen’s, but I remember him as a well-behaved young man reading history in college. The degree of encouragement he found for asking questions is an issue that I cannot comment on either way with clinching certitude. But what I now know, having discussed the matter with him, is that what the media reported is not exactly what he meant. “Between the intention and the effect,” as Eliot says, “falls the shadow”.

But the issue he has raised goes way beyond St. Stephen’s. I feel encouraged that Rahul has paved the way for a national debate on the culture of Indian higher education. The question of raising questions concerns the very purpose of education itself. What sort of products do we envisage through the education in vogue today? Why is it that a majority of students even in higher education are disallowed the luxury of asking questions to widen their cognitive horizon? Even more basically, why are millions of children not even enabled to enter the portals of education? What emerged was his concern that education of the kind pursued today promotes intellectual passivity. The vast intellectual energies of this country remain frozen for want of nurturing a culture of intellectual curiosity marked by the dynamics of asking and seeking.

... contd.