mahendra-verma

I am on a visit to IIT Gandhinagar (IITGN), which is one of the newly built IIT in India.  There are some very impressive and fresh things that made me write this blog.  Everyone seems to be happy here, and I heard no complaints.  Let me just list some of the things I noticed in the campus. 1. There is visible enthusiasm among the faculty and students.  One of the most impressive things is the sense of belonging the faculty and student have to the institute, which is quite rare now a days.   2. Openness and democracy in the system is quite impressive. A new physics faculty  is  introducing open experiments in undergraduate lab, where the students propose experiments along with the required budget, and then they get to do the experiment under an enthusiastic guidance from a faculty.  A fourth-year undergraduate student, Akash Singh, toured me the new campus with an enthusiasm as if he was a key member of the building committee; he knew the engineers and workers. He told me that th

Individual liberty is one of the major pillars of present-day democracy.  It allows an individual to choose profession of his/her liking, have ones own belief system, voice opinion, etc. Individual freedom allowed many creative individuals to chart out their own paths, which led to tremendous creativity and innovation in modern times.   The alternative, or the old system, is indeed suffocating, at least for the creative individuals; here the system decides the role of an individual.  It is worth noting that the personal liberty over the rights the state and the church over an individual came after a lot of sacrifice; the charter of “Rights of Man” , which outlined these rights for the first time, is a beautiful document to read. Ref: ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of_Man_and_of_the_Citizen) An important question is whether we have Individual liberty or not in India?  I believe that the answer is mixed.  In India, the poor do not have appropriate educat

One of the best things modern times offers to all of us is democracy.  Everyone has right and privileges that cannot be taken away by anyone.  Also, we take collective decisions on how our surrounding be managed or governed.  Of course, in any system, some individuals or groups are chosen/elected to take executive decision. The remain section, an integral of the democratic system, plays an important part in democracy.  In true democracy, both, the executive and the commoners, shape the policies, execute the work, thus make the system function.   Yet, there seems to be a constant mistrust and friction between the two sections, the administrator and others, which is a big impediment to democracy. In this blog, I will try to discuss my view on this topic. In a typical scenario, we blame the top person (politician or top administrator) for all the ills of the system.  But, we forget that we are also decision makers in many forums: as a family member in a family, as a teacher in a cla