The Culture of Research and Learning

#134 by Tmk on June 8, 2004 7:43am PT

That was hilarious- and the response was apt! Thanks!


P.S- I still fail to understand how many times these mullahs have to use the word `true` before every adjective in order to announce conspiracy behind every thing not pleasing to them!!!
Can they tell us who is a `true` idiot?

What beauty?

Sir: The much hyped and publicised Ms Universe contest, which was held in Puerto Rico last week, turned out to be a complete fiasco. Right from the beginning it lacked what it needed in order to be a classy show. The host left a lot to be desired. The judges also appeared to lack the expertise they needed for the occasion.

Above all the formatting of the show was pathetic. And to top it all, the crowned Miss Universe hardly deserved the title. It seems that the only consideration for judging the contents was the US-led war in Iraq and since Australia is a great supporter of the US, they were rewarded. Or perhaps what it really boiled down to was that the judges just didn’t know the meaning of ‘beauty’
DR SHAUKAT MAHMOOD
Lahore

And Reply:

Conspiracy theory and Ms Universe

Sir: This is with reference to Dr Shaukat Mahmood’s letter, “What beauty?” (Letters, Daily Times, June 7). While I understand the animosity that US policies elicit within Pakistan, I cannot fathom why Dr Mahmood blames the US government for rigging the Miss Universe contest just because the contestant Dr Mahmood was rooting for did not win.

Personally, I cannot imagine Rummy sitting in his Pentagon office coming up with strategies for rigging a beauty contest. I am sure the secretary of defense has more important issues on his mind. And for what it’s worth, I thought Miss Australia was quite good looking.
TAIMUR M KHAN
Philadelphia

This may be of interest to those inclined towards research and education.

http://www.vttp.org/PDMain.aspx

VTTP National Policy Dialogue Series

on

Science, Technology & Research Policy, Basic/Primary & Higher Education Reform



The National Policy Dialogue Series is designed as an exercise in participative national policymaking and aimed at inviting societal participation in idea generation, dialogue, and implementation of bold, creative, and pragmatic solutions to Pakistan’s most contentious problems. The first step of this series of interlinked initiatives is a Policy Papers Contest —subsequent activities might include a media dialogue, a national conference of idea champions, and corporate sponsored implementation pilots. Seeking to create a national repository of creative policy proposals and ideas, 5-10 page essays/papers (concise, substantive, and specific) are sought from individuals belonging to the entire cross section of Pakistani society i.e. ALL PROFESSIONALS/STUDENTS dealing with the following suggested topics:

Higher Education Reform in Pakistan: What Went Wrong, How to Fix it?
Practical & Innovative Approaches to promoting a Performance Culture in Higher Education.
What should be the Science and Technology Policy Priorities/Actions for Pakistan?
What Topical Areas of Research, Science & Technology should Pakistan Stress Upon and why?
Practical & Creative ways of marketing Pakistan (the brand) and its Research/Technology abroad?
Practical Models for Delivering Universal Basic & Primary Education in Pakistan.
Practical & Innovative Approaches to Reforming Basic/Primary Education in Pakistan.

---

http://www.vttp.org/PDMain.aspx
for details

Zahraj,
Thanks a lot for your candid thoughts. Well there are always wages for going uphill. Regarding posting on Chowk, I dont think it would be of much utility. I did post a socio economic issue on unplugged, but it drew no positive response. Thats how it is.

Most of the chowkies are heavy on opinion and thats where it ends.
Good Summers
Cheerios
Ijaz

Ijaz: I wish you all the best in your initiative and I am positive that you will keep it up and running with your good spirit. Out of curiosity, why did it take you that long to post the details on this site ? If you could write a deewan on mountaineering and go backkkkk in time to highlight Patricia, why could not you put together a few paras highlighting the ``present`` and have Chowk publish it ? All the above should serve as food for thought only. Do you have a website for this initiative? If yes, could you post it here? You may very well have the information on this site somewhere in hiding and it may have escaped my attention. In that case, please disregard the healthy food for thought. Thanks.

[Though I have impressed my views at very high forums, at the end of the day one ends up like a teacher trying to educate people with pre concieved ideas and inflexible attitudes.Even the essentials of the political and organisational theories are not grasped. I agree that one ends up denying space to oneself.]

Just to clarify: I never mentioned ``denying space.`` I suspect that you misread my drift or probably I did not grab the context of your last phrase. If you are implying that it takes a lot of time and energy out of you then welcome to the real world. To do any job up to a certain level of satisfaction, you have to be prepared to immerse yourself in the said task. That`s a given! Having worked on several cute little, bird`s size, small, medium and grand initiatives in the past, I had to be generous with my ``time ane energies``. But at one stage in life, you do want to associate with only those whose actions, words, thoughts and initiaves add to your knowledge and well being. And, that`s where I was going with my shrewd, selfish and demanding motives :)

Ijaz: An observation from personal experience...you can only introduce and promote your initiative or perspective. You cannot impose your way of seeing things on others. Way back when I was raising a generous amount for a student, I had to be focused and insensitive to the noise around me but learn to be sensitive to others` leanings. Lessons Learned: focus, belief in the gut feeling, having the end result right in front of you, keeping a decent distance from negative forces and chauvinists. Interestingly, the whole process started with just an innocent query. There was no research or analysis involved, mainly due to the deadline. Despite the bouncy journey, I was very content with the end result. It was way beyond my own expectations. The last lesson learned was being prepared to handle miracles :)

#127 by sadna on June 5, 2004 8:34pm PT

Thanks for posting that wonderful article. I think what she captured in her five months stay had escaped Pak scholars in the last thirty years.
I have much more specific information as to what happened during the zia regime and before, as I was not only a witness but an active opponent of the academic murders that were taking place in Pak at that time.
I hope to write about that someday. I feel that those years have put Pakistan seriously back almost fifty years. The problem is that things have not changed a whole lot and the lowering of intellectual standards continue.

Zahraj,
I do not wish to detain you any longer. But I do want to leave you with some thoughts over your summer vacations; something you can brood over. Even if we cant implement all, at least we would have learnt something and made some begining somewhere.

For the past ten years, I have carried out studies in detail on issues like instability of political institutions, the elites in Pakistan`s politic body, military sociology, international political economy, tax reforms, local self government, reflections on the huge foreign debts that Pakistan accumulated in the 80/90s and last but not least, the vibrant unregulated and informal sectors. Though I have impressed my views at very high forums, at the end of the day one ends up like a teacher trying to educate people with pre concieved ideas and inflexible attitudes.Even the essentials of the political and organisational theories are not grasped. I agree that one ends up denying space to oneself.

So I decided to light my own candle. I managed to introduce quality education in some schools. Now at a nominal cost, many boys and girls are doing O and A level education from the University of Cambridge. Majority are from the low middle class who could never dream of going to elite schools like Frobels/Beacon/City. We have been successful in persuading many God Fearing rich to sponsor a child each. My friends gather sponsors after the friday prayers. The response is excellent. Some of our students have already proceeded abroad for higher studies based on good results and SAT scores.

From within the finances of the school, we evolved the concept of a college. Making a beginning with 28 students, we already have over 700 students in areas like business, human resource, computers, telecom and electronics. The levels are from undergrad to post grad.

Why we made such strides is that we have avoided the lime light. There are no high profile visitors, no VIPs and we go about our work unseen with no perks. We get no grants, foreign aid or funding. Efcourse we appeal to the God fearing and get loans from the Banks that we are repaying ahead of schedule.

We are now replicating this model in health and community services.

It is this model we wish to move forward that leads to communitarianism, inclusiveness and pluralism within a social group. We want to build culverts/bridges to overcome social, sectarian, ethnic and divisive faultlines for a better Pakistan. But someday this model has to link with the strong business groups, political organisations and the state. It is for this reason that we see indepth research, sampling and study into the Civil Society. We have to develope our own model based on our own dynamics of p[ermanance and ideosyncrynism, which efcourse has also become the mainstay of our research in HRD courses.

Thanks for giving time. I have always found your views as rational, in depth and useful.

Enjoy the summers
Cheerios!!

http://www.dawn.com/weekly/books/books1.htm

``...As a college teacher of political science I was interested more in learning about the state of higher education and research particularly in social sciences and the intellectual activity in general in Pakistan. I read a number of articles on these issues during my five months stay in Pakistan, which gave vent to two major grievances in higher education. The first was about the dismal state of research in Pakistan. The dimension and quality of research appeared to be the major cause of concern of the writers of these articles.

Very often the writers indulged in comparison with India. Pakistanis generally believe that the system of higher education and quality of research in India is superior. There is an appreciation of the fact that thousands of Indians earn doctoral degrees in different disciplines of study annually. Sometimes the authors of articles asked why Pakistan did not start institutions like IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) and IIM (Indian Institute of Management). Many of the senior university teachers in Pakistan have their doctoral degrees from foreign, mostly American and British, universities.

Things are changing now and many of the younger teachers have doctoral degrees from Pakistani universities. Musharraf`s regime has undertaken major programmes with a view to removing this lacuna. While I was in Pakistan I had read the news report stating that the government of Pakistan had planned to send a hundred teachers and researchers from Pakistan to universities abroad for research at the cost of more than Rs800 million.

It had also decided to disburse grants of over Rs600 million to the QAU to encourage research leading to the doctoral degree. Science teachers with PhDs were to become eligible for extra allowances. I read about the Punjab University at Lahore deciding to get 100 theses evaluated from foreign universities. The other scheme announced by this university would make Indian researchers and research guides envious of their counterparts in Punjab University. Every candidate obtaining a PhD from the university would get an award of Rs50,000 and his guide Rs100,000. On reading this, how much I wished that I got at least two candidates from Punjab University working with me for PhD before returning to India!

The second grievance was about the state of social sciences and the treatment meted out to social scientists in Pakistan. Most Pakistani universities neglect the social sciences. Though this is a part of the global trend, Pakistan`s social and political systems are responsible for this maltreatment of social sciences. There are certain conditions for the development of knowledge in any society; the intellectual and ideological ethos of the society, the extant value system, the class divisions and the pattern of power distribution.

In the process of Islamization of Pakistan even social sciences have been Islamized. `Islam pasand` groups have cultivated traditional and puritanical values in society and have discouraged and rejected scientific rationalism. Social sciences and humanities deal with ideas. They have a potential to encourage individual thinking, to formulate and express opinions irrespective of the prevalent opinion in society. They encourage people to defy authority, if necessary, be it political or religious and lay the foundations of open society.

Any political regime founded on exclusive ideology tends to suppress the expression of independent opinion, and critical assessment of ideas. Moreover long praetorian interventions are not conducive for free promotion and expression of ideas, which is the basic function of social sciences and humanities. Therefore social sciences in Pakistan have been forced to rediscover their `relevance through Islam`.

Pakistani intellectuals are aware of the `dismal state of social sciences` in their country. I recall reading a newspaper article by a Pakistani writer, a few years ago, which said Pakistan had become an `intellectual wasteland`. Akbar Zaidi`s analytical article on the subject of the ``State of Social Sciences in Pakistan``, published in the Economic and Political Weekly, comprehensively deals with all issues regarding the subject from the number of `active` social scientists, publications, institutions of research, to finances and accountability.

Zaidi`s lament is that no Pakistani social scientist in the last three decades, `has developed, reconstructed, reformulated, expanded upon, disputed or rejected, any theory or theoretical formulation, qua theory, in the specific context of Pakistan`. This is corroborated by Inayatullah who wrote that most socio-scientific literature in Pakistan was not oriented to the growth of knowledge and that generally it lacked theoretical orientation and theoretical research in a volume titled The State of Social Sciences in Pakistan.

This is because social sciences as academic disciplines have declined in universities. In the QAU, which was developed as the centre for excellence, there are no departments of philosophy, political science or sociology. Going through the academic publications in Pakistan, I discovered that many of them were in the nature of empirical studies (data collection), documentation or applied research produced by those working in various professional research institutions and NGOs, heavily funded by foreign donors who lay down their preferences and priorities in the area of research.

I was amused reading a small news item in Dawn on August 21, 2001 that said that the NWFP government had decided to banish social sciences and humanities from college curricula. Disciplines of political science, philosophy, history and literature were deemed to be worthless and, hence, could not be funded by the government that faced a severe resource crunch. The government had further decided not to fill the posts vacated on retirement of the teachers of the said disciplines. I have no idea if this policy was finally implemented.

Pakistani intellectuals are fighting pitched battles against Islamists. In the summer of 2003 it was reported that the teachers of the English department of the oldest and the most prestigious university in Pakistan, the Punjab University in Lahore, discovered that a junior member of the department, Shahbaz Arif, was recruited by the university administration apparently to `purge` the syllabus of `vulgar, obscene, and morally corrupt` elements.

An internal memo circulated by Arif, who is said to hold a PhD in linguistics from Essex University in Britain, pointed his finger to Alexander Pope`s The Rape of the Lock, for the vulgarity of the title of the book and Jonathan Swift`s Gulliver Travels for its description of a `monstrous breast`. Ernest Hemingway`s The Sun Also Rises was nothing but anathema, for all characters in Hemingway`s work were sexually astray: men homosexuals; women lesbians or promiscuous and Brett Ashley nymphomaniac. Sean O` Casey`s play The End of the Beginning was targeted for the sentence, `When the song ended, Darry cocks his ear and listens.`

As the controversy intensified, university authorities hurriedly issued clarifications and denials. But even the department held on firmly to its ground. The department`s chair Shaista Sirajuddin is known to be outspoken, progressive and secular and has kept Islamists at bay. And there are others like her. If Pakistan has become an `intellectual wasteland` it is not for want of intellectuals, but for the intellectual culture that has been deliberately and systematically decimated by certain social, political and religious forces discussed in this book.

This is not to absolve the intellectual class of its responsibility but to stress the challenges encountered by it. Some among them have accepted the challenge and taken these forces by the horns as has been indicated by the proliferation of dissent literature in Pakistan during the Zia rule. Some like Mehdi Hasan, former professor of journalism at Punjab University, have faced serious accusations, while others call the truce with those forces and seek refuge in self censorship professed in the name of national interest and Islam.

Maneesha Tikekar is a reader in politics in SIES College of Arts, Science and Commerce, Mumbai.

This book is an Indian university teacher`s account of her five-month stay in Pakistan. It captures her perception of our society and culture.

---

Excerpted with permission from Across the Wagah: An Indian`s Sojourn in Pakistan

By Maneesha Tikekar

Promilla & Co Publishers in association with Bibliophile South Asia,

C-127 Sarvodaya Enclave, New Delhi-110 017, India

Website: www.biblioasia.com

ISBN 81-85002-34-7

360pp. Indian Rs750

Dear Ijaz: Thank you for your explanation. I am sure with your mountaineering background, you have a lot to keep you occupied with. Hope you have a relaxing time!

Your second last post had an ending with the desire to continue the exchange about improvements. Having spearheaded various process improvement initiatives, I would tell you from experience that if your surroundings are not prepared (open and ready) for any change, the results may not very satisfactory. Well, you may gain experience and insights but that`s it. And, the follow-up steps on change management that many consider only as buzz-words have much more significance, an average person can comprehend.

Before you even go near implementing anything for your institution, you must spend fair amount of time in research; and evaluate what`s pertinent to your surroundings. Lastly, do not let go of what is important to you. That`s where I have been extremely impressed by some professional organizations based out of US. Recently, on sharing some points of mutual interest with a leadership organization who wants me to run with a project, I was completely taken aback by the time they had spent in research just to get to know the need and areas they wanted to target for `` leadership ``. In order to do that, you certainly require contributors who can add signifcantly based on their own experience and what they have to offer. You have to take this as a Life Cycle Project. And, this is what I love about my surroundings (it`s not only the mountains, prairies, clean water and running tracks aside not to mention the diversity and civil beings). Despite the other committments, men and women from all cultural backgrounds have the desire to be more enlightened. It`s not just a decent six figure pay check that will add to their life and everything is hunky dory!

In my case, I am at a point in life where I like to maintain significant distance from those who want to extract my energies. My mantra is that I would contribute provided you tell me how you can contribute to my life. If you have nothing or if I find that way too obsolete then please stay away from me and I`ll do the same. I like to maintain the same approach on Chowk and in my personal life. Sometimes, I do slip and end up wasting my breath on interactors, I would not even like to associate with regardless of their origin and color. I guess that`s part of being human. Had I been perfect, I would have been sitting with the monks that Robin Sharma(one of my favorite writers) highlights in his insightful book, ``The Monk who sold his Ferrari`` or adopted the lifestyle Kabir touches upon in `` Mun Lago... Yaar ... Faqeeri Main...``

I do not have anything else to add therefore I would like to say goodbye for the summer(I am just borrowing this expression from an old song. It has no other relevance. :))

Take Care and Best Regards.

murtaza:
this is just to acknowledge and register my ``discovery`` of your debut on CHOWK. I wonder if you are aware of this being posted here.

This ``submission`` didn`t come up during our discussion a few weeks ago (confidential, confidential!--guranteed!) Maybe it was sent long time ago and was ``archived``.

Congratulations. It is a ``practical`` piece and I just can`t appreciate it enough. More of such musings and ``wondering-alouds`` are needed rather than the usual intellectualitis and kalloo-orangutanism spammed here.

zahra u just showed u cant -- :)

#121
Moi is a French word meaning myself. It is used on the board by malyck as his trade mark. Now even Omar has used this term. I wrote in french,
``please excuse me. What rational are you talking about.
when you use malycks expressions``.
As for you(Zahraj), I appreciated what you said.
I hope that satisfies you.
Pray and hope you enjoy your summers. I am knee deep in work here and wonder if i will find time to visit some mountain resort.
Nowadays, I am trying to develope models for reviving the civil society in Pakistan. The US model does not apply here. Do contribute if you can.
Cheerios
Ijaz

flyhighkites #120
My #55 might have been addressed to you among others, but not only to you. In any case after that I thought I explained myself to you on unplugged. Get a grip! In any case, it should not matter what I or anyone else says as long as you yourself believe in what you are saying.

108: Ijaz:Could you please spell out your previous post ? I do not want to say goodbye for the summer to this board without knowing that. Thanks.

#119: OK, the low-down.
I gave a brief thought to the possibility that perhaps I mistook the references by Zahra and you as directed at me, whereas they may be directed at someone else.
So in all fairness, I have re-read posts #44, 55, 58, 65, 66, 79.... My assumption is that #55 was addressed to me - i wonder who else ``preached piously`` without ``writing about the topic.`` There certainly were many PK retaliations, but am I wrong that only I ``delivered the sermon`` and therefore post#55 couldn`t be addressing anyone but me?

At any rate, 58 was directed as it made a pun on post # 44`s first line. #65 cleared the misunderstanding b/w you and Zahra... whereas #66 and 79 are an exchange of notes about bulls caught with their horns... bulls who can`t read very well. etc. I, being a fiesty little woman and pretty normal human myself, could not help but respond. Please note that I have offered truce from the start, and I even thanked you for pointing out in post #55 that I only preached piously, and did not write abt the topic.

||||||||||||||||||||||||||
This is the situation. Still, if by any distant chance it wasn`t *I* you talked about in post#55, then pray do make it clear who were you addressing? An unconditional apology if I have been entirely mistaken. ANd BTW, I am not a fan of resolving PAK-INDIA issues on Chowk, so I have no issues with continuing a dialog with anyone. I only differ on personal basis.

At this point, I am ready to side with anyone who`ll think I am being ridiculous by dragging this on. Hmmmmm... I have broken my promise, but Sadna I`d have put this in UP but I know you don`t go there... besides that`d invite spectators over. What nonsensical circus would that be. Anyhow.... my last post on this particular skirmish. Pakka wada! Good night!