Role Model

 

Some people want me to write about myself. What were you like when the Baby Boomers were dropping out? How did you handle resistance?

Well, to start with, let me request you not to ever make a role model out of me. I would make a lousy role model — walking the razor’s edge only to see if I was lucky enough. Resistance? What resistance? I never had one to fight against, and they said I was born lucky. But that’s not how it worked.

When I got out of my Jesuit school in Delhi, my father sent me off to Jadavpur University in Calcutta, so that I wouldn’t think life was only rock and roll. It was the early 1970s and young people were preparing for revolution. “Revolution comes from the barrel of a gun” proclaimed a large notice strung across the university gate.

I had long hair, wore bell‑bottoms, and believed in John Lennon. I realised I needed to find a common language between the two cultures. So I read the Red Book of Chairman Mao. I read Yevtushenko. I read Samaresh Basu and Buddhdev Bose — whom the Supreme Court of India tried to ban because of middle‑class denials of sexuality and perversion. It was a world far away from Delhi with its Ayn Rand, Germaine Greer and Erica Jong‑spouting north Indians pretending to be white.

I straddled both worlds.

I nearly topped the University in Physics, in the middle of gunfire, LSD, and the drumbeats from the USA announcing the arrival of Sreela Prabhupada and ISKCON. I didn’t resist any of it — I just went with the flow. Calcutta was burning with the Naxalite movement, and I went back to Delhi, where I did a Masters and a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from IIT Delhi.

Then I went on a postdoc to the Technical University of Vienna and built batteries for a while. The Austrians understood unreality — both the great physicists and the great musicians.

I returned to India and a friend asked me to become a teacher of computer programming. I did; the money was good. In the evenings I started working on the physics of learning. Just for fun.

Then a newspaper offered me a job to “computerise” their printing operations. I moved; the money was even better. I invented a way to make telephone directories without any human beings typing anything in. It was a bit of fun physics. Indira Gandhi came to see how it was done.

“When are you going to have a haircut?” she asked.

A few years later, I moved to head research at NIIT — digital multimedia was about to arrive in the 1990s. I loved it, published some research, and one day in 1999, let groups of slum children mess around with computers because I wanted to see what they would do.

That became The Hole in the Wall experiment, now taught in education courses in most universities. That was not my plan; I was just doing what I liked.

I went on to become a Professor of Educational Technology in the UK and won lots of prizes. All over the world they praised and criticised my work. I nodded at the praise and agreed with the criticism. I never resisted anything, never climbed a hurdle.

So, don’t make me a role model, please.

Just remember — if you can control what you want, you can do what you like.