NON CONVENTIONAL EDUCATION AND THEIR CONTRIBUTION TO GROWTH OF INDIA

Underlying the secret spurt and growth of India of today is a very special phenomenon of the decade between 1990 and 2000 which has beyond any element of doubt cast a spell of transformation and growth in India and let me call it the "era of IT education". When well meaning business propositions synchronizes itself with societal needs further fuelled by a large local population what we have is a miracle .....and India has proved it so beyond doubt.

Large scale penetration of IT and its ability to touch the common man is a recent phenomenon may be about quarter of a century old and not much. Though IT lay camouflaged in the sidewalks of the Indian psyche much earlier it came into a complete frution only during the said period and with the sudden introduction of the Internet in the mid 1990's things came into a full circle.

I beleive that private institutions like NIIT , APTECH and the like have contributed a great deal to national well being and progress which further acted as a prop to the emerging Indian software development sector. These institutes took IT to the nascent and gave him a new avenue and approach in life. Young people in India of that time across the length and breadth of the country found a computer training institute of a branded nature in the vicinity giving instant access to IT education of that time. The prevaining conditions of the time made IT education accessible to all irrespective of the backgrounds from which the populace emerged.

Such approaches and philosophies can be applied as well to any areas of education in a robust way to the benefit and succour of many.

THE PARADOX OF THE LAW

Something that we must thank somewhere is the contribution of the British establishment to India is the introduction of their legal system which we follow to this day . Having attended legal lectures at the National Law School of India university (NLSIU) a keen interest in this sector has emerged in the way legal systems and jurisprudence works; that we have a largely evolved legal system in India partially used and abused augurs well for the growth and stability of our society.

However the English Legal system is not without its own set of ambiguities and would work less effectively if the law is not understood and applied properly by people responsible for the systems of the law. The English legal system derives its fundamentals from the ancient Greeks.

I somewhere quantify legal systems that emerge from two distinct domains namely crimes that are of an unilateral kind and crimes that are of a bilateral kind. This is what I mean by the paradox of the law in essence when unilateral and bilateral crimes lay embedded and not conspicuous. It is not enough to say "You are innocent until proved guilty" but must be "you are relatively innocent to a guilt." Guilt cannot be relative but innocence can be and will always be and if jurisprudence does not look at legal situations in this manner the magnitude of error can be more deviant.

I find a problem in the way law is implemented in that a police station which is the imposer of the law does not have legal support handy which means that the imposers of the law must act not in ignorance of the law and its principles but well within it and if the process does not commence at that focal point many a relatively innocent would be forced to face the unjust part of the juggernaut called law with sparing and long drawn options for relief. Not that they are not doing it --they are.... but there is a finer view of many situations that make a man explicit to a guilt as against being partially implicit and the difference between these two stations may not be too remarkable to be significant. The modern man is characterized by an environment which is highly information enlivened and the possibility of some one inadvertently or through design committing some of fence is increasingly magnified.

Let me expand on what is a Unilateral crime as against a Bilateral crime. May be law encompasses all these concepts in itself in some form or the other but does a person get imminent justice is the question of relevance. Unilateral crime is something some one commits through planning with no aberration of any kind from the victim of the crime. The question of the law is "Was there an initiation in some form however miniscule from the victim of the crime". If there isn't the perpetrator of the crime is "Innocent until proved guilty" and the perpetrator gets minimum relief from the tenets of the law and its various agencies.

The concept of relative innocence emerges when the victim of a crime has in some form committed an aberration which created the crime and dependent on the crime itself the perpetrator of the crime is entitled to the concept of relative innocence. Depending upon the nature of the of fence appropriate dealing must be done and if the offense committed is not largely invasive and pungent with some legal procedures the perpetrator can be let go. It is a crime in itself not to examine relative innocence in the execution of legal systems.

Having said so much the "Paradox of the Law " is the inability of the legal systems to upfront examine relative innocence or also could be called relative guilt depending upon the dimension from which one sees it and the challenge is to treat a bilateral crime from this view point upfront and with imminence.

UNFORGETTABLE DR P S SRINIVASAN

The sixth semester of my study at REC Calicut was something special; A great and natural teacher taught us. His name being Dr. P S Srinivasan. I learnt with dismay that he passed away in 2010. He taught us Induction Machines. I dont regret anything I did during my stay at REC but for one thing...... missing a lecture by Dr. P S Srinivasan owing to some communication error one morning in 1985 when he taught Universal Motors. This I feel is a huge loss and I be-moan this every other day. My comfort levels with Universal motors have never been good and things could have been different had I attended this lecture.

Something about his persona...being dark in complexion and rotund with a spectacle and walked with a faster pace and a sturdy composure. He rarely mixed with many but had administrative skills no doubt and I think for a larger part of his tenure occuppied a larger of the offices on the first floor of the DB and had a doctorate from Russia in hard core electrical engineering. I think there are not many such people left to teach engineering subjects today for some reason or the other and note that this person gave nearly four decades of service to REC CAlicut and was a tamilian domiciled in Kerala.

We used to have his classes at 8:00 am thrice a week and I rarely missed the classes of his. The height of his teaching according to me was deriving the mathematical expression that discloses how a space and time displaced three phase winding produced a rotating magnetic feild. He did it meticulously. The greatness of this man was his ability to simplify a complex subject like Induction Machines. People and students must thank him no end for the silent but formidable services provided to the state and students of Kerala.

It is more than quarter of a century but let me try to reproduce from memory some of the expressions of Induction machine theory;

Slip = (Sync speed - rotor speed) / sync speed

rotor power input = stator power input - (stator iron and copper loss)

Slip x rotor power input = rotor copper loss (there is a similar expression for iron loss)

Rotor power output = Rotor power Input - (rotor copper and iron losses)

May I beseech heavens that many more of such people find a place to teach students at Engineering Institutions and the system creates and engenders many such people.