Article about ITSA published in the Bardvark!

Musings at the Gandhi Ashram

Team member Julia Meyer writes about her thoughts at the Gandhi Ashram:

Piling seven people into a five person car (and five people into an eight person van),  we finally made our way to the Gandhi Ashram.  The premise is modestly designed: a series of bungalows overlooking blue, algae coated water.  The lake, now polluted, is entirely still.  I leaned my torso forward over the concrete ledge.  My vision of the immobile pool was perfectly framed by bridges supporting two-wheelers cascading their course.

The Mahatma's Room

            There was something about the image of the stagnant water encapsulated by the hurried vehicles.  Modernity rushing forward, pulling nature to a stagnant stop.  It was painful to watch, but there was something beautiful about the serenity of dead water.  I pulled out my camera to capture the moment.  Fumbling over the composition, I struggled to include both bridges and the detail of the algae coated blue.  I finally had to settle for two separate images: the first looked directly down towards the water, the second was broader view of the land-scape, however, even within these two photographs the color was less vivid and the lens was too far to capture the motion of the crazed two-wheelers.  Once the shot was on my camera the impact had disintegrated and the moment was meaningless.

            The previous night I had just finished reading Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, where she describes the fleeting power of a photograph.  Unlike a painting, a photograph claims to render the truth.  The viewer sees the image, is forced to consume the “diet of horrors,” but once the photograph is removed from their field of vision the viewer moves on, apathetically able to return to the routine of their daily lives.  The impact of these photographs is completely ephemeral.  Not only does the viewer quickly forget the power of what they have seen, the image also leaves them feeling helpless and unable to make any sort of change. 

            Last Friday in the workshop I was conducting we began a discussion about the difference between sympathy and empathy.  One of the participants explained how it is obviously easier to sympathize than it is to empathize.  She eloquently described how empathy doesn’t mean one has experienced said event, but it does mean that they are able and willing to imagine it.  Looking at these two images on the screen of my puny digital camera I’ve began to wonder the power of a photograph.  

For the past month all of the ITSA interns have been seriously committed to divergent, creative thinking, yet in many of the workshops I’ve found myself incorporating photographs and videos.  Of course, these are intended to motivate the students and when I watch the series of images I myself feel empowered to make a change.  But how long does the memory of these images last?  Our visual recollection is much weaker than the memory of our other senses and I worry that the moment the video or slide-show is turned off the sentiment will fade. We don’t have to smell a simulation.  A photograph does nothing for the imagination.  Sympathy is as ephemeral as a bubble and without the chance to internalize the pain, empathy is left dry.  These students are overloaded with images to a point where they’re rendered meaningless.  Occasionally there is the image that does manage strike a cord.  It will vibrate inside you for a moment like the string of a guitar shooting up your spine.  Traveling through your ears, it fills your brain with a painful hum, but as the vibrations simmer the sound numbs.  Imagination, however, digs us deeper and deeper into despair.  Embodied pain has a way of sticking to the soul and it’s our ringing core that pulls us into action.     

Who Should We Save?

Hey everyone (tl;dr people, go to the end).

    Three years ago or so, my group in sleep away camp had us all play a game.  It involved an impending and total nuclear holocaust and the ability to save only five people.  Each village member was gifted a single sentence descriptor of a person - mine was 'seventeen year old heroin addict' - and was told to choose which five (out of forty) were worth saving.

     A single description isn't a lot to go on, especially when you are acting as the arbiter of life and death.  There are things you must consider! For example; do you save the children, who might be dead weight, or the adult who, although useful, might not ensure the continuation of the human race and for that matter, is the perpetuation of the human race necessarily the ultimate goal at all?

     It is terrible and fascinating work to do, and in the previous workshop, we had the kids attempt to do the same.

Something funny was said

     Once they were divided into three groups, they were informed that the city was flooded, but there was a boat that could hold ten people, though fifteen were available to save: a smoker, a Muslim mother, a 150 Kg man, a rich bachelor, a beggar woman, a Sikh soldier, a female celebrity, a ten year old maid, an alcoholic, a Hindu man, a blind man, a man with AIDS, an engineer, an artist, and a mason.

     At first, the group I was in made snap judgements without a second thought. As an onlooker, I found it truly difficult not to react to some of their rationalizations with excessively acrobatic eyebrow gestures ("We shouldn't save the Hindu man!" they all agreed,  "he has nothing special to offer.")  When the decisions got too superficial for me to bear, I began asking questions.  Needless to say, my group got aggravated very quickly - first with me ("You're making things so confusing!"), then with each other ("You're only saving the Sikh soldier because your father is Sikh!"). 

    Then, they started to fight for the admission of certain individuals against others, giving critical reasons and backing them up.  It was sort of exhilarating, though when I laughed to myself the kids gave me looks of utmost incredulity.  Their views on certain people are unshakeable and solid, but as they fought I saw them pausing, sitting back, and blinking a bit at what they found themselves saying.

 Some of the kids explaining why their choices made it onto the boats (and lived)

    When it came to a group discussion though, the judgements came back a little and got more provocative.  Juliana, another intern, brought up the idea that instead of claiming that we are noble judges, suited ideally for choosing who might live and who might die, we ought to choose randomly.  No one person is ultimately more deserving of life than another. This went over their heads entirely.

     It is, of course, a long process.  You can't expect people who have been taught under an indoctrinatory education system their whole lives to rip free of inertia and bloom immediately into critical thinkers after only a few exercises.   Unrealistic, to be sure, but still, they are blooming at a remarkable speed. They have been so incredibly inhibited, mummified by the system, and it's such a pleasure to see them rip the system to shreds with a vicious pleasure in the workshops. I'm a bit giddy with excitement watching it happen, actually.

(tl;dr - we played a provocative game about choosing who gets to live in the workshop and the kids were judgmental but quickly more critical and then it was exciting)

~Emma, Intern 2011

Bard High School Early College

"We must keep the 150 kg, he is most certainly a wrestler!"

Hello bloggers!
        
So far, I have just posted blogs about the sightseeing that the ITSA interns have done in
Ahmedabad, but, as Emma already said, our reason for being here is not merely to explore the country, but to explore and gain a deeper understanding of the Indian education system. Before actually arriving here and participating in the workshops, Riana Shah & Jwalin Patel (the 19 year old co-founders and co-director of ITSA) had described the Indian educational system as extremely strict and rigid. The reason for this, she explained (I am going to give some brief history now, so stay with me), was that the Indian education system was set up under British Rule during the industrial revolution, and as a result was aimed at creating technicians, not independent thinkers. Consequently, the Indian education system involves a lot of rote memorization and teaching directly from textbooks, as opposed to discussion based, seminar style classes. However, not until I actually got a chance to participate in the workshops and talk with the students did this become evident. 

Above is Rajvi (right) and Paranshi (left), laughing while playing The Boat Game. They were, no doubt, laughing about the fact that another participant, Nishant, had just said, "we must keep the 150 kg man. He's most certainly a wrestler."

On the first day, every student was asked to describe themselves in one word (the workshop's theme was identity), and most of the kids described themselves as "obedient" or "tactful", or, most popularly, "disciplined", as opposed to what you might hear at Bard (to name a few: creative, independent, or a learner for the sake of learning). Afterwards, when we moved on to open-class discussion, most of the interns (myself included) felt that the students responded in a way that they thought we would approve of, instead of responding openly and self-critically. Riana & Jwalin explained this by saying that these kids had been hand-selected by their teachers to participate in the ITSA workshops, which means they already knew how to effectively promote themselves and give their teachers exactly what was expected of them. 


In yesterday's workshop, which was the fourth, we did a very provocative exercise called "The boat game." In the boat game, you have 15 people who are described in only a couple of words, like a sikh man in the army, a beggar woman, a muslim mother, a 10 year old maid, etc. The world is undergoing some sort of epidemic, like a flood, and only 10 out of the 15 can fit on the boat, based solely on their few word descriptions. What this exercise aimed at doing was to explicate the point that you cannot define, or stereotype, a person based on only thing. The man who was described as 150kg, might be a genius, for example, or the smoker--an engineer. However, interestingly we found that the students had many pre-concieved notions, no doubt propagated by their society, their parents, and their educational system. For example, all of the groups eliminated the beggar woman without much hesitation pretty early on, and seemed to have no concept that certain social structures might change once only 10 people were left on Earth. 


What this exercise, and the workshops as a whole, made clear to me is just how stifled these kids are when it comes to independent thought, and when it comes to doubting the structure of the world around them. In light of this, ITSA is like a breath of fresh air. In a set of interviews which we conducted yesterday (led by intern Mariah Widman), one of the participants, Paranshi, said, "every week I can't wait for Friday's and Sunday's to come, so I can go to the ITSA workshops! It's what I look forward to during the school week." And considering that sunday is the only day these kids have off, that's saying a lot.

~ Ana, Intern 2011

Bard High School Early College