Columnists

Avijit Pathak

Avijit Pathak teaches at JNU

How Jiddu Krishnamurthy’s thoughts offer an antidote to violence of everyday life

Wed, May 11, 2022

Avijit Pathak writes: As we experience violence in the name of religious nationalism, or violence in the name of education, Krishnamurti’s books and talks tend to acquire a new meaning and significance.

Common University Entrance Test won’t solve the real problems

Tue, Mar 29, 2022

Avijit Pathak writes: To transform education we need to work on the quality of schools and pedagogy, honest and fair recruitment of teachers, relative autonomy of academic institutions and learn to value the uniqueness of each child.

JNU needs the healing touch of hope

Fri, Feb 18, 2022

Avijit Pathak writes: The new vice-chancellor must help cultivate a culture of conversation and dialogue and the courage to disagree.

Thich Nhat Hanh taught us to live in the moment

Thu, Jan 27, 2022

🔴 Avijit Pathak writes: Amid the tyranny of the clock time and calculation of ‘productivity’, he showed how to live in the here and now

bell hooks and her pedagogy of hope

Fri, Dec 31, 2021

🔴 Avijit Pathak writes: For her, emancipatory education was supposed to be dialogic and experiential and a teacher always listened compassionately and without judgment

True religiosity is a quest and has no boundaries

Sun, Dec 05, 2021

🔴 Avijit Pathak writes: It is not about repeating the scriptures like a parrot, wearing special uniforms, and following the crowd

Our children don’t need a ‘deshbhakti’ curriculum

Thu, Oct 28, 2021

Avijit Pathak writes: What they need is a learning community that makes them capable of distinguishing the soothing light of knowledge and wisdom from the glitz of falsehood and propaganda

Teachers should be seen as as carriers of ‘emancipatory education’

Sun, Sep 05, 2021

Avijit Pathak writes: They hold the lamp of truth, and walk with their students to help them make sense of the world they live in.

The spiritual lessons from Covid-19

Sat, Jul 03, 2021

Pandemic has exposed the limits of modernity. It is time to reflect on the illusory character of our inflated egos, the way we live.

Could the coronavirus be the prescription our exam fever needs?

Wed, Apr 28, 2021

The pandemic has forced us to rethink how we live our lives. We must also allow it to dismantle our exam-centric education system that only creates hyper-competitiveness and perpetuates inequalities.

Bengal politics is just like rest of India: toxic, gross and violent

Tue, Mar 23, 2021

Never mind what the bhadralok class thinks. The poll campaign has exploded the myth of Bengali exceptionalism.

In classrooms, we need to rediscover meanings of ‘disobedience’, ‘nationalism’

Sat, Feb 27, 2021

As teachers, many of us become overly cautious so that every word we utter in our classrooms becomes "technically perfect", "legally sanctified", and is in tune with the dominant ideology of nationhood.

Choice before JNU is not between Nehru and Vivekananda, but between a plurality of thought and the psychology of revenge

Wed, Jan 06, 2021

The university should be an ideal place to encourage students and teachers to engage with this plurality of visions, and even live with philosophic ambivalence.

There is no correlation between one’s intellectual ability and performance in examinations

Fri, Oct 16, 2020

In this world, there is no poetic wonder, no criticality of social science, and no enquiring spirit of science. High cut-offs in admissions are no reflection of standards, but a case of rote learning and hyper-competitiveness

Pandemic has confronted us with the challenge of redefining our role — as friends, communicators and healers

Sat, Sep 05, 2020

Even in the virtual classroom, teachers are doing something more than just dictating the notes of biology and geography; they are touching and healing the tormented souls of their students. Let us salute them on Teacher's Day.

Patriotism need not be free from criticality or art of resistance

Mon, Mar 09, 2020

Education should sow the seeds of true religiosity and universalism: A mind that sees beyond borders.

Gandhi’s dreams for the nation were dented in 2019. The new year offers hope

Mon, Jan 06, 2020

From Jamia to JNU, from Hyderabad Central University to Aligarh Muslim University, and from even the IITs and IIMs, students are dissenting. In this non-violent and aesthetically enriched resistance, I have begun to see the return of the lost dream.

The new generation has to experiment with the Mahatma, and his art of resistance

Sat, Oct 26, 2019

I ask myself: How was it possible for him to be religious, yet so elastic, dialogic, open and inclusive? Even though he chose the political domain as his field of sadhana, never did he allow religion to be reduced to an ideology of hatred and division.

Teachers ought to renew faith in the very meaning of the vocation of teaching

Thu, Sep 05, 2019

They are not loyal soldiers, nor cogs in a bureaucratic machine. They must be free to be wanderers. And poets and philosophers

The escape from freedom

Wed, Jul 17, 2019

Normalisation of surveillance destroys what sustains a civilisation — human interaction filled with trust, care.

Education in the liberal arts and humanities are important in themselves

Thu, Jun 06, 2019

The standardised “ambition” that schools and anxiety-ridden parents cultivate among the teenagers makes it difficult for them to accept that it is possible to imagine yet another world beyond the “secure” career options in medical science, engineering and commerce.

We need to question deletions and exclusions from school textbooks

Mon, Apr 08, 2019

We also need to see knowledge as an experience of enchantment, not an act of consumption. It is high time we took the debate beyond merely the content of knowledge — Aurangzeb or Shivaji, Savarkar or Ambedkar, Vedic rites or Nizamuddin Auliya’s verses