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              (continuing from Part 4)
-------------------------------------------------------

Dear friends,

In my first but very brief tour of a famed American
university, U-Conn in Connecticut, I think I did get
carried away a little. But lest I went overboard in my
excitement -- or got far too fanciful in my
impressions of education and universities in general
in America (what with my rather exuberant comparisons
with "divya-dEsams", "vidyA-bhUmi",
"gnyAna-ananda-mayam" et al of my native India) -- my
good (SriVaishnavite) friend Prof.Narasimhan
Srinivasan of U-Conn made sure I was brought down to
earth a little. Thanks to him I got a glimpse of not
only the sunny side of American "vidyA" but its dark
side too.

I followed Prof.Narasimhan into a large seminar hall 
where, he told me, he was about to address a large
gathering of students -- not his own from U-Conn but
from outside. "I'm scheduled now to give an half-hour
talk", my Professor-friend told me, "and I hope you
will not mind sitting in too". Why not, I thought to
myself, it might give me a different perspective into
another facet of America -- the so-called
"vidyA-bhumi" of my imagination.

"I'm going to address a seminar now", said my friend,
"A couple of colleagues and I are going to talk to a
group of about 100 inner-city youth from high-schools
in places like Hartford and other towns and cities in
Connecticut state. These teenagers come from poor,
under-privileged social backgrounds. They constitute
what in America we know as "minority students." 

"Mainly, they are youth of African-American and
Hispanic origins. It would be hard for someone like
you, believe me, to imagine the distressing social and
family circumstances from which these youth come ---
broken homes, estranged parents, family history of
violence, drug, alcohol abuse etc. etc. ... Looking at
these children has often made me silently wonder: if I
were to come from their kind of social background, if
I were in their shoes, would I ever have made it this
far in life, as Professor at U-Conn?" 

The Professor led me into a large, elegant,
fluorescent-lit seminar-hall with neatly terraced rows
of seats overlooking a lectern below in a
semi-circular pit of the room. A large projection
screen hung on the wall and a panel of professors --
Prof.Narasimhan's learned colleagues at U-Conn -- was
seated below it, waiting for the seminar to begin. My
friend Nawaz and I, mere onlookers, took our seats in
the farthest rear to watch the proceedings.

In a few moments, a hundred-odd young men and girls,
all in their teens, jauntily entered the auditorium.
As expected they were all either black or Hispanic all
from schools in the inner-cities in and around
Connecticut. For the first time in life, I took a good
first-hand look at young, 'under-privileged' America. 

Dressed in colourful winter clothing, with peaked
caps, hoods and parkas, wearing sneakers and boots of
all shapes and hues, and carrying noteboooks in duffel
bags slung casually over their backs, they filed in
and took their seats, all the time gesturing and
calling out noisily to each other in loud, cheerful
tones. 

I watched them take their own time settling down. To
someone like me from India, for whom the term
"under-privileged" connotes not so much lack of
Education as it does malnutrition or ill-clothing that
one may witness in some backward provinces of India,
these minority-youth appeared to be far from
'under-privileged'... I thought they all looked
particularly well-fed, and as happy and irreverent too
as high-school teenagers of the world tend to be. 

But then I quicky realized what I was witnessing was
only America's social facade -- and that in a land
such as America where basic necessities of life such
as food, health, clothing and housing were reasonably
assured to almost all its citizens, the only deep
chasm that separated the poor, deprived classes from
the higher, privileged ones of society was "vidyA" 
-- Education. 

In a few minutes, the seminar began...

                **************

I learnt that chief purpose of the seminar (a day-long
affair where my friend Prof.Narasimhan and faculty
colleagues spoke and made excellent audio-visual
presentations all meant "to raise awareness of
minority students of academic opportunities at
U-Conn") was to instil in the youth a strong awareness
about the inestimable value of university education
and the big, lasting difference it could make in their
lives. The main aim was to "educate them about
Education" i.e. encourage them to persist against all
odds in life and remain dogged in academic pursuit
even after high-school... rather than give it all up,
regress rapidly and get lost in life's -- and
especially America's -- many dark and hopeless
waysides... 

"Many of these unfortunate minority students in
American high-schools", continued Prof.Narasimhan,
"drop out of school long before they graduate. More
tragic is the case of those who get beyond that stage,
are good enough indeed to make it to a university like
U-Conn, but alas, simply run out of motivation". 

These young souls just give up hope of any higher
pursuit, or of the fine things in life. They
altogether forsake the great dream of Education,
letting slip the opportunity to break free from the
narrow and oppressive destiny awaiting them. Sinking
into apathy and despair, the black bane of the vast
social class known in America as 'minority', they just
waste away in life... 
                 
             ************

Listening to my friend's rather dark but insightful
commentary on the state of education in America, it
sounded both sad and ironical to me. The land I'd
imagined to be a virtual "divya-dEsam" of great
universities -- of 'temples of learning' filled with
the exciting air of "gnyAnAnanda-maya" -- and where
Nobel-winning minds flourished; a land with long
history and unbroken tradition of ample educational
opportunity ("vidya") -- opportunity that was as
bountiful in fact as its snow-fed fresh water
resources ("aapah")-- now, why was such a great land
of learning, a sacred "gnyAna-bhUmi", unable to
attract and embrace its children from the so-called
class of under-privileged "minority" in America?     

My friend, Prof.Narasimhan's sad commentary, I
realized, had a deeper though hidden message behind
it. The purpose of a nation's universities, of its
great "temples of learning", is not only to further
the frontiers of Knowledge, to inspire great
discoveries of the human mind or to produce giant,
Nobel-winning intellects. Equally important, if not
more, is the purpose of reaching out to embrace the
social 'have-nots', the class of the
'under-privileged' i.e. making sure they are welcomed
and co-opted into the common mainstream of the
nation's life. 

The success of American education -- why America's
very greatness as a 'vidyA-bhUmi' -- is thus not only
to be measured by the number of Nobel-laureates it has
produced or by the number of industrial or
technological patents it has enabled register in its
name worldwide. It has to be measured also by the
struggle its university teachers (like my friend at
U-Conn, for example) put up in seeking out and then
leading the under-classes of the land towards the
gates of the university. 

As a passive but curious spectator that day at the
U-conn seminar, I think I was able to witness a small
but vivid piece of America's social struggle in action
-- the struggle and sacrifice its teachers constantly
put up to close the chasm between the 'have-s' and the
'have-nots'... and in the process increase the number
of students entering the great universities, the
virtual "divya-dEsams" of America.     

                ***********

Late that evening my Muslim friend Nawaz drove me back
from Glastonbury to New Jersey. It was a long, long
journey into the night through the American
wilderness... While Nawaz concentrated on tearing down
the Interstate at a ferocious speed somewhere close to
the legal limit of 70-80 miles per hour, I found
myself drifting off into silent, private reflection...

The seminar that I'd just witnessed at U-Conn, what
was it essentially all about? 

Was it not a sort of "aavahanti hOmam" too in its
essential character? Was it not a noble effort of
teachers, in the mould of the ancient Upanishadic
ideal of the Taittiriya, striving hard to gather ever
larger numbers of students under the wings of the
community of America's learned? Was all this hence not
the true wealth of America? And, indeed, all its great
fame as a nation? 

As I journeyed to New Jersey that spring night, the
words of the "The Psalm of the Universal Teacher" from
the Taittiriya Upanishad, for some deep and strange
reason, kept echoing in my head:

    "Lord, may I grow in spiritual wisdom,
    And may I have food and clothes and cattle        

    
    May students come to me from far and near,
    Like a flowing river all the year;
    May I be enabled to guide them all
    To train their senses and still their minds;

    May this be my wealth, O Lord,
    May this be my fame."   
                        (Taittiriya Upanishad:(1.4.2)

              ************

            (to be continued)

Rgds,
dAsan,
Sudarshan


























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