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Vishesh Kumar: So how would you introduce yourself and work in a general way to start off?

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Tathagata Sengupta: Okay.

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So I am academically sort of trained in mathematics, so I did my PhD in algebraic geometry.

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And so then I, kind of, sort of took up a position at University of Hyderabad, Mathematics Department, where I taught for around, I think, six years or so.

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I was teaching mainly master students and PhD students.

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So, while teaching mathematics courses, of course, you run into several sort of questions, fundamental kind of questions around education itself, around the act of teaching or learning itself.

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But for me, it was also...

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I mean, I was kind of not very unhappy with my experience within the classroom.

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In fact, one of the most happy times I spent in the university where when I was in the classroom and [inaudible]

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But what bothered me was, kind of, the idea of the university in general.

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So overall, what was going on in the university, and generally speaking, the university system.

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And also what was going on in the mathematics department.

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And these were not necessarily technically speaking issues to deal directly with learning mathematics, but things like how...

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So, there are several anecdotal things I can maybe cite.

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But just take one example.

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For instance, there was this one Muslim student in one of my classes and Muslim students are in a way not...

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You don't find enough Muslim students [inaudible] mathematics education, for various reasons.

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And so whenever you have a Muslim student in a mathematic MSc program, it would be kind of seen by the faculty, I mean by the department as a whole, as some kind of a funny thing.

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And they would sort of, when you sit in faculty meetings no one would say anything on the face, but like, you can make it.

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When they talk about this particular student, there'll be a smirk or someone will cough and that kind of stuff.

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This is just one example, but you see similar things happening with women students, you see similar things happen with non-binary students and so on.

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And then there are like endless stories of how particular kind of students...

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Another student I had was from Tamil Nadu.

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He was a first-generation learner and his parents were daily wage workers and the kind of harassment that that person had to go to through in the department, including things like Brahmin faculty members sort of telling him on his face that, "You are in the wrong place," and, "Maybe you should go and work with your parents," and those kinds of things.

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What started bothering me from almost day one, I would say, in that space is, what kind of impact do these kinds of things have on those same students when they are actually sitting inside the classroom?

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Can we actually separate the classroom from the faculty offices, or the department itself, or the canteen, or the university campus in general, or what's happening in the university?

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These are the kinds of things that kind of kept bothering many of us, not just me.

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Meanwhile, you probably know one of the Dalit students in the University of Hyderabad, Rohith Vemula.

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He was basically pushed to kill himself, and this became a huge issue.

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So, that was a kind of watershed and there was quite an intense movement around it when this happened.

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But one of the things that this movement ended up being was, for many of us, it was kind of a watershed moment of actually taking on some of these questions head-on.

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It kind of felt like you can't really brush off these things.

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You can't sit and assume that things will get better over time and so on and so forth.

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[inaudible] some tweaks here and there that we do and we keep doing those things and things will go right.

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The whole situation then was such that it didn't really allow you to, sort of, [inaudible] along those lines.

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It felt extremely urgent to take on some of these longstanding issues in a guided head-on sense.

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So all of this, I think, kind of threw me off my track in a way, like doing this formal mathematics research and so on, because it's just difficult to do it.

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It's just difficult to sit and do mathematics research when you know that most people are actually structurally precluded from doing the same kind of research, and maybe even much better research than many of us.

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So that is, kind of, what drove me to working on trying to think formally on the question of education, particularly mathematics education.

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So that's, kind of, a brief background.

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That's when I, kind of, decided to formally shift disciplines of sorts and I moved into mathematics education and that's when I shifted to HBCSE.

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This was around 2018.

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And so from then on I've been trying to sort of work on these questions of mathematics education.

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I do want to get back to mathematics research at some point [inaudible] , in mathematics.

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So, hopefully that can happen in some time, in a less sort of violently contradicted sense with the questions of mathematics education, because that's kind of fun.

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Vishesh Kumar: Yeah.

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That's fascinating.

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You're free to steer this in a bunch of different directions, but the direction that we had thought through was, do you want to build on this thinking with talking through a relatively specific project or set of projects that you've been doing, especially in the context of education over the last few years.

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And, feel free to describe it as a theoretical, as an academic construct, or just the process.

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Like, what are the goals that you're focusing on, there in terms of context, with respect to the people, the place that you're doing some education project.

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Tathagata Sengupta: Okay.

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Right.

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So, I can...

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I mean, maybe like one of the things I can try to do is, I can try to sort of talk a little bit about one of the projects that I was involved in, which did not work.

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And sort of talk a little bit about why it did not work.

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And then maybe from there, we can go on to what we are trying to do now, kind of.

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In way, we hope to be informed by the [inaudible]

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Vishesh Kumar: Absolutely.

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Yeah.

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That sounds interesting.

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Tathagata Sengupta: So, this particular project, I mentioned is, kind of...

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So, I mean like, when I started, what [inaudible] , like I said.

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I mean, having concerns, well, exactly kind of opening them up, [inaudible] . So, questions of, sort of, social relations, economic relations, gender relations, colonial relations, and so on.

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And how these kinds of relations...

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What kind of impact do they have on education.

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Right?

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So that was kind of...

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That was where I, anyway, sort of started from.

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And what that meant in particular...

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And like I said, one of the things that I saw in one of my main difficult points that I started from was kind of questioning this idea of classroom education.

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Right?

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Because I know [inaudible] classroom education became kind of...

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Then kind of the way we...

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And this is like, I mean, it was always not just the individual, I must say, all of these have been, kind of, like I work with many other people, and did include many of our students and colleagues and [inaudible] , and so on.

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But all of us, kind of, collectively, in a way, had a common vantage point.

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I mean, our common thought process that, if we are trying to look beyond classroom education, then, how do we go about it?

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Right?

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What is one of the ways in which people, sort of, approach this?

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And so, one of the things that we kind of thought of understanding is that, how do people who don't subscribe to this kind of, what many have described as sedentary kind of life.

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Right?

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I mean, like a settled society.

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Right?

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I mean, let's say, we can think of like the [inaudible] of the settled rural society, or the settled urban society, and the school system and classrooms, and where kids are supposed to sit in one room, inside one room, for like five or six hours of their day, and go through lessons.

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I mean, this is a particular idea of education.

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Right?

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And there is no real reason why everyone on this planet should think of education along those same lines.

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Right?

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So, we kind of started, began with trying to understand, like, what could be some of the other ways in which people have approached the question of learning and so on.

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And one of the...

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Naturally, we were trying to understand people who generally, let's say, don't subscribe to that kind of sedentary ways of life.

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Right?

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So, which particularly meant that trying to talk to and discuss these things with, let's say, people from nomadic communities, or people from generally sort of forest dwelling communities, let's say, Adivasi communities.

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So, that's where we started from.

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I'm saying this because, typically, when we hear most people, including many so-called critical educators, when they talk about working with Adivasi students, or let's say, nomadic students, they go with some kind of developmentalist kind of attitude.

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Right?

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I mean, that's not what we are trying to do.

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That's not what we were trying to do.

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So our goal was not to teach these people necessarily, no, but the way we teach calculus and so on.

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But to really understand, on the other hand, what should be our way of teaching something like calculus, which in a way is not in violent disagreement, with their world views.

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Right?

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Or their way of looking at practices of education or knowledge, generally, or relations between the teacher and the student, and those kind of things.

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So that's where we kind of began from.

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So, the main place where we were kind of trying to try out these kinds of meetings and workshops, et cetera, was in Purulia in this district of West Bengal.

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And these were sort of meetings with [Sabar] community people.

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So there is this community of people called Sabars who are traditionally forest dwelling communities, and they have this kind of violent history and impact in many ways, of fully violent present, of like being declared as criminal tribes.

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Right?

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So these are, like, from the Brahmanical colonial days.

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I mean, they have been kind of listed as these born-criminals for that.

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Right?

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So a large part of their political struggle has, of course, been against colonial practices, but particularly has been on the question of the legalism of, what does it mean?

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What does crime even mean?

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Right?

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But then, what happened was when we went to sit and sort of in the conduct meetings with the people, with the elders, let's say, and also with the students, and particularly the women students, is we found that we didn't have...

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So West Bengal, one of the things I should mention, perhaps, is that West Bengal is heavily NGOs.

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Right?

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So wherever you go in these kinds of places, you'll always have like some kind of NGOs who have made it into these spaces, who have taken up this development, this agenda of educating people and all that.

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I mean, all the usual stuff.

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And, what's remarkable is how all of these NGOs...

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I mean, almost none of these NGOs are actually led by the people with who they claim to be working.

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Right?

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So, for instance, in this particular place that I'm mentioning, the NGO that works there is led by Bengal [inaudible] , who have this kind of inner sense, what we could call it, evangelist kind of [inaudible] . And in a sense, I mean, it won't...

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Like, when you talk to these people, it won't like come up.

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They won't typically come across as evangelist in the first glance, unless you are someone who knows [inaudible] looks really well.

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Right?

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I mean like, either as an insider to that kind of culture, or as sort of an outsider subject of that kind of culture, who face the brutalities of these kinds of cultural hegemonies.

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Right?

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But anyway, this NGO, for instance, they have this progressive facade.

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Right?

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And, in a sense, like in a typical Bengali [inaudible] sense, they have the most progressive facade you can possibly imagine.

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So for instance, their main USP is that someone like Mahasweta Devi was part of the inception of that NGO, for all practical purposes also.

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And Mahasweta Devi, you may have read her works, is one of these really well known Bengali upper caste authors who has actually done significant work in trying to tell the stories of such people who have historically faced this kind of violence, particularly in Bengal.

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So that's about as progressive views can and possibly get.

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And by "progressive", I always have the speech in quotes.

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But that's basically as progressive as you can possibly imagine, while confining yourself within, sort of, the paradigms of [inaudible] . Right?

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So in a way, so to speak, this is one of the better NGOs we could be proud of.

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But even there, I mean, so what we found is like, after that point, it just became very difficult to sort of continue this kind of work because you have, basically...

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Like, the engagement start getting intensely mediated, through these kinds of bureaucracies, and these kinds of things, your hierarchies and stuff.

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And these don't often take...

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So, what we typically mean by good NGOs, for instance, is that these are basically NGOs, these are basically groups or organizations that won't make this very exclusive.

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Right?

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I mean, on the face of it, they will quote Babasaheb Ambedkar, they will quote all right.

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They will quote all the correct kinds of people.

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Right?

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So they have this progressivism here, but then...

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I mean, you have to sort of spend time with them on a mundane basis, to realize what's going on.

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So for instance, questions of the sanctity of the classroom, for instance, how should people sit in a classroom, that kind of stuff.

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Right?

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I mean, this will be done in the name of like, utilities.

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Like, it’s kind of utilitarian that logic, Right?

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I mean, this kind of disciplining is often...

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I mean, there's no morality behind this.

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And this is just sort of, isn't this just the commonsensical way of making the classroom business easy, that kind of stuff.

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Right.

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But then you see what's going on through this, you see sort of the world views of people getting erased, and all the views of the entire people getting erased through this kind of thing.

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So, that's kind of where we got stuck, in a sense.

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And we didn't want to continue this work further in a sense, because we thought that...

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And now if you look at it from the Sabar students.

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Right?

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So, people like us...

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I mean, so we are not the only people who are going to sort of meet these kind of agendas through that NGO.

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Right?

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I mean like, every other day they have people coming from Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, et cetera.

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Like, everyone who has a project will go and sort of try to test it out on these people.

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Right?

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So, they are kind of used to this kind of phenomenon that people from outside, urban people, people from the metropolis are coming with their wisdom and sort of salvage us.

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So, we didn't want to sort of get into that kind of...

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We didn't want to be seen by these people in the same sense, because we don't subscribe to those ideas.

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But then we also realized that as long as we keep going through the same NGO architecture, we can't help it.

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I mean, that's exactly how they will perceive us no matter what we say or what we are doing.

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So at some level we kind of felt that this is not going anywhere.

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And I mean, this is not really the way to do things.

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Right?

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So this is kind of the failure wala, I should mention.

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But then once we stopped doing that, then kind of, it became again another second round of crisis for us.

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Right?

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Okay.

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So then how do we really go about it?

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Because this is not a singular case.

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Right?

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I mean, this is kind...

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We all know that this is kind of the situation almost everywhere.

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Right?

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So what then could be a possible way to go around this things?

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So that kind of marked our phase change for us in this kind of work.

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And so we halted all these projects that we were doing and sort of went back into some kind of soul searching, almost, of sorts.

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So that has kind of characterized this last couple of years of work for me in a way, I mean.

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So last couple of years, I haven't been actually conducting that way.

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Like, when I say projects, I don't mean of workshops and so on in that, like organized sense.

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But mainly what we've been doing is trying to sort of conduct various kinds of...

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In a way, amorphous kind of consultations, but with various different kinds of people, dealing with various different kinds of social realities.

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One of these, in a way, which is what I wanted to...

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One of the examples I could take into account, like how did we try to sort of...

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What did this mean for us?

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What kind of new directions could this have opened for us, in a sense.

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So to take one example of that, so for instance, while this was going on, some of us were also part of other works.

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Right?

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So we were working on one of the things that we are still actually continuing to work on is on the question of money lending, on the question of microfinance and debt traps that working people are getting underwritten.

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And this actually got extremely exacerbated during the COVID period, to mainly these online money lending apps and those kinds of things.

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And as people are getting thrown out of their jobs, and as they're...

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I mean, what we would call social security measures.

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Right?

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Like, health, education, et cetera, as these things are getting more and more privatized and becoming more and more expensive, et cetera, people are getting into these kind of almost non-negotiable debt traps.

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Like, the kind of debt traps that...

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Well, no one really expects, I think, anymore that in their generations they can get out of it.

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So that's the direness of the situation.

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So, we were conducting surveys and interviews with these people and trying to understand what's happening and so on.

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And through that, we kind of...

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So mathematics in a way, the concerns around mathematics also started emerging from that, for obvious reasons.

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Right?

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Like, this kind of quantitative mathematics and what is the kind of quantitative paradigm of these kind of mathematical rationalities that undergird our entire economic rationalities in a sense.

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What does that do to people's lives, and so on?

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And what role does mathematics play in this?

00:24:17.460 --> 00:24:17.490
Right?

00:24:17.490 --> 00:24:20.659
So this kind of, anyway, emerged organically as a simple question for us.

00:24:21.179 --> 00:24:31.220
Do you know how mathematics, it quite literally seems to have become the modern god, of sorts.

00:24:32.450 --> 00:24:32.490
Right?

00:24:32.490 --> 00:24:32.988
I mean, it kind of...

00:24:32.988 --> 00:24:34.299
Like, moralities are in a way dominated by mathematical rationalities.

00:24:34.579 --> 00:24:34.739
Right?

00:24:34.739 --> 00:24:37.269
So for instance, the question of compound interest rates.

00:24:37.649 --> 00:24:37.679
Right?

00:24:37.910 --> 00:24:48.230
So if you've taken a loan, like, some guy has computed the interest levels for you, and written it down in some policy document and so on.

00:24:48.230 --> 00:24:55.060
It has almost become like a divine covenant of sorts.

00:24:55.110 --> 00:24:55.209
Right?

00:24:55.209 --> 00:24:55.352
I mean that, of course, you have to pay this tax.

00:24:55.352 --> 00:24:55.364
Right?

00:24:55.364 --> 00:24:55.416
Otherwise you are guilty.

00:24:55.416 --> 00:24:55.429
Right?

00:24:55.429 --> 00:24:55.494
Otherwise, you are a sinner.

00:24:55.494 --> 00:24:55.942
And that's actually how most of our founders who are in these kinds of debt traps think about themselves.

00:24:55.942 --> 00:25:04.290
And most of these, we should remember, when we are talking about money, like microfinance and cell health groups, et cetera.

00:25:05.630 --> 00:25:17.160
Most of these debtors that we are talking about are not just any working class people, but mostly women, mostly working women.

00:25:17.310 --> 00:25:33.500
And so the way these women end up on this road of like self guilt, or self doubt, and these kinds of things, they literally start thinking of themselves as immoral people, Right?

00:25:33.500 --> 00:25:34.600
As sinners, and so on.

00:25:34.600 --> 00:25:37.810
That, "I have taken a loan from this bank and I've not been able to pay it back."

00:25:38.439 --> 00:25:41.230
And then we kind of started asking ourselves, "Hold on a second."

00:25:41.230 --> 00:25:41.231
Right?

00:25:41.231 --> 00:25:41.236
I mean, where is this morality really coming from?

00:25:41.236 --> 00:25:41.237
Right?

00:25:41.237 --> 00:25:41.446
Our religious scriptures don't really talk about it, so where is this moral power coming from?

00:25:41.446 --> 00:25:41.539
Why do the people...

00:25:41.539 --> 00:25:41.796
I mean, people literally use this word that, "I'm a sinner."

00:25:41.820 --> 00:25:41.850
Right?

00:25:52.510 --> 00:25:53.899
And when they use words like that, like saying guilt, et cetera, you are bound to think in religious systems, because we are religious.

00:25:53.899 --> 00:25:54.306
So then we were like, "Where is religion coming in all this?"

00:25:54.306 --> 00:25:54.816
And then it turns out that, okay, this is kind of a mathematical [inaudible] . Right?

00:25:54.816 --> 00:25:55.353
So that kind of threw up the question of mathematics from a very different kind of vantage point.

00:25:55.353 --> 00:25:55.353
Right?

00:25:55.353 --> 00:25:55.360
So, that point that has occupied our work since then.

00:25:55.360 --> 00:25:56.872
So one of the upshots of this, for instance, is that now when I think about mathematics, like school curriculum.

00:25:56.872 --> 00:25:56.972
Right?

00:25:56.972 --> 00:26:06.849
I began to notice how we are told these kinds of mythical stories of how mathematics is the queen of natural sciences, and that you will not understand natural sciences unless you know mathematics.

00:26:08.179 --> 00:26:22.869
So all these kinds of things.

00:26:22.869 --> 00:26:23.182
We keep hearing everywhere.

00:26:23.279 --> 00:26:23.409
Right?

00:26:38.189 --> 00:26:39.029
Including critical educators.

00:26:40.260 --> 00:26:48.580
But if you take up the NCERT textbook on mathematics, it has got absolutely nothing to do with natural sciences.

00:26:48.580 --> 00:26:50.000
I mean, you don't find anything.

00:26:50.000 --> 00:26:50.377
I mean, there's no physics, there's no chemistry, there's no life sciences, nothing.

00:26:50.377 --> 00:26:50.402
Right?

00:26:50.402 --> 00:26:50.578
Like, all you really have is economics.

00:26:50.578 --> 00:26:57.020
I mean, look at the word problems, or look at the kind of...

00:26:58.010 --> 00:26:59.479
It's basically an economic mathematics.

00:26:59.479 --> 00:26:59.669
Right?

00:26:59.669 --> 00:27:01.623
So the kind of mathematics that we are...

00:27:01.623 --> 00:27:06.784
And that's why we [inaudible] had some kind of advanced, theoretical mathematics education.

00:27:06.900 --> 00:27:08.270
All of us kind of go through this experience of...

00:27:08.270 --> 00:27:22.960
What we thought was mathematics during our school days doesn't seem to hold up anymore anywhere when you get into undergraduate mathematics education, or even much more so when you get started with a PhD program in mathematics.

00:27:22.960 --> 00:27:23.060
Right?

00:27:23.060 --> 00:27:29.100
I mean, you almost start kind of questioning that, "Okay.

00:27:29.100 --> 00:27:33.930
If this was mathematics, then what you were taught, for those 12 years, wouldn't have been mathematics."

00:27:33.950 --> 00:27:35.050
These two can't be the same thing.

00:27:35.050 --> 00:27:35.360
Right?

00:27:35.670 --> 00:27:45.850
I mean, we have that sense, but I think in this sense, I think we can try to begin to make sense of this, why we feel that kind of a jump.

00:27:45.850 --> 00:27:47.609
Because these literally aren't the same kind of mathematics.

00:27:47.609 --> 00:27:47.769
I mean, they are...

00:27:47.809 --> 00:27:58.350
Just because you use the same numbers or the similar looking symbols and similar looking alphabets, and variables and those kinds of things, it doesn't make two disciplines the same.

00:27:58.350 --> 00:28:00.279
These are basically two different disciplines.

00:28:00.289 --> 00:28:00.320
Right?

00:28:00.330 --> 00:28:03.320
So the school curriculum is basically economic mathematics.

00:28:04.310 --> 00:28:13.279
So once we notice that, then our question about, what does it mean to teach and learn mathematics at the school level?

00:28:13.279 --> 00:28:22.620
Let's say, became a drastically different question, because then it becomes like inseparable from economic rationalities, and economic moralities, and those things.

00:28:22.620 --> 00:28:22.650
Right?

00:28:22.830 --> 00:28:33.455
So that is something that we are currently working on, in consultation with people who are dealing with these kind of debt traps and other kind of economic catastrophic situations.

00:28:33.455 --> 00:28:35.669
So that was one direction.

00:28:35.670 --> 00:28:42.749
And then, meanwhile, COVID happened, and that kind of brought into question, the question of health in a central sense.

00:28:43.159 --> 00:28:43.229
Right?

00:28:43.279 --> 00:28:47.610
So what does health and rationalities and moralities around health have to do with mathematics?

00:28:48.380 --> 00:28:48.510
Right?

00:28:48.510 --> 00:29:01.919
So we've seen the use of mathematical models repeated throughout these last couple of years years, in terms of trying to negotiate, trying to negotiate it with the realities of the pandemic.

00:29:01.959 --> 00:29:10.740
So, a kind of similar question we are trying to investigate, it's kind of analogous to the economic question that I mentioned.

00:29:10.750 --> 00:29:28.850
That, what role does mathematical morality have in shaping our moralities around health and all of those kinds of [inaudible] . If we, sort of, stop for a while and say that, "Okay.

00:29:30.410 --> 00:29:31.930
What happens if, instead of centering..."

00:29:32.270 --> 00:29:37.200
Like, my agenda is still, how to teach and learn mathematics, that agenda hasn't changed.

00:29:37.599 --> 00:29:56.519
But what really, I think, has changed is this following question that, what happens if in the name of mathematics educations we don't center this formal abstract mathematics to begin with, but we actually center, let's say, the question of health, and wellbeing, and freedom, and autonomy, and these kinds of things.

00:29:56.579 --> 00:30:02.490
And, we center those questions, and then we look at the role of mathematics vis-a-vis all of these.

00:30:02.790 --> 00:30:02.830
Right?

00:30:03.380 --> 00:30:09.820
I mean, how would that, sort of, change how we look at mathematics?

00:30:09.890 --> 00:30:12.110
Or what does it mean to learn mathematics?

00:30:12.480 --> 00:30:21.139
So, sorry for going on such a long [inaudible] , but that's briefly in a very summarized sense.

00:30:22.880 --> 00:30:25.720
I mean, I don't know if that addresses some of [inaudible]

00:30:26.070 --> 00:30:26.490
Vishesh Kumar: That's...

00:30:26.679 --> 00:30:30.793
I don't think we need to worry too much about having contained answers.

00:30:31.000 --> 00:30:36.269
I think it does definitely cover the crux and it goes beyond, and it was very interesting to hear.

00:30:38.519 --> 00:30:52.779
This almost feels like a small slice of this work, our next question, but thinking of the logistics on also your radical journey you've had, as you've been doing this work, what has surprised or intrigued you?

00:30:54.170 --> 00:30:56.570
And this can also be just logistical challenges.

00:30:56.580 --> 00:31:02.826
Like, some of the things that you mentioned with respect to how they're suspicious when you have to work through NGOs.

00:31:02.826 --> 00:31:04.310
But what are other aspects?

00:31:04.840 --> 00:31:08.639
But also, just any other, challenges or surprises.

00:31:10.579 --> 00:31:11.929
Tathagata Sengupta: That's a really interesting question.

00:31:12.769 --> 00:31:12.839
Okay.

00:31:12.839 --> 00:31:12.909
I mean, there are lots of things that really surprised me, that I wasn't really expecting, and all of them have been actually quite chilling surprises.

00:31:12.909 --> 00:31:12.917
I mentioned one.

00:31:12.917 --> 00:31:12.955
So, one of the main things, like I mentioned religion just a while back.

00:31:12.955 --> 00:31:12.957
Right?

00:31:12.957 --> 00:31:12.971
So, one of the things...

00:31:12.971 --> 00:31:17.870
Like, this kind of the religiosity around debt and all that.

00:31:17.870 --> 00:31:18.020
Right?

00:31:18.020 --> 00:31:18.578
On the one hand I said, this kind of tour was on an investigation into the role of mathematics in all this.

00:31:18.578 --> 00:31:45.879
But parallely what it also did was kind of, for me personally, I'm still trying to sort of convince my comrades to do the same.

00:31:46.119 --> 00:31:57.070
I mean, sort of take up some of this, but I still have to work on it [inaudible] . But for me personally, one of the other trajectories, sort of, was to study religion.

00:31:57.190 --> 00:31:57.320
Right?

00:31:57.320 --> 00:31:58.649
I mean, to read up the history of religion.

00:31:59.479 --> 00:32:01.965
And in a way, this..

00:32:01.965 --> 00:32:03.590
And in a way this...

00:32:03.590 --> 00:32:07.820
So one of the things that really, when I started reading about religion...

00:32:07.820 --> 00:32:10.639
And this is something that I've been doing for the last six months or so.

00:32:11.169 --> 00:32:19.520
So one of the things that kind of amazed me was, we keep saying things like, we've noticed this modern...

00:32:20.049 --> 00:32:21.635
So to speak, I don't want to use the word modern.

00:32:21.635 --> 00:32:25.929
I mean, what we really mean by modernity is capitalism.

00:32:25.930 --> 00:32:28.376
So, I'm actually more comfortable with talking about capitalism.

00:32:28.610 --> 00:32:35.496
Because modernity almost is a chronological category and I don't think it really makes sense to think of timing that linear fashion.

00:32:35.530 --> 00:32:38.189
As if everyone in today's world is modern in the same sense.

00:32:38.839 --> 00:32:42.665
So, I don't want to use the word modern, but let me use the word capitalism instead.

00:32:42.665 --> 00:33:03.450
So capitalism and therefore capitalist college systems and education systems have relentlessly tried to convince us that science and religions are opposite categories and they're locked into this mortal conflict [inaudible] . And a lot of our science education and mathematics education is rationalized using this.

00:33:03.450 --> 00:33:13.550
I mean, and this is a long history and this is a colonial history.

00:33:13.550 --> 00:33:14.430
And several people have...

00:33:14.929 --> 00:33:21.880
I mean, many of us have heard this repeatedly that, okay, I mean, this was not how people sort of thought about these things all the time.

00:33:21.880 --> 00:33:26.899
I mean, like the separation between religion and science is a new thing and it was not always the case.

00:33:26.899 --> 00:33:28.100
And if you go way back...

00:33:28.100 --> 00:33:38.520
I mean, if you go into the pre-capitalist history of the world, you won't see people making that kind of quality distinction between what's religious and what's scientific.

00:33:39.740 --> 00:33:46.039
Now we heard this kind of things, but at least for me personally, I never stopped to think that, okay, what does this really mean?

00:33:46.660 --> 00:33:55.950
I mean, what does it do to our notions of science or our notions of religion, if we are to not make a distinction?

00:33:56.720 --> 00:34:02.680
How did people in those times, how were they making sense of the world?

00:34:02.720 --> 00:34:09.219
So that was one of the questions I always had in mind when I sort of went back to look into the history of religion.

00:34:11.629 --> 00:34:14.659
But what I was still expecting is that...

00:34:19.429 --> 00:34:21.039
Well, I don't know what I was expecting.

00:34:21.040 --> 00:34:30.510
But I mean, I guess one of the things that I was kind of, I guess it's fair to say I was expecting is that, okay, I mean, you don't have separate disciplines in a sense.

00:34:32.380 --> 00:34:33.580
So you have the same guy.

00:34:33.690 --> 00:34:40.949
I mean, so let's say, let's talk of the men, I mean, same guy who is a religious guy.

00:34:40.949 --> 00:34:43.240
So we have heard about, let's say...

00:34:43.240 --> 00:34:46.109
I mean, it's good to take examples.

00:34:46.350 --> 00:34:49.770
So let's say Isaac Newton.

00:34:50.110 --> 00:34:57.769
We know that Isaac Newton, while he was doing his research on sort of mechanics, at the same time he was also an alchemist.

00:34:57.790 --> 00:34:59.029
He was also doing alchemical research.

00:34:59.900 --> 00:35:04.180
And in fact, most of his publications are in alchemy.

00:35:04.180 --> 00:35:18.840
I mean, if you just do a pure what counts, I think someone sort of estimated this, it seems if you take a what count of Newton's alchemical publications, the total what count goes beyond a million.

00:35:21.450 --> 00:35:23.410
So it's a huge bulk of work that he did.

00:35:23.469 --> 00:35:27.089
And so, I knew this, and this was not new information for me.

00:35:27.090 --> 00:35:41.504
But then every time I thought about this, like the way I kind of made peace with this practice, I guess that, okay, during half of the week, Newton was being sort of a physicist and then the rest of the half of the week was being an alchemist.

00:35:41.859 --> 00:35:45.622
As if these two things have nothing to do with each other.

00:35:45.622 --> 00:35:50.651
As if, within his head, these people would make these compartmentalization.

00:35:50.651 --> 00:36:08.186
So, this wouldn't probably expressed the separate disciplines, but surely when they do the scientific [inaudible] , they should try not to make something like alchemy with something like cosmology or something, that kind of stuff.

00:36:08.186 --> 00:36:09.563
I mean, all the astronomy and stuff.

00:36:09.760 --> 00:36:24.740
And then, so what surprised me is that, not only is this not true, not only is it the case that Newton's alchemical notions were central to his physical notions and vice versa.

00:36:25.150 --> 00:36:28.526
That is, notions around mechanics were central to his notions about alchemy, but also particularly on that said then...

00:36:28.526 --> 00:36:37.619
I mean, so let's say we see this in Newton and then you sort of start asking, "Okay, was Newton the only guy who was doing this?

00:36:37.810 --> 00:36:38.790
What about the others then?"

00:36:39.160 --> 00:36:43.734
So then you sort of start revisiting everyone you thought you had known before.

00:36:44.070 --> 00:36:55.169
And then once I started doing that, one of the things that I found quite shocking in fact, and happily, I was shocked, I must say that, most of what we today mean by mathematics...

00:36:56.380 --> 00:37:00.720
Actually not just from not even religion so to speak, but in fact were cult practices.

00:37:03.040 --> 00:37:11.100
The kind of practices that today much for science people would describe as superstition and cult and unscientific.

00:37:11.260 --> 00:37:11.581
Well, that's where platonic mathematics really emerges from.

00:37:11.581 --> 00:37:11.690
I mean, like Pythagoreanism was basically a cult.

00:37:11.690 --> 00:37:11.772
And you need to be part...

00:37:11.772 --> 00:37:12.582
It's kind of understandable if you think about it in those terms.

00:37:12.582 --> 00:37:30.369
I mean, you really need to be a part of a cult if you are to really believe that the world is made out of numbers.

00:37:30.690 --> 00:37:33.970
That who really thinks like that?

00:37:35.020 --> 00:37:37.600
Or if you take like Descartes' skepticism.

00:37:37.780 --> 00:37:43.009
The level to which Descartes is said to have taken his skepticism too.

00:37:43.400 --> 00:37:47.120
I mean, if you read this guy's writings.

00:37:47.300 --> 00:37:50.049
I mean, the kind of doubts, what he means by doubt.

00:37:50.330 --> 00:37:53.620
I mean, is this chair really there or so on?

00:37:53.620 --> 00:37:59.480
I mean, like that guy who is walking on the street is that a real human being or a ghost or an automaton?

00:38:00.550 --> 00:38:02.770
These are the kinds of questions that Descartes begins with.

00:38:03.250 --> 00:38:11.140
Which is why he gets into this enormous moral and emotional crisis of not knowing who to trust anymore, not knowing what to believe anymore.

00:38:11.180 --> 00:38:21.550
Everything has to be sort of, like doubt becoming sort of the, in a sense, the main epistemological tool of what doing science even means.

00:38:22.949 --> 00:38:27.020
And Descartes almost gives the impression that he's the first person who invented the notion of doubt.

00:38:27.060 --> 00:38:29.930
And nothing could be further from the reality.

00:38:29.930 --> 00:38:31.300
I mean, like people have always dealt with doubts.

00:38:31.300 --> 00:38:49.990
I mean, if you look at the entire Islamic canons, of Islamic science and theology, stretching over like a thousand years, let's say, people have been obsessing over questions between doubt and belief and so on.

00:38:49.990 --> 00:38:52.906
So Descartes was surely not the first guy to do this.

00:38:53.010 --> 00:38:58.020
But he was the first guy to sort of take it to that kind of incredible levels.

00:38:58.029 --> 00:39:14.489
And if any of our friends were doing this, I mean, any of the people we hang out with had locked them up in a room for a couple of months and going into this kind of emotional crisis, we would be very worried.

00:39:19.050 --> 00:39:32.969
And then it sure enough turns out that Descartes himself was quite active in sort of the cult practices around those things and [inaudible] . So we can go into much more details on these things.

00:39:34.459 --> 00:39:37.290
And these are not the circumstantial evidence, this is literally what they're writing.

00:39:38.160 --> 00:39:39.160
Because occulting those...

00:39:40.870 --> 00:39:49.074
We need to remember that, what we today mean by occult is not what these people meant by occult when they were talking about occult.

00:39:49.110 --> 00:39:51.699
So, that is something that was quite surprising.

00:39:51.700 --> 00:39:56.589
And right now, that's one of the things I'm trying to work on, the occult origins of mathematics.

00:39:56.589 --> 00:40:02.990
I'm trying to sort of piss off people who want to equate mathematics with natural science.

00:40:03.220 --> 00:40:04.969
I mean, for the longest period of human existence, mathematics had nothing to do with it.

00:40:10.549 --> 00:40:11.209
Vishesh Kumar: Fascinating.

00:40:11.209 --> 00:40:42.210
So do you think that in this result, reconstructing this connection, do you think it would help the people who are dealing with the discord that's happening in their experience, like when they're dealing with the violence of mathematical undergirding of systems and then making it like a religious sin upon themselves, would it help them parse it or what?

00:40:43.299 --> 00:40:43.699
Tathagata Sengupta: Yeah.

00:40:44.750 --> 00:40:45.880
I mean, I can't be sure.

00:40:45.970 --> 00:40:52.136
And these are things we can speculate about.

00:40:52.136 --> 00:40:55.996
We'll only know when we discuss this with people and maybe try out certain things and see if it works.

00:40:55.996 --> 00:40:56.709
It cannot work...

00:40:56.929 --> 00:41:15.129
But I mean, one of the things that I do know, however, why I think it's important to do this work is that, so here is what typically happens and this kind of takes us back to Purulia in a way.

00:41:15.389 --> 00:41:33.075
I mean, so the moral power relations that exist between sort of, let's say, the urban sort of metropolitan rationalist scientists or mathematicians, vis a vis let's say, those women students in Purulia.

00:41:33.230 --> 00:41:35.540
There is a moral hierarchy and it's a power relation.

00:41:35.540 --> 00:41:42.370
And the power relation basically is like, I mean, to put in very few terms, the power relation sign sounds something like this.

00:41:44.020 --> 00:41:58.119
It's kind of, like on the one hand, the knowledge system that we kind of describe as science or mathematics or any of these things are supposed to be rational, that's the first assumption, and whatever that term even means.

00:41:58.519 --> 00:42:07.250
And the opposite side of it is obviously that, okay, I mean, those other guys are not as rational then.

00:42:07.850 --> 00:42:12.220
Because obviously, they haven't read Descartes or Newton or any of these people that we have read.

00:42:12.640 --> 00:42:14.439
So, they can't be really rational.

00:42:14.439 --> 00:42:19.449
I mean, they need to be taught what being rational even means.

00:42:19.640 --> 00:42:29.030
So, that's what kind of creates this kind of, the other facade of this, which is certain kind of moral superiority.

00:42:29.890 --> 00:42:36.633
And that moral superiority can be sort of couched in like really progressive terms and really benevolent terms and developmentalist terms.

00:42:37.030 --> 00:42:44.759
Often they are even described in sort of liberatory principles, that rationality has liberation and those kinds of things.

00:42:45.270 --> 00:42:47.260
That we're going there to sort of liberate these guys and stuff.

00:42:47.300 --> 00:42:56.680
But like Sartre said, "You don't have good colonizers or bad colonizers, you have colonizers and that's it".

00:42:56.680 --> 00:43:00.800
I mean, so that's the relation.

00:43:01.060 --> 00:43:02.850
That's what colonial relations are.

00:43:02.850 --> 00:43:07.079
It's not really about good science or bad science there, it's not a question of good mathematics versus bad mathematics.

00:43:07.079 --> 00:43:13.240
It's not a question of good colonizer versus bad colonizer, it's about colonizer and that's it.

00:43:13.240 --> 00:43:22.160
So, that's kind of the power relation that we also experience in Purulia.

00:43:22.179 --> 00:43:22.604
Which is why I kind of pulled out of that.

00:43:22.604 --> 00:43:22.829
I didn't want to sort of participate in that.

00:43:22.829 --> 00:43:27.890
And the least I thought I should do is not to participate.

00:43:27.890 --> 00:43:42.875
But coming back to what we were discussing earlier, I mean, like [inaudible] is that, there have been people, of course, who have pointed this out and who have sort of disputed this and tried to correct it.

00:43:42.875 --> 00:43:47.484
But typically if you notice, the main...

00:43:47.609 --> 00:44:04.490
And I'm talking right now about like the critical educators, people who are kind of seen as the progressive [inaudible] . I won't generalize, I mean, of course, there are people who've not subscribed to this, which is where I'm also coming from.

00:44:04.490 --> 00:44:08.516
And these are the people I'm [inaudible] that's why I'm not the first guy who is saying all this.

00:44:09.080 --> 00:44:15.630
But, most of the people, the track they to choose is to sort of either to hold on...

00:44:15.660 --> 00:44:22.540
When you say that these people are irrational, that's where you are wrong, these people are also rational.

00:44:22.589 --> 00:44:23.482
And this is how they're rational.

00:44:23.660 --> 00:44:42.279
So they will go into studying those other people, let's say the Sabars in Purulia, and they will try to sort of, they'll use various kinds of methods to establish, to prove almost that, what the Calcutta rationalist calls as superstition or irrational is actually rational, if you look at it in a particular way.

00:44:42.279 --> 00:44:44.590
So, that rationalizing exercise you do.

00:44:44.650 --> 00:44:53.730
I mean, that's what bulk of the progressives are engaged with as far as I can tell.

00:44:54.540 --> 00:44:58.040
But the approach I'm trying to take is actually, the exact opposite approach of this.

00:44:58.410 --> 00:45:08.120
Like my main concern right now is to actually poke holes into this premise that, the Calcutta rationalist is actually very irrational.

00:45:10.050 --> 00:45:27.070
Because that's, I think in my understanding, trying to go into sort of people's cultural processes or cultural practices or worldviews or metaphysics or however you might want to describe it, and trying to sort of rationalize those things in our terms of what rational even means.

00:45:27.099 --> 00:45:36.579
I think I find that as an arrogant attitude, because it kind of begins with this assumption that everything can be rationalized.

00:45:36.859 --> 00:45:45.450
And it also kind of assumes that we have already rationalized everything about our own lives and our own existence and now we are there to rationalize everyone else's experience.

00:45:46.779 --> 00:45:50.290
I mean, that I feel is an extremely arrogant approach to take.

00:45:50.490 --> 00:45:56.312
And so, therefore I want to take the exactly opposite attitude.

00:45:56.312 --> 00:45:59.330
That, maybe we should rethink about, when we say that we are really rational.

00:45:59.560 --> 00:46:01.350
And so that's kind of where I'm coming from.

00:46:01.350 --> 00:46:07.275
And I'm trying to say that, trying to trace the occult origins of mathematics.

00:46:07.275 --> 00:46:19.370
One of the purposes I have in mind is to be able to then kind of basically raise this question that, okay, one of your main tools of today's modern capitalist rationalism seems to be born out of occult practices.

00:46:19.630 --> 00:46:20.939
So how do you explain that?

00:46:25.710 --> 00:46:48.730
So now, I don't know if this helps in that broader question of education itself, but the hope is that at least this should help in, I think, if you do it sincerely, if enough people do it, particularly let's say, Indian context, it should open up the space, I think.

00:46:48.730 --> 00:46:57.390
I mean, in a way it becomes, in my understanding, a kind of equalizing effect on these different sets of people.

00:46:57.859 --> 00:47:02.870
I mean, the simple fact that rationality is no one's private property.

00:47:03.240 --> 00:47:06.770
I mean, everyone is in certain ways rational and in certain ways extremely irrational.

00:47:09.400 --> 00:47:16.885
And that happens as much with the colonizers, in fact, I would say much more so with the colonizers than with the colonized.

00:47:17.200 --> 00:47:20.280
So in my understanding, one of the things this should...

00:47:20.450 --> 00:47:25.910
I mean, at least one of the goals I have in my mind is to sort of, in a way, flatten the world a bit.

00:47:26.890 --> 00:47:41.740
And then I think the question of knowledge and the clash of knowledge and the conflict of knowledge and the role of education in that world of conflicting knowledge systems, I think that, that debate can be had in its own terms.

00:47:41.980 --> 00:47:45.890
That debate, or that discussion can happen in the terms that it deserves.

00:47:45.920 --> 00:47:50.840
Because right now, the kind of terms that we use to sort of have those discussions, I think don't work.

00:47:50.970 --> 00:47:53.120
And so, that's kind of [inaudible]

00:47:57.320 --> 00:47:58.050
Vishesh Kumar: Fascinating.

00:47:58.790 --> 00:48:06.120
Finally, the next question that we had, I think we've mostly covered the crux of it, which is, what you think are the most critical issues.

00:48:07.700 --> 00:48:18.239
And especially when I framed it, when I read three to four of your pieces, it was interesting that I did not see the common true line that this is how you were thinking.

00:48:19.080 --> 00:48:27.090
I saw that as you were thinking about science education, as you are thinking about mythology or these things and sense making.

00:48:27.090 --> 00:48:39.960
But it is interesting that you're trying to think at a more general level of, I don't know if it's right, is it trying to argue against what it is normalized through these colonial histories and structures and thinking

00:48:40.680 --> 00:48:43.410
Tathagata Sengupta: I mean, I think I do have a jigsaw puzzle in my mind.

00:48:43.410 --> 00:48:47.390
And some of those pieces you mentioned are kind of separate pieces of the puzzle.

00:48:47.390 --> 00:48:47.823
And like-

00:48:48.040 --> 00:48:48.430
Vishesh Kumar: I see.

00:48:48.440 --> 00:48:55.089
... Tathagata Sengupta: right now, I can't say that I have a complete picture of the puzzle in my mind, but the hope is that there is a puzzle somewhere.

00:48:56.099 --> 00:49:01.152
I mean, we can get to it only if we try to sort of have some handle on the multiple pieces of that puzzle.

00:49:01.152 --> 00:49:07.150
And then we can sort of see if this, whatever I said just now, a lot of it is just pure speculation.

00:49:07.770 --> 00:49:10.949
But some of these pieces need to be worked out to be able to test out some of issues.

00:49:12.430 --> 00:49:12.990
Vishesh Kumar: Interesting.

00:49:13.890 --> 00:49:32.460
That feels like it fits into exactly the second half of that question, which is, which of these things do you feel are most actionable, which do you think can actually convert to recommendations for policy or something as a material change, if you're thinking those terms at all?

00:49:34.250 --> 00:49:34.660
Tathagata Sengupta: Right.

00:49:34.700 --> 00:49:35.146
I mean, so we are trying to find, so what are some of the things that...

00:49:35.146 --> 00:49:35.149
Some of the projects, example the women debtors.

00:49:35.149 --> 00:49:35.151
So, that's an ongoing work.

00:49:35.151 --> 00:49:35.155
So there are multiple aspects of that work.

00:49:35.155 --> 00:49:35.164
So like for instance, surveys and interviews, and...

00:49:35.164 --> 00:50:06.739
I mean, I'm part of quite a big group of really young people, many of them whom are from those areas who are working on this.

00:50:07.160 --> 00:50:11.680
So, we have like, I mean, different people amongst us are working on different aspects of this.

00:50:12.290 --> 00:50:17.100
But that's one of the sort of concrete works that we have right now.

00:50:17.100 --> 00:50:20.069
And we do hope that some kind of actionable things might emerge out of that.

00:50:20.480 --> 00:50:24.463
So one of the actionable things that we do have in mind is of course, curriculum and pedagogy works.

00:50:24.463 --> 00:50:33.409
But like Sarangapani writes, that pedagogy or curricular works are basically...

00:50:33.559 --> 00:50:34.959
They're emergent processes.

00:50:35.409 --> 00:50:40.000
Actually, I don't think in design terms, I think.

00:50:40.199 --> 00:50:49.680
So for me, the question of curriculum and pedagogy is not a design problem, but it's more a problem of cultural emergence.

00:50:49.810 --> 00:51:09.900
So, that's one of the things that we are trying to find out, whether we can set up, let's say, a space, where different kinds of people can get together and work on pedagogic concerns, work on generating pedagogic materials, that makes reasonable sense to, let's say, everyone involved.

00:51:09.910 --> 00:51:18.306
An everyone should include necessarily, in this case, for instance, to get a specific example, it should include necessarily some of the women debtor themselves.

00:51:18.306 --> 00:51:35.164
And actually, like more so, like some of the women debtors who are, in a way, politically agitated, who think that political action.

00:51:35.379 --> 00:51:39.520
I mean, when we say action, one of the main aspects of action that I have in mind is political action.

00:51:39.560 --> 00:51:42.407
So, I think, yeah.

00:51:42.407 --> 00:51:42.598
So in that sense, yes, we are trying to work with people who are invested in some kind of political actions on some of these issues.

00:51:42.598 --> 00:51:42.744
And trying to see what kind of pedagogy and curricular directions can emerge out of doing such kind of engagements.

00:51:42.744 --> 00:51:42.781
But coming back to policies.

00:51:42.781 --> 00:51:42.970
I mean, so policies in a way I'm not...

00:51:42.970 --> 00:51:43.230
Yeah.

00:51:43.230 --> 00:52:10.420
So I'm kind of...

00:52:10.449 --> 00:52:17.660
You might have guessed by now, I'm kind of an outsider in a sense, to this learning sciences and so on.

00:52:17.660 --> 00:52:19.839
So, for instance, I don't think there can be a science of learning.

00:52:20.620 --> 00:52:22.129
I don't even understand learning sciences.

00:52:23.270 --> 00:52:33.450
And that's one of the kind of points I'm trying to make in my research works also to sort of actually completely argue why we can't have anything called the learning sciences.

00:52:34.590 --> 00:52:44.719
But I mean, definitely not to say that we don't have scientific questions on the question of learning, but it's kind of saying...

00:52:45.509 --> 00:52:57.643
It's kind of like how, the science or engineering of making medicines can't be the overarching framework of the question of health.

00:52:57.870 --> 00:53:00.390
Because health is not equal to medicines.

00:53:00.970 --> 00:53:03.520
Health is a lot of other things, one of which is medicine.

00:53:04.210 --> 00:53:08.290
So in that sense, learning is a huge thing.

00:53:08.700 --> 00:53:13.482
And one of the issues there is the science around, like let's say, it’s a cognitive question.

00:53:13.540 --> 00:53:19.420
But I don't see how everything can be converted into a science, the way that way we understand that.

00:53:19.969 --> 00:53:29.399
So anyway, so I just wanted to mention that, I mean, so in a sense, I think in a lot of different ways I'm not exact...

00:53:29.860 --> 00:53:40.461
I'm kind of an outsider to this kind of institution of the discipline of education.

00:53:40.461 --> 00:53:45.294
And, in a similar sense, I'm also an outsider to sort of governmental concerns.

00:53:45.294 --> 00:53:47.250
So in that sense, coming back to the question of policies.

00:53:47.259 --> 00:53:49.089
So policies are like the government's headaches.

00:53:49.710 --> 00:53:53.329
And the state and the market, it's their concern.

00:53:53.329 --> 00:54:02.019
And I basically think that, like this capital state market system is, to begin with, illegitimate.

00:54:02.059 --> 00:54:07.580
So their concerns to a large extent are also quite illegitimate.

00:54:08.679 --> 00:54:11.232
So yeah, I actually have this thing of like, I have an anti policy...

00:54:11.232 --> 00:54:11.391
I mean, I have kind of an, I guess, anarchist communist policy.

00:54:11.391 --> 00:54:11.640
I mean, I should kind of clarify who I am.

00:54:18.180 --> 00:54:20.000
So a lot of this is coming from an anarchist communist kind of...

00:54:20.000 --> 00:54:20.025
Yeah.

00:54:20.025 --> 00:54:39.379
And I think their policies and bureaucracies and rules and rulemaking, et cetera, to me, they actually are like apparatus of colonization and apparatus of exploitation of people's wealth and their freedom and all of that.

00:54:39.390 --> 00:54:42.890
So I'm not saying that like...

00:54:42.940 --> 00:54:50.554
I mean, the rules are important and in a sense, if you notice, people have always evolved.

00:54:50.554 --> 00:54:51.419
Societies and cultures have of always evolved their own rules of functioning.

00:54:51.450 --> 00:55:24.479
So, I mean, this is not point against rules per se, but when it comes to rule makings and policy makings that are sort of orchestrated or engineered by the concerns of the capitalist state market system, their idea of rules and policies are basically in my understanding kind of textual codifications of relations of violence.

00:55:24.719 --> 00:55:32.750
Relations of violence that are perpetrated at the end of the day by the use of guns.

00:55:33.040 --> 00:55:39.970
Because I mean, just imagine what would happen if for a week, the Indian state withdrew all its police forces.

00:55:40.420 --> 00:55:49.093
I mean, if there were no police or no armed forces, I don't think anyone, for instance, I don't think anyone would turn up to schools.

00:55:49.093 --> 00:55:50.660
I mean, I don't think people would go to schools.

00:55:50.669 --> 00:55:53.504
So a lot of these things are kind of...

00:55:53.504 --> 00:55:53.956
There is the structures of discipline, basically.

00:55:53.956 --> 00:55:55.943
And historically, I mean, it requires historical analysis.

00:55:55.943 --> 00:56:03.345
And if you look into history, I mean, it's quite clear how this happens.

00:56:03.345 --> 00:56:09.077
So the first phase of violence, I mean, if you take the example of slavery, conditioned labor or chartered slavery, or the genesis of capitalism, so to speak.

00:56:09.077 --> 00:56:27.049
I mean, like if you go back to fifteenth sixteenth century Europe, or if you look at sort of patriarchal gender relations and like the rise of the patriarchal state and so on.

00:56:27.220 --> 00:56:29.134
I mean, this happens all the time, right.

00:56:29.240 --> 00:56:35.590
So first of all, you'll have a phase of brutal violence, horrific episodes of violence.

00:56:36.320 --> 00:56:53.309
But then of course, because you also want to conduct business in an economic sense, you want market systems to operate and so on and so forth, you realize that, conducting your day to day activities by using the barrel of gun is not actually a physical thing to do, because that's not how anything really works.

00:56:53.329 --> 00:57:01.399
So, I mean, as a state, you can't actually afford to sort of continue that phase of horrific violence on people at large.

00:57:01.810 --> 00:57:03.820
So then you have to sort of...

00:57:03.980 --> 00:57:12.932
But by that time, through the use of this kind of sheer brute force, you have already established relations of exploitation, relations to violence and so on.

00:57:13.190 --> 00:57:23.620
And then after a while, you kind of graduate into a new phase where you say that, okay, okay, violence is bad and no one should be violent and so on and so on.

00:57:23.630 --> 00:57:28.257
Let's have rules, let's sit down and legislate laws and so that, this doesn’t happen again, et cetera, et cetera.

00:57:28.320 --> 00:57:38.740
The same guys who were in charge of that violence episode, they would typically be the ones or their shadow organizations would be the ones who would come and say that, "oh, let's sort of sort this out.

00:57:38.740 --> 00:57:40.370
Let's have more civilized processes."

00:57:41.270 --> 00:58:00.160
But if you then dig into those rules, you'll see that those rules do nothing to sort of turn around the relations of violence that were already created through that first phase of actually on the [inaudible] . So in that sense, written rules and policy documents, in my understanding, historically speaking, have been basically textual codifications of relations of actual physical violence.

00:58:00.160 --> 00:58:13.490
So one of the things for instance, this means for us that, so that's how we think of the question of policy and rules and bureaucracies.

00:58:13.860 --> 00:58:17.073
But what this also means for us that, it doesn't make sense to...

00:58:17.073 --> 00:58:25.670
We can't talk about education without also having to say significantly, something about the question of physical violence.

00:58:25.700 --> 00:58:37.919
And what kind of really amazes me in most of our institutional education literature is how, if you go through the bulk of that literature...

00:58:37.919 --> 00:58:41.590
Again, there are exceptions, not everyone is doing this, but the majority of them.

00:58:43.860 --> 00:58:54.170
You wouldn't get a sense that we are talking about a society which is in perpetual [inaudible] . That we are talking about a society which is basically run on the barrel of the gun.

00:58:55.120 --> 00:58:58.684
You don't see any mention of physical violence in any education literature.

00:58:58.880 --> 00:59:01.710
As if education or learning has nothing to do with it, which is absurd.

00:59:03.110 --> 00:59:04.620
So anyway, so that's kind of...

00:59:04.860 --> 00:59:09.090
That's where we are trying to...

00:59:09.090 --> 00:59:09.109
Vishesh Kumar: Yeah.

00:59:09.110 --> 00:59:11.710
Those are, I feel like, provocative important points.

00:59:12.190 --> 00:59:12.570
Thank you.

00:59:12.570 --> 00:59:16.420
And especially when you also mention...

00:59:16.610 --> 00:59:19.180
I feel like this also feeds directly into the next question.

00:59:19.190 --> 00:59:24.600
The parts where you point out, that you feel like an outsider, that you want to question the bounds...

00:59:24.800 --> 00:59:31.400
Or even at the attempts of setting bounds of this practice.

00:59:31.400 --> 00:59:38.490
And that question was, what works, role models, thinkers, theories, or schools of thought would you highlight as key influencers for your work and thinking?

00:59:39.780 --> 00:59:41.910
Tathagata Sengupta: So I already get like a part of it away.

00:59:41.910 --> 00:59:46.770
I mean, schools of thought [inaudible] . I mean, but like in terms of people, right.

00:59:46.770 --> 00:59:47.020
I mean-

00:59:47.459 --> 00:59:47.799
Vishesh Kumar: People, yes.

00:59:47.819 --> 00:59:47.850
Sure.

00:59:47.859 --> 00:59:50.120
... Tathagata Sengupta: Well, I mean, it's an endless list of people actually.

00:59:50.600 --> 01:00:09.409
So some of the people who I already quoted, people like Sartre and so on, but also Frantz Fanon, [inaudible] . And I mean, in a sense Frantz Fanon and not Paulo Freire, I must mention that.

01:00:09.409 --> 01:00:09.539
Vishesh Kumar: Interesting.

01:00:09.670 --> 01:00:09.690
Tathagata Sengupta: Yeah.

01:00:14.520 --> 01:00:15.935
We can get to that later.

01:00:15.935 --> 01:00:32.029
So Frantz Fanon is one and then David Graeber, I should mention, a lot of what I said about rules and bureaucracies and so on is basically based on the work of [inaudible] David Graeber who passed away last year from COVID.

01:00:32.889 --> 01:00:35.719
And I mean, in my understanding he's one of my favorite scholars.

01:00:38.339 --> 01:00:44.370
And then of course, like other usual suspects, like Babasaheb Ambedkar, Jyotiba Phule.

01:00:44.480 --> 01:00:49.919
So, I mean, so for instance, relation between sort of registering students, whatever I'm saying that phase, I have Phule in mind.

01:00:53.559 --> 01:00:54.520
Because Phule's understanding of...

01:00:54.520 --> 01:01:01.080
Because, if you look at Phule's main sort of pedagogy [inaudible] , he's repeatedly talking about Guru-Shishya relations.

01:01:01.319 --> 01:01:14.250
Which is to say that, I mean, like for Phule, the relations between the teacher and the student is of central importance, much more than pedagogic concerns or curricular concerns.

01:01:14.250 --> 01:01:24.063
And in fact way, what anti-caste reformers have been suggesting, or arguing is that, why won't you have good pedagogy and curricular?

01:01:24.320 --> 01:01:26.750
It's not very difficult, it's not rocket science to sort of come up with good curriculum and good pedagogy [inaudible] . And so there is no reason why you wouldn't have emergence of good literature, if you ensure that the social relations are conducive for that.

01:01:26.750 --> 01:01:26.861
If you ensure that the relations within the classroom, the relations between not just the teacher and the students, but between the students themselves.

01:01:26.861 --> 01:01:28.092
If you can think of a classroom, where for instance, a mathematics classroom, where people don't feel that it's normal to say that mathematics is not for women.

01:01:28.092 --> 01:01:29.566
I mean, now we can take this in terms of ethics.And we can say that, okay.

01:01:29.566 --> 01:02:01.240
And we can form a set of rules that, okay, these are ethically wrong things to me, these are ethically wrong things to say.

01:02:01.240 --> 01:02:09.030
And no one in this class will say this to any woman in the class [inaudible]

01:02:09.030 --> 01:02:20.617
So, in a sense, if I understand Phule correctly, in a sense, what some people actually are arguing is not a new set of rules or a new set of extra rules.

01:02:20.617 --> 01:02:28.300
Though they are talking about ethics, but what they really mean, I think is a new morality.

01:02:28.300 --> 01:02:37.069
I mean, what they mean is a new common sense.

01:02:37.069 --> 01:02:39.224
Where is that new common sense [inaudible] . Because all of us operate by a certain kind of common sense.

01:02:39.224 --> 01:02:39.678
And we kind of...

01:02:39.678 --> 01:02:41.833
Since we are so embedded in that common sense, we think that this must be the universal common sense.

01:02:41.833 --> 01:02:50.120
And now, I should also point out that there are a lot of different actors who say this kind of thing in particular.

01:02:50.120 --> 01:02:54.060
I mean, like use a very defined category.

01:02:55.620 --> 01:03:04.460
I could mention like postmodern scholars who say these kind of things [inaudible] . But that's also something that maybe we can go into later if that's relevant you think.

01:03:04.460 --> 01:03:13.540
That like when I'm saying that, my common sense, I don't see why that has to be shared by anyone else as their common sense, I'm actually not coming from a postmodern kind of thing.

01:03:13.540 --> 01:03:13.841
In fact, if anything, this is actually in various ways, radically opposite to...

01:03:13.841 --> 01:03:13.856
In radical rejection of postmodernist kind of ideas.

01:03:13.856 --> 01:03:13.866
But anyway, that's a separate view.

01:03:13.866 --> 01:03:13.959
But coming back to the people I'm quoting, yeah, so the Jyotiba Phule, Savitribai Phule, Rokeya Sakhawat and her ideas about feminist science and then sort of people like [Kim Dolware] ... And anthologists like [Kim Dolware] and what they have been arguing about sort of science and education and so on.

01:03:13.959 --> 01:03:16.450
And then, basically, I mean, I could say, certain sections of decolonial scholars.

01:03:17.380 --> 01:03:51.110
I mean, not everyone.

01:03:53.549 --> 01:04:16.406
I mean basically, the decolonial authors, I think we should take seriously, are the ones who make sure to find out that decolonization is not a metaphorical act.

01:04:17.610 --> 01:04:25.294
Decolonization is quite a literal activity, to say that one plus one equals two is a colonial act, is going to do nothing to change regulations for colonial.

01:04:25.294 --> 01:04:29.510
So, that's intracta move to metaphorize really serious issues of colonization.

01:04:31.160 --> 01:04:32.600
But there are, not everyone is doing that.

01:04:32.600 --> 01:04:37.605
And these are some of the people have in mind [inaudible] . They make sure that they point this out, that it's not a metaphorical thing.

01:04:37.605 --> 01:04:45.410
And these are also people which is why in just explaining [inaudible] I guess in a way, brings us back to [inaudible]

01:04:45.740 --> 01:04:51.169 So these are also the people, therefore who say that I mean, and this includes trans [inaudible] so that decolonization.

01:04:51.169 --> 01:04:52.217
If you're really serious about it, first of all, we should come to terms with the fact that decolonization is going to be messy.

01:04:52.217 --> 01:04:59.939
Right, it's going to be violent for all we know, it's going to be quite bloody.

01:04:59.940 --> 01:05:01.000
And we may not like it.

01:05:01.010 --> 01:05:03.461
We may say, I mean, like decolonization etc might be the vogue thing to do to talk about today.

01:05:03.461 --> 01:05:13.180
But like when such things really had happened or whenever people have tried to actually do such things, most of these, most of the people who have argued for decolonization haven't really liked it.

01:05:13.290 --> 01:05:16.760
I mean, they kind of, they were the first people to sort of reject those things.

01:05:16.760 --> 01:05:20.899
And in a way, so one of the things that these people talk about for instance is colonial futurity, right.

01:05:20.900 --> 01:05:33.999
I mean, so this understanding of like, when colonialists, when like current colonialists talk about progressive colonialists, such as the critical theorists, right I mean, who are part of the colonial establishment, but are critical of it.

01:05:43.560 --> 01:05:45.004
When they talk about decolonization and a lot of them do talk about decolonization.

01:05:45.004 --> 01:05:45.117
What, I mean, Freire is an example of this.

01:05:45.130 --> 01:05:58.270
When, they talk about a decolonized world, somehow their decolonized world they're in, they seem to be keeping a space for the erstwhile colonizers.

01:05:58.290 --> 01:06:03.760
Like there can be a change of hearts of the colonizers and then they can also exist.

01:06:03.760 --> 01:06:06.299
I mean we want a society where everyone can exist, right.

01:06:06.590 --> 01:06:12.939
So, there is a certain kind of colonial anxiety, like we need to sort of theorize decolonization in such a way that does not preclude us from a decolonized future, right.

01:06:12.939 --> 01:06:12.944
We should be also protected to some extent, right.

01:06:12.944 --> 01:06:13.943
So for instance, you can see this happening in Freire's writings whenever he talks about sort of the role of the colonizer, the critical colonizer, right, I mean, the role of the term Freire uses, the role of the oppressor, the role of the enlightened oppressor, right.

01:06:13.943 --> 01:06:14.463
So, Freire has this notion of enlightened oppressor, right.

01:06:14.463 --> 01:06:14.787
I mean that you are an oppressor, but you can reach a state of enlightenment where you are no longer the oppressor, right and then you are fine and so on.

01:06:14.787 --> 01:06:16.224
Which is why it's not, I don't find it surprising that, so in a place like India, all these kinds of upper caste organizations and I include upper caste communist organizations.

01:06:16.224 --> 01:06:18.910
I mainly actually talking about upper caste communist organizations, who for a long time have been working on questions of education and so on.

01:07:15.310 --> 01:07:26.050
And these are the same people who have by various means prevented non-upper caste people from becoming political members, from becoming leaders of their parties.

01:07:26.690 --> 01:07:29.000
They've prevented women from becoming leaders of their parties.

01:07:29.080 --> 01:07:35.580
But at the same time, if you look at their education, ideas of education etc, all of them come out, seem to begin from Paulo Freire.

01:07:38.000 --> 01:07:38.900
They are all Freirians.

01:07:38.900 --> 01:07:43.609
I mean everyone like critical pedagogy like seventies, eighties, nineties, if you look at the history of critical pedagogy work in India.

01:07:43.609 --> 01:07:55.360
Everyone is a Paulo Freire right, I mean banking model, everyone knows the banking model and everyone has set up like these reading, adult education movements and study circles and these kinds of things based on Paulo Freire's ideas.

01:07:56.400 --> 01:07:58.129
So, it's quite amazing, right.

01:07:58.130 --> 01:08:15.810
I mean, it's quite amazing that why not Frantz Fanon, I mean why is Fanon so difficult to sort of like practice as opposed to Freire and I think the reason is if you read Freire carefully, it's basically because Freire gives the colonialists the kind of space that Fanon refuses to give.

01:08:15.880 --> 01:08:24.543
Fanon says that if you are serious about the violence of colonization across centuries, you should give up at least temporarily speaking as a colonizer, you should give up any hope of futurity.

01:08:24.543 --> 01:08:32.149
Right, you should wake up to that fact of life that if seriously decolonization politics happens, no one will really care.

01:08:32.540 --> 01:08:38.630
When a mob comes and sets fire to your urban metropolitan city centers, they will not care who a good colonial is and who is a bad colonial is.

01:08:39.069 --> 01:08:39.789
Right, they'll not do that.

01:08:39.949 --> 01:08:43.120
So, we can't expect that to happen.

01:08:43.390 --> 01:08:45.598
It's actually outright dishonest academic practice to sort of ignore that and begin from that kind of a hidden assumption that there are good colonialists and bad colonialists.

01:08:45.598 --> 01:08:51.800
So anyway, these are some of the people I have in mind.

01:08:51.800 --> 01:09:15.945
I mean, there are many others, like I said [inaudible] , so there are people like Sylvia Federici, there are lots of historians that I'm borrowing from, there are lots of anthologists I'm borrowing from, there are lots of sociologists I'm borrowing from.

01:09:15.945 --> 01:09:15.993
And there are mathematicians also that I'm borrowing from.

01:09:15.993 --> 01:09:16.483
I mean, people like Sabina Hossenfelder, she's a theoretical physicist who has been raging this really difficult battle to sort of basically, she calls it 'gobbledygook'.

01:09:16.483 --> 01:09:17.249
I guess what I'm calling occult, Hossenfelder calls it 'gobbledygook', when she talks about [inaudible] where she talks about how this intense mathematization has converted physics into gobbledygook, right.

01:09:17.249 --> 01:09:17.262
Which is why we are kind of stuck.

01:09:17.262 --> 01:09:17.282
If you think about advanced cutting edge physics research, we are stuck beyond.

01:09:17.282 --> 01:09:17.294
I mean, post-Einstein, we are basically stuck.

01:09:17.294 --> 01:09:17.328
Which is for like 50, 60 years and this has now evolved into a huge crisis within actually the professional physics community.

01:09:17.328 --> 01:10:20.309
And people like Hossenfelder are not coming from the kind of political positions that I'm coming from, but their diagnosis when it comes to sort of what's happening with physics, I think matches quite strikingly with the diagnosis of a lot of these other people that are [inaudible] who are not necessarily talking about what's happening in the physics department so to speak, but when they talking about the what's happening on the streets.

01:10:20.309 --> 01:10:29.989
So what's happening on the streets is not different from what's happening within the physics department, within the large [inaudible] . So, it kind of spans across a large number of [inaudible]

01:10:29.989 --> 01:10:54.790
Vishesh Kumar: Yeah, there's even in, especially in the US learning sciences, so there is an interesting move of trying to figure out the relevance of Freire and even that it seems canonically within the science part of the learning science, the cognitive psych history or so on.

01:10:55.460 --> 01:11:00.609
I think even Freire is considered somewhat and underutilized radical perspective.

01:11:00.910 --> 01:11:02.309
So it is fascinating to hear.

01:11:03.290 --> 01:11:03.460
Tathagata Sengupta: Yeah.

01:11:03.910 --> 01:11:04.899
Vishesh Kumar: You're framing and

01:11:05.090 --> 01:11:14.095
Tathagata Sengupta: These days, by doing this work, the point we have reached now is now even Freire is kind of too much to sort of even Freire has become too radical.

01:11:14.095 --> 01:11:14.763
I mean, look where we have come to.

01:11:14.763 --> 01:11:25.289
I mean, we are talking, when compared to sixties where even like a typical sort of, let's say a socialist Congressi type, would also talk about Paulo Freire right.

01:11:28.180 --> 01:11:44.050
And from there, we have come today at a place where even Freire is kind of untouchable.

01:11:44.050 --> 01:11:44.086
Vishesh Kumar: Interesting.

01:11:44.086 --> 01:11:45.330
This, a bit moving our conversation side base.

01:11:45.330 --> 01:11:58.280
But I think there is a continuation, the next question where you've so far, especially the pieces I saw you were, you've been utilizing this variety of nontraditional channels and forms of writing.

01:11:59.070 --> 01:12:08.250
What has been the thinking behind these writing choices and what are your thoughts on the affordances of different media and forms?

01:12:08.370 --> 01:12:10.500
What audiences do you think are more reachable?

01:12:13.510 --> 01:12:13.800
Tathagata Sengupta: Yeah.

01:12:13.800 --> 01:12:13.891
I think so.

01:12:13.891 --> 01:12:13.897
Yeah.

01:12:13.897 --> 01:12:13.908
That's right.

01:12:13.908 --> 01:12:13.971
I mean, so that was a kind of a conscious decision.

01:12:13.971 --> 01:12:17.827
I mean, I do want to experiment around forms and styles and in a sense, it kind of comes from a larger general hypothesis in a way and I mean [inaudible] borrowing from a long tradition of people that, I mean forms are central forms and media are central to forms of expression and media of expression are quite central to sort of knowledge in general, right.

01:12:17.827 --> 01:12:57.114
So, knowledge, the fact that something like mathematics, I mean if you think about it, right there is something like mathematics that's any of these disciplines, so to speak, they don't like exist on their own.

01:12:57.114 --> 01:12:57.236
Right.

01:12:57.236 --> 01:13:00.270
I mean, you don't have anything called mathematics really.

01:13:00.280 --> 01:13:02.210
Right, I mean, all what you really have are mathematicians.

01:13:02.220 --> 01:13:03.460
Right, and mathematics is basically what they do.

01:13:03.460 --> 01:13:05.349
Right, so you basically have people doing stuff, right.

01:13:05.349 --> 01:13:08.749
That's basically what you have.

01:13:08.789 --> 01:13:08.899
Right.

01:13:08.899 --> 01:13:11.429
I mean, you don't have a standalone.

01:13:11.429 --> 01:13:29.989
Now, if you're to take that seriously and quite literally, then the sheer fact that not everyone adopts the same kinds of, same forms of expression and not everyone adopts the same media, should have something to do with how people do mathematics.

01:13:30.270 --> 01:13:31.480
Right, or what does it mean to do mathematics.

01:13:32.740 --> 01:13:39.789
So, that is kind of one of the reasons why I want to experiment a bit with these different forms.

01:13:39.879 --> 01:13:42.220
I mean, question of media, yes, absolutely.

01:13:42.220 --> 01:13:57.720
I mean today, when we talk about digital media, for instance, I mean, I think it, I always find it really like really an interesting exercise to sort of go back and sort of, kind of tally what people are saying today with what people were saying when let's say printing press came out.

01:13:58.160 --> 01:14:14.440
I mean, so we know people today, so that was also a similarly radical technological media, technological sheet paradigm, which kind of had huge, unforeseen impacts on what people meant by science, what people meant by mathematics and all that, right.

01:14:15.380 --> 01:14:34.840
Something quite similar is happening obviously today with like digital media and [inaudible] . And the comparisons in a way, like the point of going back to history is to sort of also try to see, because otherwise a lot of these things that we are embedded in, in the present feel a lot of times, these things feel as if these things are happening for the first time.

01:14:35.580 --> 01:14:37.047
And as if the kinds of concerns and anxieties that we are all trying to grapple with as if we're the first people to sort of [inaudible] like that's obviously not true, right.

01:14:37.047 --> 01:14:37.056
So, we get a sense of that when we actually go back into history and try to investigate what people discussing around those similar kinds of episodes.

01:14:37.056 --> 01:14:37.059
So, for instance, just to take an example of those, right.

01:14:37.059 --> 01:14:37.065
So we all today know how this WhatsApp culture is kind of destroying knowledge and data etc, right.

01:14:37.065 --> 01:14:37.068
Spreading misinformation and spreading violence.

01:14:37.068 --> 01:14:37.440
And amazingly, some of these people are at the same time, there are also people who think that printing press was a necessarily positive thing to have happened, right.

01:14:37.440 --> 01:14:37.494
Printing press, oh printing press led to like an explosion of really good knowledge.

01:14:37.494 --> 01:14:38.101
But, this internet WhatsApp is killing all that progress we made, right.

01:14:38.101 --> 01:14:45.620
I mean, that's kind of the sense we get, right.

01:14:45.620 --> 01:15:32.920
But if you look at the first things, I would say one of the main impacts of printing press culture when it came up, is Witch-hunts, right.

01:15:34.020 --> 01:15:45.894
I mean if you look at the history of Witch-hunts in Europe, spanning across three centuries, the role that printing press played in that is quite unbelievable, it's very, it's exactly similar to the kind of roles, the role that WhatsApp groups are playing today.

01:15:45.894 --> 01:15:59.000
In terms of agitating people about what, who are the witches and how to hunt them down, how to look at your neighbor, how to investigate that your neighbor is, I mean what does it mean to be a witch.

01:15:59.000 --> 01:16:11.290
And those kinds of blue books would be circulated and they would be printed and distributed feeling and lynch mobs would be sort of mobs would come up and all that, right.

01:16:11.290 --> 01:16:18.185
So it's like, but somehow we have erased the last part of that history at least from common popular discourse, right.

01:16:18.185 --> 01:16:22.300
I mean we, don't, when we think of printing press, the last thing we think about easily, right.

01:16:23.220 --> 01:16:27.640
So, that's kind of, in that sense, I think the questions about media are extremely important.

01:16:27.640 --> 01:16:46.710
And I think I don't have one thing to say about it, but for specific cases type [inaudible] but yeah, in general, of course I think media and forms of expression are quite, I would say quite central to production.

01:16:49.010 --> 01:16:49.180
Vishesh Kumar: Yeah.

01:16:49.180 --> 01:17:02.530
But they build on the general thoughts of yes, the medium as the message and also the people you'd talk to, the people you'd do things with, whatever is recognized.

01:17:04.119 --> 01:17:10.250
And how I'm seeing also participates in the, participating in the delineation of these things.

01:17:11.420 --> 01:17:17.970
What counts as math versus what counts as numerology or something are connections that are coming in my head.

01:17:17.970 --> 01:17:25.620
But I'm also interested to see here if you've, I think you mentioned that you've not been doing this for too long.

01:17:25.630 --> 01:17:32.759
But one also, do you want to share, what are some of the different things that you have experimented with and what have you found through them?

01:17:32.770 --> 01:17:36.520
Like, what are the conversations they spark, what did you hear back?

01:17:37.049 --> 01:17:44.390
What do you feel like were the affordances of writing a play dialogue sort of thing versus,

01:17:44.570 --> 01:17:45.250
Tathagata Sengupta: Absolutely nothing.

01:17:45.250 --> 01:17:46.113
I had no feedback from anyone.

01:17:46.220 --> 01:17:47.760
I don't think many people read also.

01:17:47.760 --> 01:17:48.290
Vishesh Kumar: I see.

01:17:48.290 --> 01:17:50.145
Tathagata Sengupta: You are of the very few people.

01:17:50.410 --> 01:17:57.577
I also didn't send it around too much, because a lot of these things I want to, I don't know I'm generally very self doubting.

01:17:57.630 --> 01:18:00.930
I am probably right now, not coming across as very self doubting, but I really am.

01:18:00.930 --> 01:18:21.030
I mean, which is actually why I have also avoided going for really formal publications and so on, because which is why I also requested you, if you could sort of postpone this meeting for a month because some of the things I told I was talking about, like on occult etc, those are some of the things I was studying then when you, so, I wanted to be careful with what I said.

01:18:21.030 --> 01:18:29.377
I wanted to sort of check out a little more few things, I didn't want to say things that wouldn't be correct, right.

01:18:29.460 --> 01:18:36.240
But the reason I kind of wrote those pieces that I wrote and kind of at least put them up in some places in public domain is to get feedback, right.

01:18:36.510 --> 01:18:38.250
That's basically why one should write, right.

01:18:38.620 --> 01:18:41.560
Because otherwise, how do you get feedback from?

01:18:41.560 --> 01:18:48.889
So in that sense, I have got feedback from people but these are still people who I kind of send those links, people I know basically, right.

01:18:48.889 --> 01:18:51.960
I mean kind of based on some kind of personal network connections and so on, and

01:18:51.970 --> 01:18:52.350
Vishesh Kumar: Yeah.

01:18:52.920 --> 01:18:55.990
Tathagata Sengupta: You send something you wrote to one of your friends and ask for feedback.

01:18:55.990 --> 01:18:59.040
That kind of feedback I got, but general public feedback, I didn't get.

01:18:59.590 --> 01:19:14.870
And in a sense, I think that's fine because I like this particular phase because it also gives someone like me, sort of some peaceful few years to sort of work out some of the details before really having to face the music of,

01:19:14.980 --> 01:19:15.540
Vishesh Kumar: Having yeah.

01:19:15.850 --> 01:19:16.240
Tathagata Sengupta: That you're,

01:19:16.280 --> 01:19:17.099
Vishesh Kumar: Public scrutiny.

01:19:17.110 --> 01:19:19.954
Tathagata Sengupta: So I want to be a little bit more prepared before I get there.

01:19:20.059 --> 01:19:20.349
So,

01:19:22.170 --> 01:19:22.480
Vishesh Kumar: Nice.

01:19:23.059 --> 01:19:25.699
Tathagata Sengupta: I don't, I don't think I answered your question though.

01:19:25.740 --> 01:19:25.979
I mean,

01:19:26.009 --> 01:19:26.389
Vishesh Kumar: I think

01:19:27.799 --> 01:19:28.170
Tathagata Sengupta: Affordances, yes.

01:19:28.190 --> 01:19:31.809
I mean, on the question of affordances, I think, some of the little bit feedback I did get.

01:19:32.580 --> 01:19:32.769
Yeah.

01:19:32.769 --> 01:19:35.549
I mean, I think those people were quite interested in response.

01:19:35.550 --> 01:19:43.469
And this includes people, some of my friends with whom I have differences, it's not like I agree with everything that they do.

01:19:43.480 --> 01:19:52.519
But some of my friends in friends and colleagues in education research, who I send those pieces to, and who sort of work on these kinds of questions of science education and media and forms and this kind of things.

01:19:53.679 --> 01:20:19.620
And the feedback I got from them is largely [inaudible] but beyond that, since we haven't really tried it out in sort of a public sense, for instance, I don't really, I can't tell you how sort of a young student would go through this and they would make out.

01:20:19.620 --> 01:20:20.820
And so that's something,

01:20:20.830 --> 01:20:21.230
Vishesh Kumar: I see.

01:20:22.629 --> 01:20:24.389
Tathagata Sengupta: Hopefully I'll have an answer to,

01:20:24.599 --> 01:20:31.550
Vishesh Kumar: Do you have any thoughts on its features affordances in for your own thinking or expression?

01:20:32.990 --> 01:20:33.250
Tathagata Sengupta: Yeah.

01:20:33.250 --> 01:20:33.849
Oh, okay.

01:20:33.849 --> 01:20:38.020
Yeah, so one of the, I mean again and I guess it's best to sort of cite examples, right.

01:20:38.020 --> 01:20:48.990
So, one of the things, again, this came up through studying the history of religion and science, particularly the history of Alchemy right.

01:20:48.990 --> 01:20:52.559
Right now, I'm actually quite, really, I find it, I don't know.

01:20:52.580 --> 01:20:57.470
You should also try.

01:20:57.969 --> 01:21:00.900
One of the things is, for instance, that what we mean by Chemistry today, right.

01:21:00.900 --> 01:21:03.740
I mean, it kind of goes back.

01:21:04.380 --> 01:21:08.137
I mean, basically obviously, I mean, Alchemy is the precursor of what we mean by Chemistry.

01:21:08.137 --> 01:21:10.940
But what's quite amazing is one thing that the kind of continuity, right.

01:21:11.250 --> 01:21:13.676
So for instance, most of the standard, at least like school, the school laboratory kind of or even the kind of the large sections of even some of the industrial laboratory setup kind of, the process of distillations or the kinds of instruments that we, or the kind of vessels that we used, etc.

01:21:13.676 --> 01:21:13.803
These are directly inherited from thousands of years of our Alchemical practice.

01:21:13.803 --> 01:21:13.814
Right.

01:21:13.814 --> 01:21:14.482
So, we owe a lot to the history of Alchemical practice.

01:21:14.482 --> 01:21:14.544
But, one thing that really I found quite fascinating is how, so basically what I mean to say is the idea of laboratory, right.

01:21:14.544 --> 01:21:14.585
The idea of laboratory is not due to Charles Boyle or any of those guys, right.

01:21:14.585 --> 01:21:14.631
I mean you had a notion of laboratories for thousands of years, right where people were doing that.

01:21:14.631 --> 01:21:14.923
And, by thousands of years, I actually mean, let's say as far back as Pharaonic Egypt, right.

01:21:14.923 --> 01:21:15.675
I mean Pharaonic Egypt is actually one of the main centers of Alchemical research.

01:21:15.675 --> 01:21:16.523
Alexandria and [inaudible] . Two of the first known or documented sort of writers or documented Alchemists so to speak, who sort of taught Alchemy and who gave lectures on Alchemy, both are women.

01:21:16.523 --> 01:21:16.551
And, the person I want to mention is called Cleopatra.

01:21:16.551 --> 01:21:16.582
I mean, this is the, this is not the same Cleopatra.

01:21:16.582 --> 01:21:16.602
I mean, this is Cleopatra, the Alchemist.

01:21:16.602 --> 01:21:16.647
And, so she was one of the first recorded Alchemist and the trend setter of sorts.

01:21:16.647 --> 01:21:16.698
I mean she was to Alchemy to what today Newton, Isaac Newton is to sort of [inaudible] right.

01:21:16.698 --> 01:21:16.726
I mean even her teacher, her instructor was another woman.

01:21:16.726 --> 01:21:16.743
I mean, these are two women.

01:21:16.743 --> 01:21:16.774
So her teacher was named Miriam, Jewish, a Hebrew-speaking Jewish woman.

01:21:16.774 --> 01:21:16.824
The point I was trying to get at is, if you look at how Cleopatra describes a laboratory.

01:21:16.824 --> 01:21:28.851
Or something like how she's writing about sort of this act of hermetically-sealed vessels in which you are conducting your chemical experiments on a burner and so on, on fire and something.

01:21:28.851 --> 01:21:28.956
Cleopatra describes that vessel, that hermetically-sealed vessel as metaphorically and as analogous to the mother's womb.

01:21:28.956 --> 01:21:28.960
Right.

01:21:28.960 --> 01:21:29.021
And she constantly talks, I mean, that's the language she uses to talk about chemical research.

01:21:29.021 --> 01:21:29.085
I mean for her, the language of chemical research is basically a feminist language in that sense.

01:21:29.085 --> 01:21:29.135
I mean it's about like how, producing, like child-rearing kind of thing, right.

01:21:29.135 --> 01:21:29.169
I mean, then she's talking about like biological world.

01:21:29.169 --> 01:21:29.226
I mean, so she places her chemistry laboratory in an inseparable world of lives, right.

01:21:29.226 --> 01:21:29.340
Now, if you compare that to today's pharmaceutical companies laboratory, I mean, centering something on that kind of biological lives, is the last thing you expect to happen there, right.

01:21:29.340 --> 01:21:29.401
I mean, the kind of industrial, when you think of the typical modern, industrial chemical level.

01:21:29.401 --> 01:21:29.580
Now this is the point why I'm raising this because, and that's where we need to get into some of the details of what they're then doing with all that and how the science is developing in a sense is, what kind of impact does it have?

01:21:29.580 --> 01:21:29.679
Like, I mean, so on the face of it, it may not sort of mean much, on the face of it may not sound very significant.

01:21:29.679 --> 01:21:29.701
It might just sound as, okay.

01:21:29.701 --> 01:21:30.034
Just another metaphorical device to think about basically the same thing, right.

01:21:30.034 --> 01:21:30.608
But, it's actually quite telling how, that's not the case.

01:21:30.608 --> 01:21:37.791
It's actually quite telling how the form or the kind of metaphysical, what do you call it, like the metaphysical background or the metaphysical language or the world that you choose to sort of talk about something like a chemical experiment, the kind of impact that has on the science of Chemistry itself, on the kind of experiments that you do, right.

01:21:37.791 --> 01:21:37.792
I mean how you connect it with everything else that you do.

01:21:37.792 --> 01:21:37.792
Right.

01:21:37.792 --> 01:21:37.794
I mean, so for instance, there, you won't have, so for instance, today, I mean, what has happened today on the other hand, right.

01:21:37.794 --> 01:21:37.798
So one of my friends, we are working on this also, that's another project that I told you initially, that kind of getting split into like five different projects.

01:21:37.798 --> 01:21:37.811
And I hope that somewhere that all come together, but so one of those project that I'm kind of currently engaged in is, with another friend, on the relations between chemistry and mathematics.

01:21:37.811 --> 01:21:38.701
And that kind of centering these things on the question of health.

01:21:38.701 --> 01:21:38.916
So there we were discussing how, we are trying to sort of discuss how.

01:21:38.916 --> 01:21:39.222
So if you look at sort of, modern medicines, right, if you have to take the example of modern medicines.

01:21:39.222 --> 01:21:39.420
If you go to Patancheru right, I mean, and, and we did this.

01:21:39.420 --> 01:21:39.711
I mean in the sense, Patancheru is this town near Hyderabad and it's right next to University of Hyderabad.

01:21:39.711 --> 01:21:40.017
Right, so when I was there and this friend I'm saying he was also a chemistry department master student there.

01:21:40.017 --> 01:21:40.231
So, we would, we were part of various kinds of groups that went into.

01:21:40.231 --> 01:21:40.476
So, Patancheru is that area that is kind of right next to the University of Hyderabad.

01:21:40.476 --> 01:21:40.706
And Patancheru is sort of the, you could call it the pharmaceutical hub of India.

01:21:40.706 --> 01:21:40.859
I mean the whole town is basically a pharmaceutical town.

01:21:40.859 --> 01:21:41.348
So all medicines, genetic drug industries that you can think of, American industries, Japanese industries, companies, American companies, all, and also Indian companies, all of them have production units in that area.

01:21:41.348 --> 01:21:41.563
And Patancheru on the, so that's where our modern medicines are coming from, right.

01:21:41.563 --> 01:21:42.870
I mean, so when, during this kind of pandemic times, as we would really hope that we have that whole Patancheru town should be as active, producing as many medicines as you possibly can and that kind of the, that's how important that town is, that industry is for our modern, our current notion of being healthy.

01:21:42.870 --> 01:28:05.129
But at the same time, Patancheru, not surprisingly is also the third most polluted town in the whole country.

01:28:05.949 --> 01:28:12.480
And so to the extent that the entire water system in that region has been completely messed up.

01:28:12.480 --> 01:28:16.760
And if you go to sort of, so these are the, this is Telangana, right.

01:28:16.950 --> 01:28:31.492
So, this was kind of, this was 'Nizam Ka Area', right.

01:28:31.492 --> 01:28:40.480
And one of the things that the Nizams were like fantastic built I would say is, tank irrigation systems, right.

01:28:40.740 --> 01:28:40.923
So, if you look at Telangana irrigation systems, they are like quite amazing the kind of irrigation systems that were in place.

01:28:40.923 --> 01:28:40.924
I mean, so Patancheru is no exception.

01:28:40.924 --> 01:28:40.936
So you go to that place, you'll find this really strategically developed reservoirs that would hold contained water, because you have to understand that this is plateau region, right.

01:28:40.936 --> 01:28:41.440
So water is, it's not as watery as let's say Bengal or Gangetic Plains.

01:28:41.450 --> 01:28:46.952
So, these are serious irrigation business, right.

01:28:46.952 --> 01:29:08.443
And so they have this huge tanks on which essentially the entire locality depends for everything, right.

01:29:08.690 --> 01:29:14.420
For drinking water, for grazing their animals, for everything basically, right.

01:29:14.420 --> 01:29:20.059
And when now, if you go to that area, you'll find those stands it's quite, that site itself is quite chilling.

01:29:20.059 --> 01:29:20.279
Okay.

01:29:20.279 --> 01:29:26.780
I mean, so you'll find like skeletons of cows and buffaloes, cattle, scattered all around those stands.

01:29:26.910 --> 01:29:32.799
I mean, these are cattle who have drank that water and poisoned, been poisoned to death because the water has become so poisonous.

01:29:34.320 --> 01:29:37.450
The point I'm trying to make is the following:

01:29:37.480 --> 01:29:56.260
That somehow, I mean, in our infinite wisdom, we have created a science where, so let's say, when you say health, health of the human body and health of nature have become too completely different things.

01:29:56.600 --> 01:29:56.987
And in fact, they seem to be in, at loggerheads with each other, right.

01:29:56.987 --> 01:29:57.723
I mean, so you have this antibiotic industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and the side effect of that pharmaceutical industry is this environmental catastrophe, which in fact has turned the entire region into what has been in several reports described as a petri dish of micro bugs.

01:29:57.723 --> 01:29:59.089
So, it's not, I mean how much more irony could it get that.

01:29:59.089 --> 01:30:01.695
I mean, this Patancheru it's not just the source of main bulk source of medicines, it's simultaneously also the main bulk source of Superbugs, right.

01:30:01.695 --> 01:30:50.019
Now, the thing is now, if you go and talk about, try to talk about this to sort of the scientists who are working in the pharmaceutical company, they will say that, oh, you are really looking for either the policy makers or you're looking to, you should talk to the politicians, or you should talk to the regulatory authorities, or you should go talk to the environmentalists.

01:30:50.470 --> 01:30:52.460
We are chemists, this is not exactly our concept.

01:30:53.760 --> 01:30:55.159
Now going back to Cleopatra, right.

01:30:55.230 --> 01:31:03.579
Why Cleopatra's world is so different is that this kind of a question, like Cleopatra couldn't, people like her couldn't have said this, right.

01:31:03.579 --> 01:31:09.509
I mean, they couldn't have said that, "Your concern, I'm just a chemist and your chemical concerns, your environmental concerns, these are the chemistry, it has got nothing to do with me.

01:31:11.919 --> 01:31:16.290
You should go talk to some ecologist."

01:31:16.750 --> 01:31:19.390
I mean, that would be unimaginable, right.

01:31:19.630 --> 01:31:20.329
So, that's what I mean.

01:31:20.330 --> 01:31:28.629
So would that be the same science or what would it have been like in a sense, of course there would be overlaps and we would have lots of common ideas.

01:31:28.900 --> 01:31:33.387
I'm pretty sure that we still have about what Chemistry is as a science.

01:31:33.440 --> 01:31:41.620
But, I would think that it would not be fundamentally the same kind of science.

01:31:41.620 --> 01:31:43.500
And we wouldn't even mean the same thing.

01:31:43.500 --> 01:32:02.749
I think anyway, that's a long-winded, this thing of basically coming back to saying that, in my own experience, this has been one of the ways in which forms and how you think about something like laboratory for instance, has got a lot to do with what scientific output comes out of that level.

01:32:02.749 --> 01:32:10.630
I mean, these two things are in my understanding inseparable.

01:32:11.660 --> 01:32:11.836
Sorry, I don't know, that is somewhat,

01:32:11.836 --> 01:32:16.170
Vishesh Kumar: No, that was completely relevant and insightful.

01:32:18.849 --> 01:32:19.379
Thank you.

01:32:20.700 --> 01:32:30.040
Think as we get close to, this is basically the last formal question, but yeah, if you feel like you like talk about it, how has Covid'19 shaped?

01:32:30.040 --> 01:32:35.960
How you, the nature of your work, how you orient to your work now?

01:32:37.130 --> 01:32:38.840
What you think should be doing, what has foregrounded, etc?

01:32:38.840 --> 01:32:38.841
Tathagata Sengupta: Yeah.

01:32:38.841 --> 01:32:44.424
I mean, so Covid'19 did a couple of things for me, I could say.

01:32:44.424 --> 01:32:55.699
I mean one thing, I mean, I'll not go and take up your time to sort of describe any way, what all of our collective experience has been both.

01:32:56.059 --> 01:33:00.709
Both you and I, and everyone might be listening to this would know that.

01:33:00.809 --> 01:33:04.040
But I would just take again, maybe a couple of...

01:33:04.540 --> 01:33:29.120
So, the first thing for me personally, that one of the things that kind of Covid'19 did was that some of these questions that I was already kind of grappling with, or some of the crisis in a sense, that I was already grappling with on some of these questions, just got intensified in, in scale and in seriousness.

01:33:29.140 --> 01:33:49.850
Even for myself, because of Covid'19, because we, because of seeing what was going on and, and a lot of these questions were those, the kinds of questions that might have been, let's say, vaguely speaking, like sort of theoretical or abstract in my head actually became like really concrete from the Covid'19 experience, right.

01:33:49.880 --> 01:34:04.980
So in a sense, the Covid'19 experience and the entire, everything, I'm trying to find the appropriate word, but you know what, you understand, right.

01:34:05.110 --> 01:34:12.050
I mean, what it did was it kind of made those questions really urgent for me.

01:34:12.090 --> 01:34:16.270
And for many of us, that's one thing that it did.

01:34:18.870 --> 01:34:24.059
The other thing that it did is yeah again, maybe I should cite concrete example to point out.

01:34:25.219 --> 01:34:30.160
So, you remember, I mean, there was, there was this, this was I think when the second wave was going on, I was in Delhi then.

01:34:30.190 --> 01:34:38.910
And this was when basically, every day you wake up and you hear people you know dying.

01:34:39.640 --> 01:34:44.469
I mean, entire families you know are getting wiped out, people basically dying like flies.

01:34:44.469 --> 01:34:53.430
And I was in Delhi and for days, right, you would hear ambulances.

01:34:53.430 --> 01:34:57.830
I mean constantly, like nonstop ambulances, like going back and forth.

01:34:58.059 --> 01:35:04.269
And it's just like, I have never, none of us have ever sort of felt that.

01:35:04.299 --> 01:35:14.240
I mean, what it means, you sort of live in that, people have lived in war zones etc, they have been dealing with such things for ages.

01:35:14.290 --> 01:35:19.219
But not people like us who had basically sheltered lives, right.

01:35:19.219 --> 01:35:27.143
I mean so, around this time, this guy, right I mean that, what's his name, this Adar Poonawalla, right.

01:35:27.143 --> 01:35:58.580
The Serum Institute, that Pune guy, he kind of gives out this statement that okay, the only way we can sort of vaccinate everyone in this country is if I am given $30,000, know what was, not $30,000, what was the amount, something like, these are like two big orders of magnitude for me, right.

01:35:58.580 --> 01:35:59.246
I mean, like something 3000.

01:35:59.246 --> 01:36:06.160
What was the...

01:36:06.160 --> 01:36:10.465
I don't know, some $3 million, or $300 million, something like that.

01:36:10.740 --> 01:36:16.375
Some huge, enormous amount of money he said we need to spend to be able to provide vaccines to everyone.

01:36:16.750 --> 01:36:21.469
Now, already that was, I think, quite obnoxious enough.

01:36:22.550 --> 01:36:30.370
But what really pissed me off, or threw me off let's say, was not even that guy's statement, but in fact how people started reacting to it.

01:36:30.730 --> 01:36:33.556
Most of the reactions, if you notice, are basically of two types.

01:36:33.780 --> 01:36:35.379
One is, is this figure correct?

01:36:35.629 --> 01:36:44.936
Is this a blown up figure, or should there be a more reasonable estimate of how much it should cost to provide vaccines to everyone?

01:36:44.936 --> 01:36:58.450
And the second kind of criticism that came up was, or the second kind of debate that happened to an extent is where should this money come from?

01:36:58.450 --> 01:37:04.242
Should it be private companies, or private banks, let's say financing this?

01:37:04.242 --> 01:37:10.034
Or, should it be funded by the government or something like that?

01:37:10.034 --> 01:37:19.269
What threw me off was how in a sense, everyone seemed to have bought into this thing that health is just another budget header in an Excel sheet.

01:37:23.480 --> 01:37:24.882
You have your wallet, and you have 100 rupees in that, and then you want to spend things.

01:37:24.882 --> 01:37:25.120
You want to allocate to your monthly household expenses of how to manage your household.

01:37:25.120 --> 01:37:25.121
That's when we do budgeting, right?

01:37:25.121 --> 01:37:25.122
That's basically what budgeting means.

01:37:25.122 --> 01:37:25.129
Now, let's say if we go to a place, let's say if I'm switching houses, and I'm house hunting.

01:37:25.129 --> 01:37:36.929
And I go to a house in a place like Patancheru, where, let's say, breathing is difficult.

01:37:36.929 --> 01:37:46.079
It is literally the case.

01:37:46.079 --> 01:38:08.400
You go to that area, and the fumes often would come all the way to the university.

01:38:08.400 --> 01:38:08.500
And you can't breathe in that air, it's dense, right?

01:38:08.500 --> 01:38:08.560
The oxygen levels, et cetera, are...

01:38:08.560 --> 01:38:08.630
these are being measured by these environmental...

01:38:08.630 --> 01:38:08.690
It's documented, there's documented, everything's there.

01:38:08.690 --> 01:38:08.750
It's actually difficult to breathe there.

01:38:08.750 --> 01:38:20.908
Now, what if someone were to come and tell me that, "Okay, you can take a house here, but notice that you won't be able to breathe as much, breathe in and breathe out as many times as you would have elsewhere."

01:38:20.908 --> 01:38:23.901
You will have to budget how many times you inhale air.

01:38:23.901 --> 01:38:40.410
Because if you inhale too much air, you will further deplete the oxygen that is available to you, and that can be really bad for you in the long run.

01:38:46.410 --> 01:38:49.440
What if breathing becomes a budgeting kind of a question?

01:38:49.440 --> 01:38:51.710
It sounds really absurd, right?

01:38:52.050 --> 01:39:03.865
That's how absurd it sounded to me when people bought into that logic of you have this purse, you have this wallet, and you have health concern.

01:39:03.960 --> 01:39:08.112
And therefore you need to sort out how much you'll breathe, who will breathe, how many people get to breathe.

01:39:08.112 --> 01:39:11.900
Literally, that's really people literally die from not being able to breathe.

01:39:11.900 --> 01:39:12.110
[inaudible]

01:39:12.110 --> 01:39:16.290 This is not even metaphoric, it's quite literal.

01:39:16.590 --> 01:39:17.407
How much people are allowed to breathe, essentially, is being determined by your financial budget.

01:39:17.407 --> 01:39:17.434
That's crazy, right?

01:39:17.434 --> 01:39:18.788
In a sense, it should have been completely the other way around.

01:39:18.930 --> 01:39:19.378
Any reasonable society would've taken the exact opposite approach.

01:39:19.378 --> 01:39:42.425
That in any case, I think this is actually this should be the center of economic rationality.

01:39:42.425 --> 01:39:42.551
Economic rationality and health.

01:39:42.551 --> 01:39:42.896
First thing you take care of a society is everyone's health.

01:39:42.896 --> 01:39:43.022
Everyone should be healthy.

01:39:43.022 --> 01:39:43.900
And education, everyone should be emotionally healthy or mentally healthy, and intellectually healthy, and physically, biologically healthy and so on.

01:39:43.900 --> 01:39:46.262
Health, right?

01:39:46.262 --> 01:39:47.443
Healthcare.

01:39:47.443 --> 01:39:52.168
These are sort of...

01:39:52.168 --> 01:40:03.981
And then you define your monetary system based on this.

01:40:03.981 --> 01:40:13.089
Because the fact is that we actually do that.

01:40:13.179 --> 01:40:15.120
We actually define money into existence.

01:40:16.780 --> 01:40:17.969
Because what is money otherwise?

01:40:21.240 --> 01:40:24.750
We literally print money, and these days we type in money.

01:40:26.200 --> 01:40:30.629
And all these economic historians, several people have been known the entire modern monetary theory is based on this.

01:40:31.730 --> 01:40:38.170
That you can basically, the way you bring money into existence is by giving out loans.

01:40:38.500 --> 01:40:42.100
That two people, that's how money itself gets generated to begin with.

01:40:42.370 --> 01:40:44.219
Otherwise you don't begin with money, you don't have...

01:40:44.420 --> 01:40:45.580
Money is not a fact of nature.

01:40:46.230 --> 01:40:51.480
But the way these arguments are conducted is as you would think that money is a fact of nature.

01:40:54.600 --> 01:41:07.099
That's one of the things that pushed us into actually starting off this, the first thing that I started off with this relation between economic rationality and mathematical rationality and health.

01:41:07.129 --> 01:41:14.040
That COVID episode was, in a way, some of those questions were poking around in our minds in a vague sense.

01:41:14.510 --> 01:41:18.420
But that Adar Poonawala made it really concrete for us.

01:41:21.469 --> 01:41:26.545
These are the kinds of ways in which...

01:41:26.545 --> 01:41:29.770
Oh, you are on mute.

01:41:33.139 --> 01:41:36.180
Vishesh Kumar: Those are all the on paper were questions we had.

01:41:37.000 --> 01:41:38.479
We are mostly at the end of our time.

01:41:38.480 --> 01:41:44.879
But are there any general other angles, thoughts, that you wanted to remind me?

01:41:44.879 --> 01:41:51.129
This feels like the most important idea for any viewer, or someone to take away?

01:41:52.620 --> 01:42:04.923
Tathagata Sengupta: Well, if I have to pick one thing, I think what I'm trying to at the end of the day get at is, or suggest, is that we need to...

01:42:05.490 --> 01:42:11.460
I think we are living in really remarkable times.

01:42:12.429 --> 01:42:16.759
A lot of times I feel like we are actually living in a Galilean kind of times.

01:42:16.839 --> 01:42:18.990
And when we think of Galilean times, we typically think of the telescope and heliocentrism and geocentrism and those kinds of things.

01:42:23.780 --> 01:42:28.420
But we forget the fact that that was not the whole of the Galilean crisis.

01:42:28.570 --> 01:42:33.910
The Galilean crisis, when it was happening, it spanned over every sphere of human existence.

01:42:34.840 --> 01:42:49.430
It was as much about physics as it was about questions of health, as it was about questions of morality and religion, as it was about questions of economic relations and the idea of money and debt, debtor and creditor relations, and all of those kinds of things.

01:42:49.960 --> 01:43:04.190
That entire thing, and labor relations, all, that entire transgender relations, we mentioned witch hunt, this is the same thing that's part of the Galilean crisis.

01:43:04.190 --> 01:43:08.207
In a way, I think today we are living in a similar, something that I think is quite comparable..

01:43:08.207 --> 01:43:08.491
That look all around.

01:43:08.491 --> 01:43:12.642
For instance, the kind of environmental crisis that we are faced with, the kind of health crisis we are now faced with, this crisis of science.

01:43:12.642 --> 01:43:31.354
This, for me, this example that I was talking about Patancheru and this separation between the health of nature and the health of people, for me is a fundamental scientific crisis.

01:43:31.354 --> 01:43:32.525
It's a question of science.

01:43:32.760 --> 01:43:36.120
If we have built a model of science where this is the rationality, then clearly we are reaching the limits of that kind of a rationality, and it's not working out.

01:43:47.700 --> 01:43:49.579
We are getting stuck in various fronts.

01:43:49.630 --> 01:43:53.110
We are faced obviously with an economic crisis across the world.

01:43:54.780 --> 01:44:07.024
In fact, this Afghanistan crisis, or also and now people have even started saying how what used to be the mainstay of capitalism, the not authentic militarism, not authentic military colonialism.

01:44:07.024 --> 01:44:07.340
The failure of the American war efforts in West Asia and in Afghanistan and so on.

01:44:08.090 --> 01:44:27.279
A lot of people have now started talking about this.

01:44:27.479 --> 01:44:29.221
Very serious people have started talking about this.

01:44:29.221 --> 01:44:31.239
This is, we've not seen this ever.

01:44:31.690 --> 01:44:35.320
It looks like something is getting stuck there also.

01:44:35.700 --> 01:44:43.610
In a sense, that model doesn't seem to be really working out really well commercially speaking, for even America.

01:44:43.620 --> 01:44:49.769
Which is why, if it was in the business interests of the American empire, let's not kid ourselves, they would never leave Afghanistan.

01:44:49.769 --> 01:44:55.470
The only reason why they had to leave Afghanistan is because the war had become economically unviable.

01:44:55.480 --> 01:44:58.450
The war had become commercially unprofitable.

01:44:58.660 --> 01:45:04.420
The crisis is that how come wars are no longer commercially unviable or unprofitable?

01:45:04.570 --> 01:45:06.830
Because that's been the story of capitalism.

01:45:07.270 --> 01:45:14.730
Capitalism wouldn't continue for one day if you don't have military warfare.

01:45:15.730 --> 01:45:21.643
And then another example that I mentioned also was physics, what's happening with advanced physics, the particle physics and so on.

01:45:21.643 --> 01:45:28.049
We are, actually in that sense, I do think we are in a Galilean kind of times.

01:45:28.670 --> 01:45:38.759
And these require really serious introspections, and really serious dialogues across society.

01:45:39.600 --> 01:45:44.010
And my worry is that, in that context, I wanted to phrase the question of education.

01:45:44.020 --> 01:45:50.649
And my worry is how much of these concerns around education and learning have been completely subsumed into the concerns of the market and the state and so on.

01:45:52.719 --> 01:45:59.830
This whole, this constant way of thing of economic survival, et cetera, et cetera.

01:45:59.830 --> 01:46:01.019
And so this thing of people need to learn mathematics, why?

01:46:01.070 --> 01:46:04.309
Because otherwise they wouldn't get employment.

01:46:04.309 --> 01:46:10.900
Well, we are reaching a limit of that project because it's not as if people who are learning mathematics are getting employed.

01:46:11.260 --> 01:46:12.588
How long can you keep doing this?

01:46:12.588 --> 01:46:12.739
Sooner or later people will stop taking mathematics classes, because there's absolutely no reason to do this.

01:46:12.739 --> 01:46:12.863
We are living in a time when, in this country for instance, a B.

01:46:12.863 --> 01:46:29.682
Tech graduate from a place like IIT Mumbai also doesn't have a guaranteed jobs.

01:46:29.682 --> 01:46:31.215
There are B.

01:46:31.215 --> 01:46:34.590
Tech graduates from IITs who are unemployed right now.

01:46:34.590 --> 01:46:37.820
And well, we are converting it into the go start your own startup, get your own money, et cetera, et cetera.

01:46:37.820 --> 01:46:38.824
But like Pakoda-seller type.

01:46:38.824 --> 01:46:42.152
This is not going to work.

01:46:42.152 --> 01:46:46.035
Everyone knows this is going to crumble.

01:46:46.590 --> 01:47:06.489
I wanted to end with one thing that I would want to really almost plead to everyone is that it's really crucial that I think we start questioning our Holy Grail assumptions about what learning is, what science is, what common sense is, what education is, and so on so forth.

01:47:06.530 --> 01:47:10.780
And, yeah.

01:47:13.810 --> 01:47:23.459
Do it in the sense that we would do anything else.

01:47:23.459 --> 01:47:27.950
For instance, if we have...

01:47:32.610 --> 01:47:42.870
[inaudible] . It's funny, whenever you talk about in [inaudible] and those kind of places, whenever you talk about you know that superstition, it's not going to work, and this religion is a mess and so on.

01:47:46.640 --> 01:47:47.440
And we need science.

01:47:47.500 --> 01:47:50.540
I don't know if you've noticed this.

01:47:50.550 --> 01:47:59.129
I've noticed a lot of times this bridge building engineers is somehow the go-to example for these people.

01:47:59.369 --> 01:48:06.030
And somehow they will say that, oh, if you didn't have precise science, if you didn't have precise engineering, how would you build bridges?

01:48:06.260 --> 01:48:08.470
You need the bridge to work.

01:48:08.470 --> 01:48:10.280
Obviously, of course you need mathematics, of course you need precise physics.

01:48:11.440 --> 01:48:12.760
They will always go to the bridge.

01:48:13.160 --> 01:48:18.064
I also wanted to [inaudible] in a different sense.

01:48:18.119 --> 01:48:23.080
If we had an engineer who was building a bridge which is typically breaking down, we would've fired that engineer.

01:48:23.269 --> 01:48:28.810
That is the sense in which I think we should approach questions of education.

01:48:29.090 --> 01:48:41.080
If, as educators, we are failing to do something repeatedly year after year, ticket after ticket, then maybe it's time we raise fundamental questions about what it means to be an educator, the kind of questions that people like Jyotiba Phule and Savitribai Phule are raising.

01:48:41.790 --> 01:48:42.683
And maybe we have to start raising questions about what could be a way to fire all of these?

01:48:42.683 --> 01:48:56.216
And we could start things from fresh slate, in the way which the current times [inaudible]

01:48:56.216 --> 01:48:57.241
Vishesh Kumar: Yeah.

01:48:57.241 --> 01:49:05.445
Thank you for, once again, a provocative note.

01:49:05.445 --> 01:49:15.330
I think that's a valuable, powerful summarization to end with, especially.