Annihilation of Social Reality

 

Things as simple as hugging a friend, talking face-to-face, socialising freely, and travelling have been restricted. Even as social distancing measures are slowly relaxed, hesitation and anxiety remain. The situation has had a profound effect on our social relations.

Two broad and inter-related aspects of social experience are to be distinguished. First, there are our face-to-face relations with others, including particular individuals and people in general. Our interactions with other people shape our feelings, thoughts, and activities in all manner of ways: the pleasure we gain from our surroundings, whether we feel at ease or unsettled in a situation, the narratives through which we interpret our lives, how we regulate our moods, whether we anticipate the future with hope or dread. Interaction with another person can nurture a sense of comfort and hope or, by contrast, a feeling of discomfort and vulnerability. This applies even to brief, mundane interactions with strangers—whether someone smiles while walking past or glares at you with apprehension as they hurriedly cross to the other pavement. To be experienced as a potential conversational partner is quite different from being experienced as a potential source of infection.

Many dimensions of interpersonal experience have been affected by lockdowns and other social distancing measures. In some cases, the effects are more positive: some people have been brought together; friendships have been rekindled without the usual distractions; and rewarding pastimes have been discovered or rediscovered.

A strong sense of solidarity and expressions of gratitude towards front-line key workers in different sectors have also emerged. With this, questions arise of where and to what extent we have been able to adapt successfully to the new situation and what, if anything, remains missing or even irreplaceable.

We share a world with others and much of its meaning comes from this shared-ness. With social distancing, much of this background structure is changing; norms of interaction that were once taken as given are gone.

At times, there is a sense of not knowing what to do anymore, how to interpret and interact with other people. The rulebook is not only new but also strangely incomplete. There are experiences of anxious uncertainty and of absence and loss, as our habitual patterns of expectation are repeatedly challenged by socially distanced public spaces.

Various elements of pandemic experience are characterised by suspicion, uncertainty, and doubt. We may distrust the air we breathe and the surfaces we touch, while strangers suddenly seem unpredictable sources of potential danger.

This dismantling of the everyday inevitably leads to a pervasive breakdown of habits. Usual socialising in the evenings or the weekend, or the morning chaos, organised and punctuated our lives into a familiar tempo. Previous schedules have been largely removed from daily life, resulting in changes to our experience of time. The loss of norms, routines, and structure alters our sense of how time passes. Some people report that time feels like an undifferentiated flow, an experience that is disorienting and dispiriting.

COVID-19 is not just killing the ‘animal’ but also the ‘social’ in the ‘social animal’ called man. The pandemic is destroying the society as we have known and it may not be any constructive destruction but a destructive destruction.

(First published 10 August 2020)

-------------------------------------------------- 

“Likes” "Follows" "Shares" and "Comments" welcome.

We hope the conversations that take place will be energetic, constructive, and thought-provoking. To ensure the quality of the discussion, comments may be edited for clarity, length, and relevance. Comments that are overly promotional, mean-spirited, or off-topic may be deleted.

Novel Corona Virus can kill the MBA Institutes

 

The COVID-19 pandemic has already cost management institutes a bomb. The shutdown has meant that the Executive-Education has vanished and the accommodation, catering, and non-tuition income has evaporated. It is estimated that non-tuition income of some of the top ranking management institutes in India is upwards of 35-40 percent of their annual income and this could be the first loss of a major revenue stream.

Universities and educational institutions worldwide have been forced rapidly to scale up online teaching, which has typically entailed unexpected expenditure. The same may become true for the management institutes in India. They will have to find money to continue paying their staff, as well as maintaining and cleaning the massive infrastructure facilities they have created.

The economic downturn will force thousands of youngsters to defer entering MBA institutes. Encouraged by successive governments, who wished to bolster commercial education in the name of realistically priced education, top-ranking management institutions have come to rely on unregulated pricing of their degrees and developing multiple revenue streams. A collapse in the student market, which seems probable, would have serious consequences.

Prospective students might also be put off by the physical distancing requirements that are likely to prevail on campuses for the foreseeable future. Much will depend on the dynamics of the pandemic. No one really has a handle on what will happen when it comes to end-June, which is the time when most management institutes are busy trumpeting their induction programmes for the new arrivals. Hesitant to acknowledge but very few institutes are certain that they will be able to open on time.

The shift to online learning looks set to continue at least until the advent of a successful vaccine for COVID-19. The mere act of listening to wise statements and sound advice does little for anyone.  In the process of learning, the learner's dynamic co-operation is required.  Such co-operation from students does not arise automatically.  It has to be provided for and continually encouraged. During most of undergraduate education, thinking out original answers to new problems or giving new interpretations to old problems is assumed an adult function and, as such, denied to students.  The task of the student during that time commonly is taken to be one chiefly of familiarising himself with accepted thought and accepted techniques, these to be actively used later.  The instruction period, in other words, often is regarded both by students and by teachers as a time for absorption.  The undergraduate colleges turn out knowledgeable and informed students and teaching at the undergrad degree can be adjusted to on-line teaching except for the lab-work.

Thus, many student entering graduate schools have become habituated to the role of a passive receiver.  The time inevitably arrives, however, when young people must engage in practical action on their own responsibility.  This needs wisdom; knowledge alone is of little use.  Students at MBA School have a little time, at best two years, to achieve the transition from what may be described as a childlike dependence on parents and teachers to a state of what may be called dependable self-reliance.

MBA graduates are expected to take on the roles of administrative positions of importance. The qualities needed by people in such positions are ability to see vividly the potential meanings and relationships of facts, capacity to make sound judgements based on these perceptions, and skill in communicating their judgements to others so as to produce the desired results in the field of action. These facts pertain to persons and things.  MBA education is consequently directed to developing these qualities of understanding, judgement, and communication leading to action, amongst students. Teaching at the MAB degree cannot be adjusted to on-line teaching except for transfer and comprehension of content.

One 3-credit hour on-line course in the best US University, which usually means 45-hours of teaching, costs around $17-$22 per hour. This is lower than the fee charged for face-to-face teaching in a top-ranking Indian institution which is around $25-$35 per hour. This situation raises questions about whether institutions can justify a fee structure predicated and priced on a model of face-to-face contact. Students generally report that campuses of the management institutes are much more than just teaching—experience is also really important. If students are going to miss half of what usually constitutes the student experience, are they really receiving the same value for money? Furthermore, online learning is no substitute for face-to-face classroom.

Imminent recession due to the pandemic will diminish the prospects for MBA employment. For a downgraded student experience and for a downgraded value of the MBA degree; it is going to be difficult for institutions to sustain the same level of fees that they have been charging so far. Weakening of demand coupled with pressure to decrease fees, without any action, management institutes will be forced to make huge cuts, jobs could be lost, and funding for PhDs could be halted. Institutes will begin to look for redundancies and a lot of staff on short-term contracts may be cajoled to go.

Prestigious IIMs are better placed to weather the coming cyclone because they can dig into their corpus or look towards the government to support them, but institutes that fall lower down the ranking tables are vulnerable, especially if non-tuition income forms a big part of their receipts. Much will depend on the depth of the downturn.

Summer internship placements for MBA students in their transition from the previous to the final year and confirmed job-offers for the passing out MBA students have already seen the coal face of impending loom on the careers market in the last 2-months.  Some lost ground can be recovered if institutes are able to restart by September, but any further delay would be a real threat to graduating on time next year.

Many of the MBA institutes are unlikely to survive the pandemic. Others may have to sell their property. This is going to leave a huge impression on the MBA education sector in India and may be in the whole of the world.

(First published on 23 May 2020)

-----------------------------------

“Likes” "Follows" "Shares" and "Comments" welcome.

We hope the conversations that take place will be energetic, constructive, and thought-provoking. To ensure the quality of the discussion, comments may be edited for clarity, length, and relevance. Comments that are overly promotional, mean-spirited, or off-topic may be deleted.

Seventy Three Years of Freedom, without Independence of Thought

To look forward with clarity, we must sometimes glance backward.  For a moment, let us disconnect ourselves from our self and observe objectively, what all has been happening around us, with us and by us. Irrationality has been peddled as rationality and unfortunately, it has been winning.  Intolerance has been promoted in the name of tolerance, conformity has been sponsored as diversity, violence has been tolerated and ignored in the name of peace, history has been destroyed to preserve it, and lack of intellectual curiosity has been served as education; and all this and much more has brought us to where we are.

 

Television anchors and too many modern educators – often unable to think logically themselves – are afraid of differentness.  They urge diversity as long as “differentness” is the same as what they think.

 

Sadly, suppression of independent thought is the hallmark of a sick, unthinking society – one increasingly unsure in its underpinnings, ignorant of how it got to where it is, afraid of history and the future. Deep conversations get superficial, as citizens are unable to defend ideas.

 

Organized educators promote those “different like them,” while seeking to silence anyone different “not like them.”  The hypocrisy is, of course, transparent.  It is also coercive, anti-democratic, anti-free speech, and pits the “collective” against the individual.

 

Our media are corrupt, our youth unfamiliar with logic, ignorant of Indian and world history, blind to critical thinking. Why? Because we have somehow evolved into a society where “group think” is rewarded, sameness and conformity enforced, independent thought increasingly condemned.

 

In the case of politics, media, and left-lurching educational institutions, such behaviour suggests a society dangerously leaning toward socialism, communism, fascism, and centralisation of power; at the expense of independent thought and individual liberty.

 

Leftist groups and administrators ban intellectual discourse, labelling traditional, historical, different, and diverse ideas as anti-social, unsafe, emotionally violent, triggering, or – sweet irony – intolerant.  Likewise, University teachers’ unions insist on idea suppression and socialism. 

 

How did we get here? Until the Muslim invasions, Indians and Hindus were synonyms.1200 years of non-Hindu rule may have failed to convert majority of Hindus into non-Hindus, because faith is more deeply rooted in the conscience of a society, this regime of non-Indians succeeded in eroding our education and thought. How did they do it? They did it by instructing our youth to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

 

Integrity, liberty, and truth leaked from our society because we failed to defend them. The consequence is for us to see - dishonest government, educators, and media.

 

Needed is more honest thinking, blunt talks, and restored capacity to listen; a desire to learn and seek truth; not suppress it.  Needed is courage to accept that humans see the world differently, and that is good. By listening, reading, and thinking, we inform each other. That is rational thought. The opposite is dishonest thinking, and the end of integrity.

 

(First published 21 July 2020)

------------------------------------------------ 

“Likes” "Follows" "Shares" and "Comments" welcome.

To ensure the quality of the discussion, comments may be edited for clarity, length, and relevance. Comments that are overly promotional, mean-spirited, or off-topic may be deleted.