Unwarranted arrogance

Regular readers of EducationWorld might have noticed that only one of the directors of the country™s 13 IIMs deigned to speak with your editors for last month™s cover story which exposed the second hostile attempt made within a decade by a BJP government at the Centre to acquire control of the country™s premier B-schools, one of the few successful Nehruvian initiatives in education. This despite EW having established a reputation as a champion of academic freedom. If institutional autonomy is as dear to them as they claim, IIM directors would have seized the opportunity to detail and explain the sly provisions of the BJP/NDA government™s Indian Institutes of Management Bill 2015. Therefore, the inference one can draw is that it was a combination of ignorance and arrogance which prompted the IIM boycott of this publication. This conclusion is prompted by a case history. Last August, your editors staged a national conference on ways and means to upgrade K-12 education in Kozhikode, Kerala. As courtesy, since IIM-K was in the neighbourhood of the conference venue, the director of IIM-Kozhikode was invited as a panelist in a discussion forum chaired by your correspondent. The institute™s director ” one Mukherjee ” took great exception to the invitation. According to this worthy, as director of an IIM, he should have been invited to deliver the keynote address, and that in any event Delhi was the more œnatural neighbourhood of IIM-K. The purpose of recalling this incident is that it reveals the arrogant kiss-up-and-kick down mindset of the top brass of the IIMs, in sharp contrast to the ready willingness of the India-born deans of premier American B-schools who readily responded to EW. Unsolicited suggestion to IIM directors: (i) introduce a course on how to win friends and influence people; (ii) lead the way and sign up yourselves. Rare achievement Undoubtedly, maverick former Supreme Court judge Justice Markandey Katju has struck a resonant chord in the hearts of millions of citizens with his no-holds-barred expos© of the establishment in a recent issue of the best-selling newsweekly Outlook (August 17). In an essay titled ˜Lock Up the Doors, Time for them to Depart,™ Katju draws upon the famous injunction of revolutionary British republican Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), who dissolved Parliament and briefly abolished the Blighty monarchy some four centuries ago. Letting loose both barrels at all establishment worthies, Katju doesn™t spare Parliament (œwith its members shouting and screaming all the time ” and hardly any meaningful debate held or business transacted), politicians (œincorrigible rascals who have no genuine love for India, are bent on looting the country, squirrelling away its wealth to secret foreign banks and havens), and the bureaucracy (œlargely become corrupt) and even his own fraternity (œalas so has a section of the judiciary, which anyway takes an inordinate time to decide cases). Shockingly this essay by a former Supreme Court judge is a blatant call for a violent French Revolution (1789), when members of the establishment and monarchy were guillotined after cursory trials. No…