I fear for India and its future.

These days I carry a lot of guilt. The reason is that I go to work everyday find that there are no classes, I sit around doing some other work that is there to be done in the department and I come back home. The rate at which things are going, the time when I will forget teaching is not too far away. I carry guilt because of the salary I take. What I get as salary is comparable to what some people get in the corporate sphere. The difference is in the amount of work that we put in. While I put in none, the people who earn the equivalent of what I earn have their noses rubbed into the ground with work. Every week numbers are crunched and performance evaluated for them. For us in the university system, there is no such thing. We are the freest people in the true sense of the term. We get our salary on time and we have no accountability. We don't have to teach, we don't even have to turn up for work everyday (some of us do that once in a week if we have a bit of conscience left and some turn up once in a month or so), we don't have to answer anyone for anything and yet at the end of the month we get our salaries. No wonder then most of us have other things to do by the side. Some of us own marriage halls, farms, hotels and restaurants and other kind of businesses. When we don't have anything like this then we turn revolutionaries, ready to bite the hand that feeds us.

And we are good at forming Joint Action Committees with students and non-teaching staff. In a truly revolutionary way we march hand in glove with our comrades from the student community and the non-teaching staff community and ensure that there is no work for anyone to do. The joint action committees are the bane of the university system. When students are drawn into the politics of teachers and vice-versa, where is the sanctity of the student-teacher relationship? By walking together shoulder to shoulder we have destroyed the possibility of ever setting an example to students. Do not get me wrong here. There is nothing wrong with being friendly with students and being supportive when they need you in matters of academics. What I am against is using the students to settle scores with fellow faculty members or using their revolutionary potential for the satisfaction of one's own greedy needs. In matters of learning and education a teacher and student should be together, but not for things that I have specified above. These days the transactions between students and teachers are about things which are anything but academic.

Universities were supposed to be free spaces, where people could do free thinking without the fear of anything and without any limitations being imposed upon them. Today they are free spaces where anyone can do anything except that which they are supposed to do. Unaccountability is the word to describe what happens and I am ashamed to say that this is reaching criminal proportions. Consider the fact that we are paid by the tax payers money and you will see why I have used the term criminal. Expenditures on universities is in thousands of crores and if they are nowhere near what is expected of them and in many instances are against what is expected of them, then is it not criminal?

Many of the teachers in my own university are aware of this. But since most of them want to be another power centre they do not wish to change anything. But they are also very clever people. Many of them have ensured that their off spring do not study the subjects that they teach and also have sent them to still functional universities and colleges in other parts of the country so that they their children can study peacefully and uninterruptedly while they the teachers with their assured salaries and unaccountability wreak havoc on the university, education system and politics of the state. The other day I was chatting with some colleagues about appointment of Vice-Chancellors. I said that the appointments were too political and that people from within the university should not become Vice-Chancellor of that university since it is difficult to function. Someone said that nobody would allow a person from outside of the university to be appointed as Vice-Chancellor and even if such a person is appointed he would not be allowed to function. I was aghast. Have we reached the level where we dictate things such as the appointment of VCs? I was told that there is nothing wrong with this thinking since we are living in a democratic system. I then suggested that we should simply have nominations for Vice-Chancellorships and have a VC elected by the teachers, other staff and students of the university. They thought I was trivialising a serious issue. But I am sure you now know why I fear for India and its future.

P.S. My usual disclaimer. Not proof read and hence mistakes of grammar and spelling will abound. Please read around them. Thank you.