« About bubbles and numbers | Main | The problem with language »
November 07, 2007
About Dasara and documentation
A few weeks ago, with some excellent company, I had the opportunity to see the Dasara festival in Mysore for the first time. Up until now, my experience of Bangalore only held validity between the months of June and August. I’d seen a lot of Varamahalakshmi poojas here, but never a Ganesh Chathurthi and definitely not a Dasara. The more I watch the rhythm of this place, follow the shape of its seasons, the shifts in weather and public mood as the months and endless festivals unfold, the more I feel that I have a stake in its everyday life. Bangalore for me is becoming less of an inherited emigrant memory and more of a concrete, evolving reality.
Soon after we arrived in Mysore, sleepy and a little sore from our precarious seats on a luggage rack on the Mysore Express train, we began to look for tickets to see the Dasara procession on the palace grounds. The process, however, was one that becomes increasingly familiar the more I interact with anything meant to be official in India. When I first got to Bangalore, I spent two weeks being sent from office to office in order to register my visa and get a residence permit; I even ate lunch in the police station one day and was then told to go next door and buy a gluestick to glue my passport photos onto my application.
Getting tickets for the procession was more or less the same. “Where can we get tickets?” we asked at the hotel. “Walk straight down here and you’ll get to the Corporation office,” said the man at the desk. “Here” is a loose term in Karnataka, it seems, and after a lot of walking we asked another uniformed man, this time a policeman futilely – with a sort of resigned carelessness about him –appearing to direct traffic. “Just right here,” he said, “unless you want to spend 12 rupees on an auto.” Of course not, we thought; “go that way,” said the next man we asked, pointing in the opposite direction.
Finally we stumbled on the Corporation office, where a couple of men in uniform sat behind a randomly-placed desk. “Can we buy tickets for the procession here?” we asked them. “No,” they said, though they seemed to have a few tickets to something with them – the torchlit parade, I finally deduced, which was planned for that same evening after the elephant procession. “The Jambu Savari,” I said again. “Maybe over there,” they said, waving their arms vaguely. Sure enough, there were two more dudes behind another seemingly makeshift desk in the next room. When I asked for tickets they looked surprised, but finally dug out a haphazard package of a few tickets to the procession. We bought them with relief, though they were quite astonishingly expensive. “Can we get a timetable for the events?” we asked them, maybe so complacent with our successful ticket purchase as to become overly ambitious. “No, madam,” we were told. “Maybe if you go to Town Hall.” Of course, Town Hall was also “right here.”
All in all, it wasn’t impossible to get tickets to the Jambu Savari, and clearly a significant number of tourists with much less familiarity with the area had landed up in the same kind of seats we’d gotten. But the process this time threw into relief something I’d been noticing in all aspects of my life here: informality of information. In the U.S., if you need directions to a place, you’ll go first to Google Maps or maybe, if you’re especially smart, look at an actual map and plan your route. You’ll look at an online or newspaper schedule for an event you plan to attend, maybe buy your tickets online, and listen to the radio for traffic reports just to make sure nothing is out of whack. Of course, none of this will be completely reliable, but the fact is that through the whole process you’ll have very little interaction with people. Life in the U.S. could potentially be run through conversation with machines alone.
Here in India, it’s the exact opposite. You have to ask around before going to a dry cleaner to make sure it’s a reliable place. Ask someone for directions and they will mention not a single street name – only landmarks, and you’re best off just arriving at a landmark and asking someone what to do next at every turn until you get there, since anyway the only address you’ll have is something like “5th Main Road, Opposite Police Station”. When I bought my copy of the seventh Harry Potter book, my fourteen-year-old cousin berated me. You could have gotten a bigger discount at Sapna Book House, she said. You should have consulted me first. Try to look anything up online and you’ll be told something different when you go and ask. In Indian education departments there are entire schools that don’t exist except on the books – the only way to know is to ask someone who’s been there, or visit yourself.
The general trend, then, is that knowledge is housed in individuals. When someone is sick or getting married or retiring, the institution around that person has to start from scratch. So people are constantly reinventing the wheel. And people are always dependent on each other. This dependence constantly strikes me here in Bangalore. The functioning of my life depends on the milkman and my auto driver arriving on time, the tailor being in good health, the bus conductor having change, cluster volunteers not getting married or having new babies or deaths in their families. When I wrote my background paper on the reading programme at Akshara, there was very little of a paper trail to follow – it was more about asking the experts and pulling information together. Learning for the future depends on keeping capacity within the organization. Processes are preserved as long as people are, and not the other way around.
I’m not arguing for a robotic world in which people are incidental and unnecessary, but all this does make clear the importance of documentation. Since I got here I feel I’ve produced document after document, not all particularly useful. Yet there’s something satisfying about knowing that my intellectual work is all on paper for anyone to look at, even if I’m no longer around to explain it. Documentation doesn’t have to be about removing real people from the equation, but it is about communicating knowledge so it doesn’t remain confined to individuals – instead, experiences and learnings can disseminate throughout an organization.
This past weekend I went with A, N, and two cluster volunteers to conduct ASER surveys in households. ASER, or the Annual Survey of Education Report produced by the Pratham network across India, tests children's learning levels in reading and math through random household testing. The purpose of ASER is to do something like what I’ve been discussing: document something relatively simple, the learning levels of children, so that knowledge can become generalized beyond individuals. We visited three households. In the first, a girl was able to recognize letters but stared blankly at sentences and paragraphs. The mother insisted that she had seen her daughter writing the English alphabet, but seemed to know little about what her child was learning. In the second house, two sisters read to us beautifully and confidently. Their mother sat next to them and encouraged them; she told me that she taught them at home and regularly talked to their teacher. All these children attend the local government school. In the third household we visited, a boy whose parents invested Rs. 300 a month for private English-medium schooling also read with fluency and confidence. His older sister was studying for a bachelors in commerce; their mother, by contrast, had studied up to 8th standard. All the children struggled with math; the cluster volunteers told us that children tended to respond better when asked questions in practical terms (“How much money do you have left if you start with Rs. 30 and spend Rs. 13 on fireworks for Deepavali?”).
In short, all kinds of concepts relevant to education policy were here: the crucial role of mothers and other family members in children’s learning, the importance of teaching through concrete examples, the abrupt cross-generational leap in educational attainment in some families, the dismal fact that some children get quite far in the school system without ever learning to read. The parents and perhaps the teachers of these children already knew all of this. The purpose of ASER is to generalize that information, to document and consolidate and disseminate. Once that happens, the localized experience becomes a powerful narrative, one that extends across the district, the state, and the country and becomes a tool for advocating change.
In a sense, all of Akshara’s goals are in line with this idea. Because not only is Akshara improving communication between public and private actors, introducing a new external push for documented information about children’s learning levels, and raising the profile of literacy; it is also attempting to promote future generations of readers who can use the written word to communicate information, imagination, and ideas. Through literacy and communication come sustainability of knowledge and personal independence. So that someday, maybe, children won’t have to ask five different people for help, bribe officials, or use connections just to get from here to there.
Posted by gowriv at November 7, 2007 12:04 PM