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He observed: "Our liberal arts courses are landlocked imaginations. Our street performances emphasise memory and the constant reinvention of memory. For my friend, life is incomplete without the sea. When you can recite, you reinvent. He talked about how he had examined various courses, studied what was missing in them. It’s an act of mourning for language loss, a wake for all the languages we have lost. I cite in particular a speech by a distinguished banker.R. To grasp the poetics of air or water, you have to read a Bachelard, do a history of science.Orality links up to memory. The liberal arts have to bring nature back into the syllabus, into science, even into the Constitution. "Food is science and ethics rolled into one."My friend laughed and said: "You make the liberal arts sound like an extract, an educational potion to be instantly marketed." It is not managerial or corporate or policy-oriented. Our villagers can tell you a Mahabharat with myriad variants. He asked: "Can you think of any liberal arts course designed around food as a sensorium, as a celebration of diversity?" Our liberal arts courses are like instant food, instantly digestible and forgettable. Memory captures diversity. Otherwise you create an education based on dualism. Orality has to spring back to life." He went on to add: "I mean it literally." A Jesuit priest asked me: "We all think from the land to the sea. Memory can give you as many variants of a legend or folklore as the uses of a coconut.
That’s all a liberal arts course is. Policy vulgarises the liberal arts, turning a play into a gross act of instrumentalism. He asked me which liberal arts course has a sense of diversity, a profusion of languages." Food is a sensorium; food shows you the difference between need and desire." He explained: Wholesale Spring machine Suppliers "You do not begin with a syllabus, which is like a shopping list, buying two parts Panini and three parts Socrates..My friend lost interest in my questions. We destroy these little worlds to build a port, Adani style." Liberal arts do not begin with diktats and syllabi, but with storytelling. My friends said: "Food is central to the liberal arts.My friend became more thoughtful after a few idlis and a coffee.One of the things I value most in life are the friends I have and the lessons they teach. Corporations cannot redeem the liberal arts. One needs to understand nature, the sea, forests and rivers as economies. Their insights are not lectures but emerge from the way they live and think. Science and ecology have to be reworked into the liberal arts. This is why we do not understand fishing as a livelihood. How many think from the sea to land?" Our notions of economics and security are all landlocked. A return to orality is what you need, not a course in the digital humanities, which tells how many times Shakespeare used the word "evil". Patrick Geddes, the ecologist, called it the economics of a leaf, as opposed to the economics of a metal. Look at the way they have turned CSR into an oxymoron for ethics. The return of storytelling is the first attempt to redeem education. Between food, fasting and festivals, you can write the history of a civilisation. One has to have idlis at only one restaurant." I was angry, and then he laughed and said: "A walk through the city is a better course in liberal arts than any college effort. He added that we need the classics and storytellers. Memory is reinvention." The liberal arts are a celebration of language, of the playfulness of translation.We decided to walk along the sea. He was heading to his favourite café in Chennai.
The addiction is not to drugs but to food and place. Ananthamurthy, saying: "An illiterate in India speaks five languages, while a convent school girl survives on one. Storytelling creates memory, returns orality to its place in society. He bought a roll of peanuts, and sat watching the sea. Our education, he felt, does not give us time to breathe between the Kota tutorials and entrance tests. "The deficit," he claimed, "was the liberal arts, a sense of aesthetics and values which added a holism to managerial and corporate life. You cannot do it with some course on environmental humanities.We were walking near the sea. Once memory is central, recovering languages, and celebrating their world views, is the task of liberal arts. The sea is his cosmos, and the fishermen his friends. He quoted his friend, the wonderful Kannada writer U. He laughed sharply and asked: "Can you think of any corporation which can do that?" I sat silently next to him, content with a little packet of Sundal. The liberal arts are the return of dreams and reverie to education.A city is a diversity of languages — "which liberal arts course can quote such a diversity, pretend to be a costume ball of languages?" A living city is a better model for the liberal arts than some stiff-necked course on the classics. Can you think of a single liberal arts course on food?" You will have bits on dance and music, but little on food. The other day I met a friend, a philosopher, and I was telling him excitedly about the new liberal arts universities being planned across India. "It’s a return to civics, civility and civilisation. The fate of food can be a course which is futuristic.
