They give even the toughest cold jitters, the hardiest of the hardy feel a chill up their spine. For all our famed resilience and abilities to weather the cruelest of storms, we Engineering Students have yet to come up with a more optimistic philosophy when it comes to VIVAS.
Engineering studies hardly ever make any sense whether they be in the context of relevance or in making we under grads feel some pride in the overhyped glamour that distressingly engulfs this stream. (May be the 'grass is just greener on the other side')
Now VIVAS hold the terrifying potential of making our worst fears come true.
The mere thought of being expected to ‘understand’ all that bullhsit in those overweight Engineering books makes me week in the knees. Forced into a false complacency and security after an academic life filled with complete dependence on the ‘ Rote’ memory, we have hardly ever been tested for our true understanding of the complex equations and awe inspiring theorems that have rolled before our eyes countless number of times. We have absorbed them retained them and felt infinitely smug about being able to do so efficiently.
Detractors will of course beg to differ on many counts to that allegation of the aforementioned fear of being put to the real test.
“ I cannot mug yaar, this theory subject’s such a pain “ ….an extremely fashionable statement of our times.
The hypocrisy of it all is so overwhelming that it has failed to excite any emotions in me any more.
These same folk (often including me) have ridden waves of jubilant success piggybacking on exactly this ability to ‘learn by rote’ all their lives. Some have enjoyed fame fortune and almost celebrity status thanks to the patronization of exactly this method of education. Even while uttering that ever present excuse they are bound to know somewhere in the deep recesses of their conscience that those very subjects which require nothing other than ‘mugging’ and ‘vomiting’ are their safest and certain avenues of high grades and mind-boggling percentages .
Coming back to the question that begs to be answered in the light of such a culture of education is ‘how fair is then the concept of VIVAS ?’ They aim at testing a student’s grasp of the fundamental concepts of all that they learn.
We are often taught by totally hapless and incompetent professors (whose only claim to fame being a mere ‘bachelor’s degree’, that’s like a 4th grader teaching the 3rd grade just because he has passed the 3rd grade a few months earlier)
Thus forced to trudge along through heat sweat and smoke to ‘ coaching classes ‘ stretched from one end of the city to another, and then weighed down by the mindless copy pasting of assignments and journals we hardly ever have scope to retrospect upon the true significance of the nature and reach of our subjects. We begin and end our lessons completely clueless about ‘why’ we just spent an hour or more racking our brains over seemingly impossible set of theorems and equally confusing bunch of equations to follow.
In such a scenario, to inflict upon us the torture of forcing our intelligence to stretch into thus far com pletely uncharted territories,to insult our sensibilities by exposing our ignorance and immaturity and make us unwilling fodder to feed the pompous egos of certain sociopath professors, is in my view nothing but ‘Criminal’ and could amount to ‘Mental Molestation’.
Having claimed thus an interesting conclusion comes to my mind.
The very mechanisms that have been structured to makes us think beyond written literatures, to force interest (in hopes of eventually making it voluntary) in the real world and the very tangible link between ‘Theory’ and ‘Practice’ , have succeeded in accomplishing the exact opposite.
And the week link probably has been the manner in which we have been introduced to all the concepts in the first place. Very few can actually interest themselves for the sake of the depth of the fundamentals and minute details in the Theory itself. For the rest of us commoners it would be a lot more interesting to have some knowledge about the end towards which we learn a particular concept etc. In knowing such we would, I believe have a sense of equipping ourselves (through such knowledge) to make a meaningful foray into the practical nature of Life around us.
It would give us a sense of following in the footsteps of the Great Minds of our age. To learn about a theorem and know exactly how Edison used it to make the ‘bulb’ or how C.V Raman used another to measure the age of stars, would make us feel in some way on the path to greatness.
The great breakthroughs of our times have loads of residual glory left in them. Were we to taste these while also being exposed to current progresses in the same, and encouraged to dream about how they could still be taken further; numbers, equations, codes, machines and such like would suddenly seem a lot more interesting and worthwhile then they do at this point
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