Thinking Inside the Box

Don’t you just hate it when you have to call tech support for help with your mp3 player or computer? It really sucks. You get connected to somewhere in India where your call is recorded for training purposes. You’re stuck speaking to Bob with an Indian accent, whose name you know isn’t really Bob, but whatever. The worst part is that when you tell them your problem, you just know that all they are doing is looking up that problem on your computer and seeing what solutions their company has told them to try (Reboot? Gee, I never would have thought of that on my own. Thanks, Bob!). They’re not actually trying to solve your problem, they’re just following an extensive spreadsheet that covers nearly every problem your software or hardware could have, and if they can’t find a solution, they are instructed to have you call somebody else or send it in for repair.

I can now tell you that it’s not their fault. It’s education in India that teaches them to be that way, and after just two hours at the Ayurvedic College and a follow-up with Principal Ramdev, I know this for sure now. It’s tickled the back of my mind since I got here, but I can finally confirm that Indian education does not value logic and reasoning.

First, let me explain the basics of Ayurvedic dietetics, so that you can understand the rest of what I write. Food is categorized as either being light or heavy on digestion. Then, each person is categorized under one of three digestions, or a combination of the three: vat, meaning moderate digestion; pitta, meaning strong; and kaph, or weak. Based on a person’s digestion, they are prescribed a certain diet that contains a combination of light and heavy foods that are appropriate for their particular digestion. In addition, the season of the year is another determinant of what food you should eat, and Ayurveda distinguishes between 6 seasons throughout the year: spring, summer, rainy, early winter, late winter, and autumn.

Knowing this (which only took about ten minutes to be explained to me) and based on what I learned the previous day, what I really wanted to get out of my time in the college was how exactly foods and people are classified as such. Rice is a light food, but why? I have a moderately-strong digestion, but what in my body determines that? These were my goals.

My goals will not be met. Ever. Know why? Because not even Ayurveda knows the answers.

Consider that for a second, and let me give you an example to help you understand. If you go to a Western doctor with a knee injury, he will likely do some sort of exam, and based on what he thinks about the results of his observations, he will make a recommendation for treatment that will be best for you. What if instead of considering you as a unique person with individual needs and symptoms, he considers the results of your exam and opens up a book in front of you to see what to do? He reads for you the proper recommended treatment word-for-word out of the book, and that’s that. Would you go back to that doctor or follow his advice? Probably not. Unfortunately, that is exactly the method of treatment you will receive if you go to an Ayurvedic doctor.

Dr. Gupta, the dietetics professor, sat with me for two hours today trying to answer my questions about Ayurvedic classification, and I kept asking why. Why is this food light and this food heavy? What are the characteristics that give me a stronger digestion than that person? She was never able to answer my questions, and kept flipping through the pages of a book that she had in front of her and reading loosely-related paragraphs in the hope that they would answer my questions and shut me up. Fortunately, I am stubborn, and tried to ask the most simple questions possible that could never be answered from a book. I could tell that after awhile, she was getting really sick of my questions. In my mind, I was asking the same question 10 different ways and never getting a good answer. In her mind, this stupid Westerner was asking the same question 10 times and she was showing me the right answer in her book each time.

First, I tried this one: “Why is rice light on your digestion?” She answered because rice has properties that make it light and easy to digest. “Yes, but why? What are those properties?” She rattled off Sanskrit terms out of the text in front of those. “Okay, but how does one discover those properties?” She didn’t know.

Then I tried a new one. I pulled a pack of American-brand gum out of my backpack, one that she had never seen before. I asked her to tell me how to classify this food. She said this was impossible without eating the food in the first place. In other words, a food is light if it feels light on your body, and heavy if it feels heavy. That’s it. But wait, you might ask, what if rice makes one person feel heavy and another feel light? There’s no way that food can be universally classified as light or heavy, because different people react to the same food in different ways. Ah, but a food is only light or heavy after it enters your system and is digested, upon which its lightness or heaviness is revealed. In this respect, Ayurveda is a completely objective branch of science. It contrasts heavily with Western science, which strives to be as subjective as possible. After 2 hours of me asking why, I finally got down to the real answer: who knows?

Let me remind you that Dr. Gupta is a well-practiced doctor of Ayurvedic dietetics. She has a 5-year undergraduate degree in Ayurveda and a 2-year master’s in Ayurvedic diet. On top of that, she’s over 40 and thus has 15+ years of practical experience. Yet she is physically unable to tell me why rice is light, because she simply doesn’t know. Upon realizing this, I finally understood Ayurveda. Completely. They told me it couldn’t be done in a week, but I did it in two hours. Ayurveda is a set of texts over 2,000 years old that lists conditions of the body and treatments, and it has been blindly followed since its inception. In order to be a practicing Ayurvedic, all you have to do is memorize. No logic, no reasoning, no diagnosis. It doesn’t exist. It’s not needed. A computer can do it, and could probably do it better and faster than a person.

This is the way education of all kinds works in India. I’ve seen copies of tests at several levels of education in a variety of subjects, and it boggles my mind the kind of questions that are asked. For example, “What are the four characteristics shared by most democracies?” This question was asked on a pre-university entrance test, one comparable to the SAT or ACT, but the type of questions, as you can see are completely different. They have different values. 4 characteristics? Just 4?I can think of 6 or 7 characteristics shared by democracies, based on several classes I have taken, but if I didn’t write down the answer that was told to me in the government-sponsored textbook, verbatim, I would fail that question. Does that mean that I know nothing about democracies? No, it just means I haven’t read that book. Yet this is the kind of teaching and learning valued in India: memorization and regurgitation. That’s the only way one can succeed here. If you ask questions, think for yourself, and try to exercise logic, you are shunned.

You may wonder, if logic is not valued, why so much business is starting to be shipped out to India. 10-15 years ago, MNC’s specializing in technology and IT, like Microsoft and HP, decided to set up businesses in Hyderabad, Bangalore and Kolkata (then Calcutta). They favored these places not just because they were some of the only big cities in India with relatively stable power supply, but because there was so much cheap labor available. Most people know this. What they probably don’t know is that they also snatched up the rejects from the educational system, those who asked questions and tried to exercise logic. These people were not welcome in what India saw as development, but foreign MNC’s saw their potential and recruited them for their purposes. Today, these are the leaders of the industry in Asia. America frowns upon excessive outsourcing and calls it the labor drain, but India is also unhappy with some of the results of international cooperation. Sure, their IT industry is booming, but they are experiencing a brain drain, with strong thinkers and innovators leaving the country because they have no reason to stay in India. It’s their own fault, though. Until education can move away from rote memorization and teaching students how to pass the exams and nothing else, India can never be a big thinker in the world.

Here I’m starting to get biased and judgmental. I’ve tried not to do it so far, but this time, I don’t care. This is something that really strikes me at the center of my beliefs and values. I’ve tried to be understanding and tolerant of all the cultural differences I’ve encountered so far, but now I have to take a stand. This isn’t right. A person cannot become smarter by reading a book and memorizing facts alone. At some point, we have to ask Why. It’s the only question that leads to progress and higher learning. That’s how we evolved and grew as a species. Without “Why,” we would still be hiding in our caves and eating raw animal flesh, wondering why the sky kept throwing bright fire at us and making loud noises when it rained. It’s the only thing that separates us from animals. Humans can think, reason and act upon their beliefs. It’s human nature, and the Indian system of education is suppressing it.

When I started at MSU, I began my studies in political science and international political relations at James Madison College. I really disliked it and changed majors after a year. That whole first year, all we did was read political texts and case studies and analyze them according to arguments, points of view and logic behind policy. Then we would right excruciating essays on an obscure issue and argue one point or another. I hated it because I didn’t like politics, and I felt like the professors believed that reading a book will make you an expert on that subject immediately. While I never regret my decision and I stick by it, there is something that I cannot deny about JMC, and that is the value they put on teaching logic and critical thinking. In just one year of classes with them, I learn invaluable, incalculable amounts of reasoning powers and methods of deduction. I learned how to read a newspaper article and consider hundreds of points of view represented by it. I learned how to listen to a person and consider their background and how it affects their way of speaking on an issue. Most importantly, I learned how to question. Since then, I never, ever, ever take anything I read, hear or see at face value. I always question everything in my life without exception, and this has helped me excel in everything I do. Thank you, James Madison College. You and I may not have gotten along at all times, but I will never forget that you taught me to think.

I won’t lie, this realization has made me question the impact I can possibly have here. There’s no way that people who have been trained in a system teaching them exactly one way to think can be very receptive to outside viewpoints and different ways of doing things. Even if a few people want my input, the system won’t let me get very far. Ultimately, I can’t make much of a difference. I can try, and most certainly will, but I have to do so working within the system, and that’s quite difficult. For example, how can I teach about eating a proper diet when I can’t get the students to question what’s in the food they eat and think critically about it? I can’t exactly go over every single piece of food that they will possibly consume over the course of their lives and tell them how much to eat of it. Instead, I have to somehow get them to think more about what they put into their mouths and not take it for granted all the time. It might not even work, but at least I can try.

For the rest of my time at the Ayurvedic College, I will hopefully be shadowing doctors as they diagnose patients and recommend changes in their diet. I will also be reading some literature about specific classifications of food. I’m not too happy about that part, because I didn’t come to India to read a book about Ayurveda when I can just as easily pick one up from the library. I’ll never be able to learn why the classification is why it is, but any knowledge about it is good knowledge at this point. I also was able to visit the hostels today and get some information about their diet, upon which I will expand in the next few days. Unfortunately, as I have no plans to become an Ayurvedic doctor or learn much more about it, the college has little to offer me. I won’t be spending much more time there.

In other news: Madam Utra’s son, Shankir, has come home for a vacation after working for some time in the states for AT&T. It was so nice to be able to talk to somebody who speaks American English. It was even nicer that he brought dark chocolate from the states. I love dark chocolate, and there is exactly one kind of chocolate that you can get in Palampur: Cadbury milk chocolate. It sucks. Who would have thought that Hershey’s could taste so good?