Sunil Trovalds: Fail.

June 2003

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Richard Stallman's parents must attend the Parent Teacher Association (PTA) school meet. The teachers and the principal wish to complain about his disrespect for authority and his bad manners.

"Son, you'd better study for your Boards or your college entrance exams. Stop wasting time with your kernel software hobby. Think about your future, your career, and your marriage." Sunil Trovalds would have certainly got and earful from his parents. Richard Stallman may just have been expelled from school for being brutally honest and outspoken about ethical issues. That is, if these two visionaries had attended school or college in India. Look no further than what our education system did to Ramanujan, India's greatest contemporary mathematics genius. Bluntly speaking, only recognition from the 'white man' brought innumerable honours to Ramanujan, the Indian academic failure.

Defiance, Not Discipline

Surprisingly, the Indian education system is among the best the in the world. Our engineers, doctors, MBAs, and even English teachers are sought worldwide. Indian students are mostly intelligent and hardworking. The country has strong traditions in education spanning thousands of years. Indeed, the system that gives birth to thousands of brilliant computer engineers each year, suffers from only one tragic flaw. Cleverly designed by the former British Empire, its sole purpose was to ruthlessly cut asunder the civilization's grand learning tradition, school innocent young minds in the glory of Britannia, and churn out educated colonial slaves steeped in obedience and servility. Impressively, the system worked so well that a huge sub-continent could remain colonized and managed by just a handful of Britishers. Today, the British are long gone, taking with them the Kohinoor and Indian Curry as prime souvenirs, and leaving behind a still scarred and wounded education system.

So here's the one thing they don't teach you, and actively discourage, in Indian schools: Defiance. Yet defiance alone furthers the frontiers of knowledge. A defiant Einstien challenged Newton's theories and broke the centuries of intellectual rigor mortis that followed Newton's breakthroughs. Unix was born in academia, and when corporate America successfully swallowed it, Richard Stallman defiantly and single-handedly rose to create Free Software Foundation, and GNU, which stands for Gnu Not Unix. Linus Trovalds created the Linux kernel as a college project in Helsinki. Thus was born the alternative, freedombased operating system known as GNU/Linux. These projects could never have been born in Indian academia.

Absent For the past one decade since the birth of Linux, and seventeen years since the birth of GNU software, the academic community worldwide has made major contributions to its thousands of software, millions of lines of codes, and in providing other resources. Yet Indian academia is starkly conspicuous by its absence. You know why? Because we are not even debating in 2003 for instance, whether we should teach students the concepts of wordprocessing through a more holistic approach, or should we continue teaching them just MSWord. The Indian education system forbids your asking fundamental questions. Don't ask why, just do it. If you don't understand something, pretend to know it by rote. The mouse and the GUI could never have been invented in India to supplant the command-line end-user interface of DOS. What we did have in the DOS-decade were thousands of clever school and college kids who knew every DOS command by rote.
Indians only get to make significant contributions and breakthroughs in computing, once they leave India to study and work on foreign shores. For the first time their disciplined minds taste intellectual freedom, and Hotmail, the Pentium chip, and hundreds of other innovations suddenly spring forth. What if we could set free the minds of millions of students across India? Could another Ramanujan or C.V. Raman blossom again? Could this country of a billion plus people unleash its own Sunil Trovalds, Richard Stallman, Eric S. Raymond, Seymour Cray?
So how do you teach defiance? Changing the current syllabus, coursebooks, and even switching from proprietory software like MSWindows, MSOffice and other proprietory applications, to freedom-based alternatives like GNU/Linux, OpenOffice, won't help. Defiance cannot be taught. It can only be caught. Just question everything you think you know. Breakthroughs will follow. Einstien asked a fundamental question: What is Time? This type of thinking has been the hallmark of any significant software development, anywhere in the world. Do share with us how you can bring innovative thinking in Indian academia and through it the immense possibilities of free software development projects across schools and colleges in India.

Inspired by the vision of Osho. Niyam Bhushan is a leading technology writer, editor, columnist, with a background in graphic design. He consults and trains in digital imagery. He has been using computers across several platforms since 1982, and loves the freedom and power offered by GnuLinux. Email: freedomyug at linuxforu dot com

© 2003 Niyam Bhushan. First published in LinuxForYou magazine, www.linuxforu.com. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.