In one of the recent interactions with my students, whereintopic for discussion was objectives of contemporary higher education, one ofthe objectives which came under discussion was a university or highereducation, in general, has a responsibility to create intellectual pioneers ofthe society. During the course of interaction when one of the students raisedthe question, Sir, who according to you can be considered as a publicintellectual in our part of the world, astonishingly I could not name even one.That particular episode became the precursor for the present write-up. Afterleaving that particular class I was thinking is it really that we don’t producepublic intellectuals in our society or we are unable to recognize them. Duringour student life, people whom we were looking as inspiration as publicintellectual have ended up being hypocrites. As a society, we have been made tobelieve that intellectualism is something related to power and status. By thatanalogy, Ambanis are the best intellectuals in Asia, which really is not true.We believe that intellectuals are the custodians of society. These are peoplewho always keep the interest of society above their own personal interest andthey always speak truth to the power when perhaps nobody dares to speak. Thereal public intellectuals always have the guts and gumption to take on thepowerful state machinery at the cost of their own self and come what may-thesepeople raise questions in the society, for the society.
Another feature which probably all public intellectualspossess is that these people try to keep a distance from the establishment andkeep evaluating the policies and programs of their respective governments withan independent mind and try to depict the true picture before the common massesof that particular society. Not only this, but public intellectuals equallyspeak about issues confronting a particular society irrespective of theircaste, colour, region and religion. Also, it is equally true that these publicintellectuals are pushed to the wall and are being at times mistreated both bysociety and state, but the fact of the matter is that these people neither bendnor compromise with their consciousness. As a society, we should accept thefact that we have failed collectively to produce a bunch of intellectuals whocould have spoken when everybody keeps mum. The tragedy with our society isthat our own people who in the garb of intellectualism always tried to elevatethemselves for higher posts or positions whether political or administrative.There are a lot of people in and around us who have made a career bothpolitical and other out of tragedies of people in our society from the lasttwenty-thirty years. And see the shamelessness of these hypocriticalpseudo-intellectuals, finally, when they reach to their aspired positions theyendorse anything and everything of state and society they had been opposing sofor. Their hypocrisies achieve another milestone when they lose their cherishedposts due to circumstances, they start speaking the language of the masses yetagain, shamelessly. As a society, we should always keep a vigil on theseso-called intellectuals, because the only aim of these people is to grab thepower, nothing else.
When we look into the possible reasons why as a society wehave not been able to produce a handful of public intellectualisms, the part ofthe blame lies with our education system especially higher educationinstitutions. As a system, we are up to produce conformist from our educationalinstitutions and we never encourage a student who has the ability to question ateacher and society at large. Rather, those who have the ability to questionthey are being isolated and even singled out so that they don’t dare toquestion anymore. If we wish as a society to progress we have to make sure thatour educational institutions must become breeding grounds for intellectualismwhich currently seems a far-fetched dream and the fact of the matter is thatour higher education institutions have been turned into seas of mediocritywhere intellectualism has no place whatsoever. We need to change this as earlyas possible and revive the integrity of our society, we need to do a lot moreto go away with conformists, for living a healthy, prosperous, academic andlife with intellect.
The author is Assistant Professor (Education), GovernmentDegree College Ganderbal, Kashmir.