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Founders Day Speech 2004
Dr. Karan Singh
Chairman Dhruv Sawhney and members of the Board of Governors, Headmaster Kanti Bajpai, Deputy Headmaster, staff and students of the Doon School, parents, grandparents, old boys and young wives, distinguished citizens of Dehra Dun, karamcharis and friends;
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Let me say at the outset how delighted I am to be back at Doon on such a gloriously clear autumn evening. The HM’s worries about the weather happily turned out to be unfounded and we are here together gathered on the main field overlooking Kashmir house where I spent four years of my life as a school boy. Incredible though this may sound to the present students of the Doon School, it is exactly 62 years ago that I joined here. That was in pre-historic times, you know, because modern history begins in 1947. But going around the campus, the exhibitions, the play, the music school, the art school and so on, it seemed to me that all the intervening years had disappeared and I was in a time warp, back more than half a century. It is astounding how little has actually changed. Of course there are a lot of new buildings. I saw Oberoi house for the first time, but the Kashmir House toye room looks as grim as it was when I was here. I think, Dhruv, with all your 20 crores you must get them some new desks, for heaven’s sake.
The main change, of course, from my time is the common dining hall. In my days, each house had its own dining hall. The food when I was here, needless to say, was virtually inedible. In fact, it is a miracle that I survived for four years on Kashmir House food. What used to happen was that when I went home for the holidays I was sort of fed and fattened up, and I lived on the fat when I came back. So I did a sort of concertina for four years when I was here. But let me first of all explain why four years. It wasn’t that I was thrown out or expelled or anything. The fact is that I joined in C form instead of the usual E form. I did my Senior Cambridge at 14+ and I got a first division, to put it on record. It was just that in 1945 I did my Senior Cambridge, in ’46 I came back. I was the only first divisioner to take arts, all the first divisioners went to science. But I knew that my future did not lie in science, it lay in the humanities. I rocketed up to the top of the class, when the Partition riots started and I was withdrawn. But in any case, as I said, things are just the same: The Rose Bowl is the same as it was when I made my historic acting debut as Olivia in Twelfth Night, with Chiranjeet Batra as Viola, Ravi Mathai as Orsino and Mr Siddhartha Chari as Malvolio.
Those events are all indelibly printed upon my memory, and revisiting the school after so many years I am struck by the vibrancy and vitality, the variety and versatility of activities here. I am very glad that the Headmaster has recalled that the Doon School has always been a truly pioneering institution. It was, as he said rightly, the first public school in India and it pioneered in so many different fields – in the field of socially committed work, in mountaineering, environmental activities and generally in the concept of a holistic education. I share the hope expressed by Dr Kanti Bajpai and Mr. Dhruv Sawhney that Doon will retain its pioneering spirit to meet the challenges ahead. New challenges will require new responses and it is my hope that Doon School will always be in the forefront of creative change.
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The first pillar that we identified was of course Learning to Know – the gyan yoga. Anoh bhadra kritvoyanto vishwatah – let noble thoughts and ideas come to us from every side. We are living in an age of information explosion – the information base is doubling every five years, but from this avalanche of information, we have got to abstract knowledge and from there we have to develop wisdom. So what we need to learn is not only what we are actually studying, but the capacity for lifelong learning. That is tremendously important. Learning does not stop when we finish school. Learning is a lifelong process, literally from the womb to the tomb, and that is why most of the physics and the chemistry, the history and the geography that I learnt here in the school is probably out of date, because of technological changes. But the most valuable thing I learnt here was the capacity to learn. Every day I try to learn something new to enrich my consciousness, because life is a rare and valuable experience and any day that passes without continuing the process of learning is a day wasted. We must be open to new ideas in this information-oriented society. Our consciousness must continually expand. We are doing the most extraordinary things – we have reached the moon, we are reaching the planets, we are reaching out literally to the stars, and this is the time when the learning, the capacity for learning, must be developed while we are at school and must continue throughout our lives. That is the very first pillar of learning – learning to know.
The second pillar that was identified is Learning to Do – the karma yoga – yogah karmasukaushulam – which is one of the classic definitions of yoga. Unless education teaches us the capacity to do some productive activity, it becomes meaningless. In India, not in Doon – I am sure all the Doon School boys have been always able to secure very good work places – but generally in India, we find there is this mismatch between education and employment, and we are producing a vast army of young men and women educated but unemployed, and in some cases they become unemployable. There is a curious misapprehension still in many people’s minds that people who are highly educated should not do manual work.
That was one thing we were taught here in Doon- we had to do gardening, we had to do a lot of things with our own hands. John Gardener in one of his books has a marvelous sentence. He says that a society that values philosophy because it considers philosophy to be a noble profession, and looks down on plumbing because it considers plumbing to be a lowly profession, will get the worst of both worlds – neither its theories nor its pipes will hold water! I am afraid that this is what is happening in our own country. Our pipes are leaking and our theories are wobbly.
Therefore it is tremendously important that we have a system where this aimless drift from school to college which represents a massive waste of human resources is in some way changed. The plus two system was supposed to do that. That has failed miserably. What we need now are thousands of IIT’s. Our IIT’s are very good, but Industrial Training Institutes are needed, where young men and women, after their high school, can go into some productive training and open up job opportunities. In India we can put a satellite into space but you can never get anyone to repair your television set, this is very curious. We have to change our philosophy of education. A lot of new vistas are opening up and therefore this Learning to Do is of the essence. It also involves a positive value system, because action must be as the Gita says – shuchir daksha – it must be aimed at excellence and perfection, and rightly performed action can itself be a potent force for spiritual development. Therefore the first pillar of learning which we identified is learning to know – first of all with supple minds, with minds that are receptive and creative, minds that ask questions, and then learning to do, to put that knowledge into some useful and productive activity.
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Then there are societal values – cleanliness. We are one of the biggest clutter-bugs in the world. There is so much kachara in this country. We produce millions of tonnes of kachara. I have travelled throughout the world, in Asia and Europe, but this country is full of kachara, because what we do is take all the kachara from our houses and throw it on to the road because that is not our job. You go to Delhi. You enter a flat. The bulb is fused. The entrance is dark. But when you go inside somebody’s flat, it is beautiful, it is modern with lakhs of rupees worth of curios and furniture. But the entrance nobody will look to, because it does not belong to anybody. Now this attitude is entirely wrong. Our social commitments are nil, generally speaking. So what we have to do is to develop these social values – societal values. Cleanliness – we have to clean our own rooms. Here at least we did it in my time. Punctuality is of the essence. That is why I was so keen to arrive always two minutes before the scheduled time. Teamwork is very important and a stress on duties along with rights.
Everybody in India is obsessed with rights. We have bandhs, we have litigation and so on. What about the duties? I do not want to test you here, but how many of us know that there is a chapter on Fundamental Duties in the Constitution? I doubt if one in ten thousand knows that. Are you taught the fundamental duties? There are ten fundamental duties in part four of the Constitution. I was on the drafting committee, the Swaran Singh Committee. Nobody is worried about duties. All they are worried about is their rights. Let me tell you that if you live in a democracy or in any kind of system, you cannot have your rights until you fulfill your duties.
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Then there are environmental values. Here again Doon has pioneered. Planet Earth is in jeopardy and we have got to realise that this planet belongs to all of us. Global warming is proceeding apace. Just the other day you read that global temperatures are rising. The polar caps are melting. The sea levels are rising and there could well be ecological disaster on a global scale before the end of the century. Recall that beautiful photograph taken from outer space – that NASA photograph of planet Earth – that shows our Earth as it really is. A tiny speck of light and life against the unending darkness of outer space, so beautiful and yet so fragile. It is this Earth that has nurtured consciousness from the slime of the primeval ocean, four billion years ago to where we are today. We have to repay our debt to this Earth, to bhavani vasundhara, to Gaia, by preserving her, by reversing the process of destruction that has taken place. Millions of acres of forest disappear every year. Thousands of species become extinct. I was very glad to see the Kids for Tigers programme. As you know, I was responsible for changing the national animal from the lion to the tiger, and then was chairman of the Project Tiger steering committee. Now that is the sort of thing that we have to inculcate among our school children. Doon School of course has done it, but it is not yet as widespread as it should be.
Finally, there are values for a global society. We live in India, we are proud to be Indians, but we are also global citizens. Remember that in this present age of globalization, to which Dhruv referred, there can not only be narrow nationalisms. That is not enough. We have to develop a global nationalism, if I can coin that term. If you could go to the Parliament on the first gate there is a beautiful shloka: ayam neja paroveti ganarum laghu chetanam, udarcharitanam tu vasudhaiva kutumbakam – this is mine, that is yours, it is a small and narrow way of looking at reality. For those of the higher consciousness – the world is a family. Those two words must be the motto of a global society. We already have a global anthem – We are the World. We have a global day- The Earth Day, and the global motto has to be vasudhaiva kutumbakam. We must learn that nationalisms, no matter how significant they have been in the past, are now being transcended. Look at Europe – Britain, Germany and France fought each other for a thousand years. Millions of people were slaughtered on the battlefields of Europe, but today you can travel from Poland to Portugal and from Norway to Greece without a passport. I am very glad that a Doon School group went to Pakistan. The first step in empowering SAARC will have to be a détente with Pakistan. And then we must move on to a SAARC on the lines of the EU, ultimately a common currency, then these regional unions can form what Tennyson called "The parliament of Man, the federation of the world". So these are the sorts of values that have to be inculcated in the third pillar of learning, learning to live together.
The fourth and perhaps the most important pillar is Learning to Be. What is the inner dimension of the human personality? What are the boundless possibilities in being human? Every religion in the world talks of the inner light. The Bible talks of "the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world". The Sufis talk of the Noor Elahi. The Sikh gurus spoke of the Ek Omkar. As Francis Thomson says in one of his poems "The angels keep their ancient places, turn but a stone and start a wing. ’Tis ye, ’tis your estranged faces that miss the many splendored thing". The many splendored light of the atma, the light of consciousness itself. That is what we must reach. It is not enough to skim across the surface of life. You can be very successful. You can be great managers. You can be great entrepreneurs. But if you have not plumbed the depth of your own consciousness, you have not fully developed the potentialities and possibilities of humanness. And that is the fourth pillar of learning.
So friends, these four pillars taken together- learning to know, learning to do, learning to live together and learning to be can support the infrastructure of lifelong learning and education system. And The Doon School with its unique position has and must in the future pioneer this holistic approach to education.
Dhruv Sawhney, Headmaster Kanti Bajpai, let me congratulate the Doon School on its splendid performance over 70 years. The results this year are truly mind-boggling. The academic results are getting better and better, and so are our sports. In the past 70 years, The Doon School has produced outstanding leaders in almost every field of human activity – in politics, in trade, in industry, in commerce, in diplomacy, in the armed forces. We have held all the major offices in India, including the Prime Minister. There is only one exception and that is the Presidency, and we all have to do something about that in due course! But as far as the future is concerned, let me say it is going to be even more challenging than the past. We are moving towards a new kind of consciousness, a new set of inner and outer goals. It is a truly exciting time to be alive, my young friends. Wordsworth has written, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven." You are the young people at this time, the most exciting time. Do not waste your youth. Bernard Shaw, you remember, said "Youth is a wonderful thing, what a pity it is wasted on the young", meaning thereby that very often, young people do not realize that these are the years – there may be terrible food, I agree, probably better now and the blankets were absolutely unlivable, but nonetheless – these are the years , formative years, this is when you build your bodies, you build your minds, you build your emotional and aesthetic sensibilities, your spiritual goals.
Remember my young friends, the goal ahead is difficult and challenging. There are no short cuts any longer, either to individual greatness or to collective salvation. But it is across that difficult and razor-edged path that we must go towards our chosen goal. I will therefore end with my favorite verse from the Kathoupanishad which exhorts us to arise, awake and move onwards across the razor-edged path to our goals. The goal is a new India, the goal is a new world, the goal is a new consciousness. The goal is a new human being. Uttithata jagrata prapya varan kshidodhata kshurasya dhara nishita darattaya dargam pattastat kavayo vadanti.
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