From Chandita Mukherjee, Comet Media Foundation, Mumbai

As I stare at the thread from the last day’s web, darkened from all the dirt it has taken in the two months since it was wrapped and tied securely around my wrist by Damyanti, (the idea being that you wear it till it rots and drops off—a traditional way of keeping a memory alive till it loses its relevance or is so internalised that it requires no more reminder, possibly) these are some things that strike me.

 Even before it started, the conference built itself up beautifully through the expectations created by the open discussions on the page. People tuned in, framed hopes in their minds and came to Udaipur very excited and ready to share and learn.

 I really appreciated the open way the core group designed and conducted the event, not feeling pressured nor pressurising the participants to put out finished formulations and results. The mela sessions opened our eyes to the pre-occupations of our co-participants and it made everyone come closer. The setting up of discussion sessions by various participants, and the poster calls to attend these, the theatre games, the painting on a common canvas, all were appropriate to this form of conference and brought us into a common resonance.

 Then there were all the interactions throughout the day and night with all the new friends. Throughout there was enough space for us to mingle, to talk with everyone, and at the end I thought I had maybe missed meeting only 4 or 5 people.

 This free flowing structure enabled many of us to shed some hardened attitudes—baggage produced out of years of struggling to keep ourselves going in hostile environments. It helped us to regain, if only for a short time, the sense of being a child-like learner, reacting without worrying about what lay beneath, easily dipping into the good feelings that pervaded the air.

 This positive flow carried over into the following fortnight when one ran into so many of the new friends made in Udaipur at the Asian Social Forum in Hyderabad. It made one feel that one was part of something that encircled the globe, not some small conspiracy in a corner of the universe, and that realisation is very charging, makes a current flow through the plugged up places in one’s being.

 About the term “learning societies” (apropos your questions “What do learning societies mean to you? etc. ) I am not sure what those are now. I had some notion before going to Udaipur, I think because of all the daily discussions on the e-group, but now I am fuzzy. I suppose it encompasses a whole range of practices, whether consciously educational or otherwise. Rather than define it tightly perhaps one should use it as an all-inclusive basket to pile in all the good things we know of and want to pass onto our descendants. No, perhaps we should be more rigorous—at least attempt to name the elements that make up a learning society, even if we do not want a hard-edged reductionist definition.

 Now for the reservations. Despite all the engagement, affection and affirmation, what worried me about the conference was a certain avoidance of problematic issues. Take the rise of intolerance, not only here, but the world over. The rise of fanatical religion-based nationalism is bad news for a group like this, but somehow, though we alluded to it all the time, (that and the possibility of war in Iraq) we were not able to respond to it with the same creative vigour that characterised our other activities together.

 At times one got this impatient feeling that here the forces of intolerance are out to snuff out all liberal opinion and we are acting as if just asserting that we have nothing to hide, and keeping a benign demeanor is our best protection. Remember, these are the people who celebrate the assassination of Gandhi behind closed doors, every year on 30^th Jan. They don’t care if you are sweet or have integrity; they want to squash you out because you are a nuisance.

 Many of us were drawn to the conference because of our critique of the educational system, concern with the curriculum and questions such as Why school at all? and so on. These stem from a basic questioning of notions such as development and modernity, issues tied to the role of the state, and a vision of the society we would like to see in the future. However, we didn’t go into all that very much. Did we assume a tacit agreement all around? This set of issues should have been kneaded and chewed more between us. Maybe it required that some people be cued in advance to provoke some exploration on these themes?

 Jinan, Kishoreji and others connected these issues repeatedly in the various plenaries, and went on drawing our attention to the dangerous outcomes of the worldview that comes with modern education—that we have unthinkingly ruined delicate ecosystems, made many ethnic groups, cultures and languages extinct and similarly destroyed thousands of plant and animal species. Jinan felt that it is no wonder that it has turned out this way—for a long time the dominant view of the educated has been that to know means to control and to use for personal gain. He pointed out that all this had harmed the intuitive aspects of our personalities and made us slaves to “the tyranny of reason”.

 However, it appeared some of us were happy to limit their interpretation of such ideas to: (I exaggerate a bit for effect) let’s dump the modern world, make an enclave where we will recreate a golden age from the past, where we shall live simply. For, you can’t solve the world’s problems, but you can choose to live differently yourself.

 This inability to engage with issues of the common good in a collective manner is worrisome. It results in efforts like this conference being marginalised. Of course, one may say Whose margins? But we live in a wider world, we want to expose people to ideas we hold dear, by responding to their quest for a better existence, don’t we?

 What if we meet again, after some three years, and come back with a renewed focus on the issues causing misery to millions of people and draining the planet of its resources, and to look at education and educational activity as a way of healing people and the earth from this standpoint?

 In the meantime what could be the processes we nurture in ourselves and those around us as we carry on with our day-to-day activities? Your original question was: What are some new actions you would like to take to help unfold learning societies?

I would say, just spread the word that globalisation and modernity is not inevitable. That protecting the earth and all beings on it, including ourselves, is the only choice. And as part of this, the education angle is: we must protect indigenous knowledge and ensure that it is appreciated and passed on.

In this world, being over-run by monster conglomerates, no border is sacred any more and no nation state can erect barriers to keep them out. Under such circumstances, the only way that people can keep their self-respect is if they can build their capacities for resistance, and they can keep their environments from being stripped of resources and destroyed forever. This has to happen in their villages and farms, in hills and forests, within their knowledge systems and practices of agriculture, animal-rearing and craft manufacture.

Knowingly or unknowingly the educated have de-legitimised the traditions of people’s knowledge, and do not recognise its value. This is a chance to do some corrective action, by bringing it to the foreground, and creating respect for the keepers of this knowledge among the arrogant educated, giving the latter some provocation, and a way out of their own sense of suffocation. This is the potential opportunity I see for my own practice as a communicator in the upcoming period.