07.25.07

Dr Kalbag

Posted in Miscellaneous at 11:16 am by PuneTalks

We went to Pabal after 21 yrs after we visited there last. The timing just seemed right .As we were three of us in summer of 85, we were three even now on this trip to this village . It showed signs of heavy rains when we started and poured on the way to Pabal.

The heavy rains hit the wind shield fiercely. The heavy raindrops bombarded the car roof, as the car bumped through potholes and left village after village behind as my mind raced back to my 1985 visit to Pabal.

In the afternoon when we reached Pabal everything looked lush green around. Summers were over and monsoon had set in.

As we lunched at a small hut restaurant at the bottom of the Vigyan Ashram Hill, we asked the restaurant owner if he knew Dr Kalbag? “There will never be one like him. He touched lives of many ordinaries. “
I could not have disagreed In July in 2003, while in London, when I had heard of Dr Kalbag passing away in Mumbai, I sobbed inconsolably for many a hours -a reaction which had surprised myself.

Who was he to me who struck such an inner cord and also for several others who passed by him?

Our current visit was in a stark contrast to the first one that I had made in the summer of 1985. I had finished my third year in an engineering college in Mumbai and was recommended to get to this place called Pabal to have a look and learn a few bits on the practicalities of life. The suggestion came from my brother working from Hindustan Lever. where Dr Kalbag the founder of Vigyan Ashram had worked earlier .

After an overnight stay in Pune, it was in the middle of Afternoon in a scorching heat on the plains that we arrived at Pabal, from Mumbai .There were three of us there. After a brief introduction to the Ashram authorities, Amit and Amlesh headed back to Mumbai to leave me to spend close to four weeks in the campus which was to influence rest of my life.

The experience itself did not start without pains.

As I dumped my travel bags in my room (This was of a house called Geodesic Dome), there hung a poster, with a sketch of a woman in tears, on the bathroom door.

Hot winds blew and whistled through the door and window cracks. This and the heat on the plains and sight of endless barren land that you could gaze down from the top of the hill, where the campus stood, hit me with the first home sickness.

This was the site of Vigyan Ashram that Dr. Kalbag had started as an institute for the cause of Rural development through Science and Education. He took premature retirement from Hindustan Lever to start the institute .

The flavor of the teachings and way of working at the campus was worlds apart from what I had seen through my formal so called sophisticated institutes .The use of “hands” in the education was what was being emphasized.

I had two assignments. (Which I was asked to develop on my own as a goal for my stay at camp.)
The first one was to develop and create an “Electronics Principles” teaching course for an ordinary non technical student which is when I realized for the first time how difficult a teaching effort could be. Incidentally, it also actually meant knowing the facts before you spell them out to others!

I then finished design / building the “electrical energy generation” part of the Windmill energy project. We had mechanically coupled a bicycle wheel rotated by a windmill through to an Electrical Dynamo whose output was then filtered to charge the batteries.

Dr Kalbag made me do everything. Right form generating the idea for the project, through costing, travel budgeting and then the implementation.

This was very different from my engineering institute experiences in Mumbai wherein most of the components and apparatus for the experiments would lie on the lab shelf. We then went through motions to repeat an experiment defined so precisely, that the brains would just not tick and connect with the joy of discovery or pleasure of finding things out which in first place was the very purpose of the experiments.

On the contrary, Everything on the campus was through first principles of science. The Geodesic domes in which we all lived were built to take care of the high wind velocity management. The water tables discoveries were to be made on the basis of earth resistance measurements to save farmers efforts in digging water wells and then there was the bullock cart called Mech-Bull which did it’s job and also eased the life of the “Bull” itself.

Nothing at the Ashram, the teachings, the learning and experiences came capsuled as they come in the modern teaching methods and that fascinated and captivated me.

Dr Kalbag himself used to say:
“You know why the kids do not like and later abandon schools? Probably because there is nothing in the schools that naturally connect and attracts them. In the core, learning is a natural process and there is nothing natural in today’s learning process or methods.”

If you have ever read Richard Feynman’s “Surely u are joking Mr Feynman “, a book that explains the attitudes of the great physicist in approaching physics, life and puzzles, you can probably be able to relate to Dr. Kalbag’s ways of teaching. He was a lot like Feynman.

Amma (Dr. Kalbag’s wife ) walked me in the mornings during that trip every day to ease out my home sickness.She told me umteen stories of the travels they had in their lives and through careers and how rewarding it was an experience for them.

As the night fell, we dine dat the mess assembled in the corner of the campus. It had a corrugated tin roof ,survived from flying away in one stormy night by Dr. Kalbag and his Dutch student visiting from Netherlands who both hung to the “flying roof” before others could tie it down.

Social connections got developed with me connecting with farming communities around. In one of the events of a local farmer’s marriage, I was witness to the marriage in which the bride was carried on the shoulders by an Uncle as a procedure!

As I spoke today to Amma, on the progress and spread of the program, I remembered another experience I had during my visit to my old school in South Konkan.

In the summer of 2004, I had visited my old school in a Shiroda and had delivered a lecture on globalization and the way it would impact us-including the lives of those who thought they were far away and disconnected from the modern world.

At the end of that lectures, I was taken around for a tour of few of the labs of the school that were actually being used for demonstrations of science and technology for rural development.

The school authorities told me that “some science center“ from Pune had funded the program 3 years ago and the funding stopped this year and the school now faced issues continuing on such a great program experience which every student was dying for.

I was later to discover that the funding came actually through efforts from Vidnyan Ashram. Soon things were pretty clear in my mind as to what could have happened. The objective was to provide the funds to start an initiative but Dr Kalbag in his methods would expect that the local management would design a program which would self sustain after some initial period.

For instance if they decided to initiate a mechanical fabrication shop as one of the elements of the local program, they also needed to make sure that they obtained “work” from the communities and earned for further investments and self sustenance.

This particular program in my school lacked the vision and aptitude for it (as even I could see it ) and also the need to realize the fact that when we sometimes drift from seeking help to seeking permanent crutches, that disables us throughout our lives.

The learning experience does not necessarily relate to the classrooms and qualifying certification tests, as we are witnessing them with horror in the modern world. It goes beyond these boundaries and the course contents and connects with the character building process. These aspects of learning connected and made a solid bond to Dr Kalbag

I then realised the emotions I went through at the news of his death. Subtly I was influenced and had tried soaking in his principles and with his passing, I had a fear of losing that association. It was as if a child was developing a fear of losing the toy that it acquired.

Let us now stop here for a minute and have a look at the vision that Dr. Kalbag stated.

It would be bit disappointing to many a soul as there is not a word of IT advancements, investments in the markets and such but let us still read it and see if we can relate to it and if so put our two cents on the table to move it forward.

This is the way it goes :

“I would like to see India prosper and be a path finder for the rest. This will happen only when everyone can reach his or her own full potential. Hence raise the lowest. Thus my stress on education of the rural youth. I believe intelligence is developed and not inherited. Activity-based thinking is the source of intelligence.

Good education has to be based on diverse experiences and for this real life is the best educator. In our society, we need to develop courage to act on our convictions and be willing to pay the price, many of us do not act on our own belief and we seem to be playacting all the time. We believe only in symbolic acts not acts for results.

I feel like an inventor. My invention is the educational system that integrates education and development, that is close to real everyday life and which costs so little to implement. My vision is that one day I will see this invention spread all over India in all the schools. My vision is that every village will have the equipment and the skills that are the basis of all modern industry; my invention will achieve this at a very low cost.

My vision is that youth coming out of this system, in villages all over will be handymen, who are at home with a variety of skills and can concretize their ideas; they are inventors at their level. My vision is that most rural sections will thus get access to most modern techniques and this will spur development from the grassroots and ultimately progress India into the new age. My vision is that India will one day be at the forefront of a new civilization.. Now I have put my vision in black and white, as much as I can. But it is not possible to describe a vision in words. I hope I can show a glimpse of it in my own actions”

As the day was closing, the Ashram campus was busy bustling with activities and life and Amma was telling me the inroads the program made into the education system in Maharashtra.

On the return trip, I touched Amma’s feet and left. The rains followed us all the way. Everything around looked very green and cool, wiping clean the memories of the scorching heat and barren land which had overwhelmed me in the summer of 85 when the dreams that Dr Kalbag had, looked so distant in reality.

There was dead silence in the car when we returned. No matter what I missed Dr. Kalbag.

Windshield wipers rubbed against the windshield making a rhythmic noise and struggled to keep glass and sight clear in front through the incessant rains. So did my moist eyes occasionally, as we headed back to Pune to catch up with the ordinary before the nightfall.

-Jagdish Naik

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