When a colleague of mine told her students she was more an activist than an academic I was amused to say the least. If, in all naivety, she thought being an activist was enough reason to neglect academic duties I think it’s a time-honored excuse for insincerity and laziness. Reading and preparing for classes is hard work. Making sure students are able to meet specific standards of reading and writing is labor. To say one is an “activist” in the “comfortable” zone of a state-run university is euphemism to expressing distaste if not contempt for academic work.
As a teacher I would like to influence my students to think in a certain direction. I don’t just teach but also give them a worldview. At the same time, I’ve to make sure they acquire competitive skills that enable them to be independent in the all-too-real world. It’s not my job to indoctrinate them with what I believe to be truth. Therefore when teachers think they have a right to impose ideologies on students instead of giving them education, they are doing injustice to their work and to students as well.
I only wish I could tell the teacher she gets paid not for being an activist but to be an academic. She could stay with her activism stance and voluntarily renounce her salary in favor of those who are actually spending their time teaching. I’m sure the activism part does not make any reference to the money you make through the institution.
Part of the crisis in the past two or three decades is the poor quality of parenting and teaching across the globe. The ones who firmly believe all that children need are things to occupy them end up being parents and the ones without any personal defining character end up becoming teachers. This is why we have morons running governments and holding public offices where a lot gets “conceived” but nothing ever gets “delivered.”
I don’t qualify to be an activist; not even the oxymoron “academic activist” defines me. Most of my knowledge comes from books and some of it from interaction with people on and off the streets. Apart from books and films, I cannot claim to have any great insight into the world around me. At any point in time, I’m either talking about something I read or a scene from a movie or words from a song. Otherwise, I’m an intolerably boring person by my own liberal standards. I write, too, in order to escape the angst of having to be “me” all the time.
A rhetorical question: what then do I associate activism with? I associate activism with two things: either one is like Chomsky who made enormous contributions in a certain area of knowledge and uses his position to think and speak about issues related to society and politics or one is into public service and from the experience of serving masses speaks of what is good to humanity or a section of people. In the latter category we could place serious activists who gave a good part of their lives speaking for others because they understood through the experience of being with people or through scholarly insight—as in the case of the historian Eric Hobsbawm—what liberation meant in the real sense of the term.
The thing I find annoying is that more and more people who neither occupied public positions and honestly served people nor with academic or intellectual credentials to their credit nor as members of parties or groups who spent their time confronting power on the streets—these are the ones we get to see and hear and they speak with an air of arrogance that is surprising to say the least. They seem to have concocted solutions to problems in this country and every other country on earth. The actors and sports persons fall in this category. I also place everyone in this category who thinks that having an opinion and a platform qualifies them to speak on issues of importance that concern others. These are the people who have shamelessly dedicated their lives to pursuing their own interests but now feel they have a right to voice the feelings of ordinary folks.
My brother once told me that insincere people are simply insincere irrespective of whether it is in a capitalist or a communist system. To try to make a virtue out of insincerity, laziness and indifference to others by standing at the forefront of public debate and pretending to offer solutions is unacceptable in any decently-run order. A real activist will not work for individuals and groups. She must work for the truth. It is disheartening to know that you could never know the whole truth. However, to attempt to arrive at the truth and fail in the process is in itself a noble thing.
It is commonly said that power brings responsibility. I simply don’t think so. What is equally true if not truer is that it is responsibility that brings power. Those who take responsibility for their own lives and for those of others, they are the organic intellectuals of the masses. They are empowered in a strange way and the masses take them seriously. I don’t want someone to protest for me on the street. I’ll do that when pushed to desperation and left without choice. I want someone to share and feel with me, to assist me in dealing with my situation on a day to day basis. I’m not interested in others who want to speak for me while I could do that for myself.
In his little book on Gandhi, Norman Finkelstein makes the following observation on the role of the Mahatma at the time of India’s partition:
“If Indians ceased, momentarily, slaughtering each other, it was because of the mutual intuition that, when all was said and done, the Mahatma represented what was the highest and best in them, and had earned, through a lifetime of selfless devotion to public service, a claim on their obedience. It was a role that Gandhi had uniquely carved out for himself. Only a fast initiated by Gandhi, and him alone, could have cooled fratricidal hatreds whipped into a frenzy.”
Gandhi won the trust of the public over decades of being one with them. If most of his demands were unreasonable and if he sounded paternalistic more often than not, there is no doubt that his intentions were genuine and his claims to represent the public built on his love of humankind which few of his generation were remotely capable of. The biggest contribution in my view is that he endowed with goodness the most wretched and suspect of activities called “politics” and public life.
I’ve learnt to distrust the terms “left” and “right.” I usually think in terms of whether a person is self-interested or other-interested. A moral distinction difficult to ascertain at the individual level, but: are you interested in yourself or in the world around you? In the first case, I put all those people whose agendas are ultimately about them. In the latter I include those who might have a notion of otherness—I might disagree with them, but at least I’m convinced they’ve something other than their own gain in mind. My idea of an activist is someone with a sense of otherness, someone who spends the time and space of her days, giving something of herself to the world. If I persist in an Orwellian suspicion towards most leftists I came across in my life time, it’s because they did not have enough of the “left” in them. They gave themselves honorable labels while in their personal lives there was nothing to indicate the slightest trace of other-interestedness.
Though I’m certain I’m not an activist I’m equally certain that I could never bring myself to dislike someone or reject his or her personhood for ideological reasons. I’m convinced nobody has a right to reject anybody and develop feelings of animosity merely as a way to legitimize an imaginary cause or ideal. Engels in his tribute to Marx says of the latter that “though he may have had many opponents he had hardly one personal enemy.” I think that line says a lot about Marx’s greatness as human being as much as he was a profound thinker. Being an activist or revolutionary does not mean you reduce everything to a formula and see people as divided into enemies and friends. That’s the trait of the stupid and the fascist who need to see the world in black and white. On the contrary, activism celebrates individuality and human freedom. Where these things are not respected as having a value in themselves, social change—as in taking from each according to his or her ability and giving to each according to her or his needs—is either impossible or meaningless or both.
Prakash Kona is a writer, teacher and researcher who lives in Hyderabad, India. He is currently working as an Associate Professor at the Department of English Literature, The English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad.
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What activism is
Posted on May 2, 2013 by Prakash Kona
When a colleague of mine told her students she was more an activist than an academic I was amused to say the least. If, in all naivety, she thought being an activist was enough reason to neglect academic duties I think it’s a time-honored excuse for insincerity and laziness. Reading and preparing for classes is hard work. Making sure students are able to meet specific standards of reading and writing is labor. To say one is an “activist” in the “comfortable” zone of a state-run university is euphemism to expressing distaste if not contempt for academic work.
As a teacher I would like to influence my students to think in a certain direction. I don’t just teach but also give them a worldview. At the same time, I’ve to make sure they acquire competitive skills that enable them to be independent in the all-too-real world. It’s not my job to indoctrinate them with what I believe to be truth. Therefore when teachers think they have a right to impose ideologies on students instead of giving them education, they are doing injustice to their work and to students as well.
I only wish I could tell the teacher she gets paid not for being an activist but to be an academic. She could stay with her activism stance and voluntarily renounce her salary in favor of those who are actually spending their time teaching. I’m sure the activism part does not make any reference to the money you make through the institution.
Part of the crisis in the past two or three decades is the poor quality of parenting and teaching across the globe. The ones who firmly believe all that children need are things to occupy them end up being parents and the ones without any personal defining character end up becoming teachers. This is why we have morons running governments and holding public offices where a lot gets “conceived” but nothing ever gets “delivered.”
I don’t qualify to be an activist; not even the oxymoron “academic activist” defines me. Most of my knowledge comes from books and some of it from interaction with people on and off the streets. Apart from books and films, I cannot claim to have any great insight into the world around me. At any point in time, I’m either talking about something I read or a scene from a movie or words from a song. Otherwise, I’m an intolerably boring person by my own liberal standards. I write, too, in order to escape the angst of having to be “me” all the time.
A rhetorical question: what then do I associate activism with? I associate activism with two things: either one is like Chomsky who made enormous contributions in a certain area of knowledge and uses his position to think and speak about issues related to society and politics or one is into public service and from the experience of serving masses speaks of what is good to humanity or a section of people. In the latter category we could place serious activists who gave a good part of their lives speaking for others because they understood through the experience of being with people or through scholarly insight—as in the case of the historian Eric Hobsbawm—what liberation meant in the real sense of the term.
The thing I find annoying is that more and more people who neither occupied public positions and honestly served people nor with academic or intellectual credentials to their credit nor as members of parties or groups who spent their time confronting power on the streets—these are the ones we get to see and hear and they speak with an air of arrogance that is surprising to say the least. They seem to have concocted solutions to problems in this country and every other country on earth. The actors and sports persons fall in this category. I also place everyone in this category who thinks that having an opinion and a platform qualifies them to speak on issues of importance that concern others. These are the people who have shamelessly dedicated their lives to pursuing their own interests but now feel they have a right to voice the feelings of ordinary folks.
My brother once told me that insincere people are simply insincere irrespective of whether it is in a capitalist or a communist system. To try to make a virtue out of insincerity, laziness and indifference to others by standing at the forefront of public debate and pretending to offer solutions is unacceptable in any decently-run order. A real activist will not work for individuals and groups. She must work for the truth. It is disheartening to know that you could never know the whole truth. However, to attempt to arrive at the truth and fail in the process is in itself a noble thing.
It is commonly said that power brings responsibility. I simply don’t think so. What is equally true if not truer is that it is responsibility that brings power. Those who take responsibility for their own lives and for those of others, they are the organic intellectuals of the masses. They are empowered in a strange way and the masses take them seriously. I don’t want someone to protest for me on the street. I’ll do that when pushed to desperation and left without choice. I want someone to share and feel with me, to assist me in dealing with my situation on a day to day basis. I’m not interested in others who want to speak for me while I could do that for myself.
In his little book on Gandhi, Norman Finkelstein makes the following observation on the role of the Mahatma at the time of India’s partition:
“If Indians ceased, momentarily, slaughtering each other, it was because of the mutual intuition that, when all was said and done, the Mahatma represented what was the highest and best in them, and had earned, through a lifetime of selfless devotion to public service, a claim on their obedience. It was a role that Gandhi had uniquely carved out for himself. Only a fast initiated by Gandhi, and him alone, could have cooled fratricidal hatreds whipped into a frenzy.”
Gandhi won the trust of the public over decades of being one with them. If most of his demands were unreasonable and if he sounded paternalistic more often than not, there is no doubt that his intentions were genuine and his claims to represent the public built on his love of humankind which few of his generation were remotely capable of. The biggest contribution in my view is that he endowed with goodness the most wretched and suspect of activities called “politics” and public life.
I’ve learnt to distrust the terms “left” and “right.” I usually think in terms of whether a person is self-interested or other-interested. A moral distinction difficult to ascertain at the individual level, but: are you interested in yourself or in the world around you? In the first case, I put all those people whose agendas are ultimately about them. In the latter I include those who might have a notion of otherness—I might disagree with them, but at least I’m convinced they’ve something other than their own gain in mind. My idea of an activist is someone with a sense of otherness, someone who spends the time and space of her days, giving something of herself to the world. If I persist in an Orwellian suspicion towards most leftists I came across in my life time, it’s because they did not have enough of the “left” in them. They gave themselves honorable labels while in their personal lives there was nothing to indicate the slightest trace of other-interestedness.
Though I’m certain I’m not an activist I’m equally certain that I could never bring myself to dislike someone or reject his or her personhood for ideological reasons. I’m convinced nobody has a right to reject anybody and develop feelings of animosity merely as a way to legitimize an imaginary cause or ideal. Engels in his tribute to Marx says of the latter that “though he may have had many opponents he had hardly one personal enemy.” I think that line says a lot about Marx’s greatness as human being as much as he was a profound thinker. Being an activist or revolutionary does not mean you reduce everything to a formula and see people as divided into enemies and friends. That’s the trait of the stupid and the fascist who need to see the world in black and white. On the contrary, activism celebrates individuality and human freedom. Where these things are not respected as having a value in themselves, social change—as in taking from each according to his or her ability and giving to each according to her or his needs—is either impossible or meaningless or both.
Prakash Kona is a writer, teacher and researcher who lives in Hyderabad, India. He is currently working as an Associate Professor at the Department of English Literature, The English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad.