On December 25, 2009, some of us woke up to a rude Christmas present. WorldSpace (WS), a US based satellite radio provider with coverage extending over Europe, Africa and Asia, facing financial difficulties leading to bankruptcy, had been sold to a media company which did not wish to purchase its India operations.
Indian subscribers, in a cryptic email from the U.S. company, were informed that they would stop receiving their services as of December 31. This was somewhat surprising in light of the fact that over 95 per cent of WS's total worldwide customer base was in India.
For those of you to whom this sounds like a dry business fact which should be relegated to the sidelines of a financial paper, I should explain that the news has evoked an unusually emotive response among many of the 400000-odd subscribers of WS's Indian subsidiary.
Eclectic variety
For a little less than a decade, WS provided commercial-free music of a purity and eclectic variety that had devoted listeners totally hooked. Moreover, they had a team of RJ's whose passion for and dedication to the content of their programmes was as palpable as the melody that streamed out of your speakers.
The chasm between WS and the other free-to-air FM channels available was vast. The state-run Vividh-Bharti channel in my city, Allahabad, routinely broadcasts commercials not just between songs, but in the middle of a given song, which is then resumed after these rude interruptions. Given what passes for music in our films today, I suspect that most of us cannot tell when this happens while listening to the majority of songs being broadcast. However, for a music lover, it is shocking to have Din Dhal Jaye, for instance, blithely interrupted half-way by chirpy advice on which hair oil to anoint yourself with in order to relieve your tension headache. It is enough to make Rafi turn in his grave.
The one ingredient that made both the music WS offered and their presentation of it stand out was quality. Quality, as Robert M Pirsig noted in his book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, is difficult to define, since it often empirically precedes any intellectual construction needed to analyse it. The quality of music, for instance, is apparent to a listener prior to her being formally instructed in its appreciation.
Intangible yet radiant, elusive but invaluable, it elevates every worthwhile human effort by its presence, from routine daily tasks to works of art. As all of us have found, at some time or another from personal experience, it usually manifests itself when the distinction between the doer and the task dissolves, and both become one.
Traditional crafts
What is alarming is that as a society, we seem to be progressively less able to recognise its value, or even, at times, assign it one. On a recent visit to Varanasi and to a village fair on the ghats, my younger daughter came back with a hand-made, hand-painted wooden toy, remarkable by virtue of the care and craft that had gone into its making.
Brightly coloured carved birds were arranged on a circular wooden platform, below which a bob connected to their necks by strings could swing freely. As you moved the platform, the bob swung in a circle below it, pulling the strings in succession as it moved, bringing down the beaks of the birds in a delightful rattling sound depicting them feeding.
The simple ingenuity of its design testified to a craftsmanship honed by years of tradition. A tradition of quality, but unfortunately one that is dying, unable to compete with the mass-produced, battery-operated plastic toys that flood our markets today.
When we refuse to rescue it, or for instance, unthinkingly drape our homes in Chinese lights at Deepavali in preference to earthenware diyas, we snuff out means and ways of livelihood that, more often than not, embody quality because they are rooted in skills passed down over centuries and generations. When we judge something to be economically un-viable, and hence dispensable, we must ensure that before we let it die a natural death, we have factored in the opportunity cost of quality correctly.
As I watch my older daughter prepare for her board exams this year, burdened by a syllabus whose extent can only be described as insane, it is apparent how our system works to squeeze and shut out quality both from the learning and the teaching process. True learning occurs in an environment that offers time and space to ask questions and examine a topic from several different angles.
Superficial treatment
Cognitive thinking, critical analysis and general problem solving abilities, all essential outcomes of a good education, cannot be developed unless such an environment is provided. The death of quality in teaching is assured by the concomitant superficial treatment of all topics demanded by their sheer number and the amount of information that is required to be memorised, as opposed to understood, by the student.
Every generation of our race passes on a clutch of values to the next one. Respect for and recognition of quality in all its myriad manifestations must be at the core of this legacy. This is because in one form or another, it breathes life into and resides in all the other values that we hold dear.
When we as consumers, educators, parents, as a society or as a race, embrace the trashy or the superficial, the unsustainable or the expedient, we end up submerging islands of genuine quality in the process. Perhaps more importantly, we run the risk that when a future generation stretches out their hand in expectation for the baton of values that we have cherished, nurtured, and added to, they may find their fingers closing in on thin air.
Raj Gandhi is Professor of Physics at the Harish Chandra Research Institute in Allahabad. He can be reached at>nubarnu@gmail.com
