(A
chapter from the book The IITians by Sandipan Deb, Penguin
2004)
‘Meet
Arvind Gupta,’ Dunu Roy told me as I was taking his leave.
'Who
is he!' I asked. 'What does he do!'
'Oh,
he's a mad guy,' Roy said. 'He makes toys.'
Toys! An IITian making toys? I thought all toys were made in China! So one late afternoon a few days later, I am ringing the bell at a small government-constructed middle-class apartment in south Delhi. I don't know it yet, but I am about to have the most fascinating three hours of all the hundreds I have spent on this book.
Arvind
Gupta makes toys. This tall, bearded, jovial, gentle man makes them out of
everything that we throw away as useless: empty tetrapak boxes, film-roll cans,
used bicycle tubes, old newspapers, ball-point pen refills that have run out of
ink, matchsticks. He does it so that underprivileged children--or privileged
ones, for that matter can make their own toys they can have fun with, and
simultaneously learn the principles of science - aerodynamics, hydraulics,
electromagnetism, acoustics.
'Here,
look at this, this is fascinating!' he tells me, and I find myself joining him
on the door of his sitting room, on which he has arranged a newspaper littered
with all sorts of odds and ends. He is holding in his hand a little contraption,
which on closer inspection turns out to be a normal torch battery, which has
been attached to two narrow metal strips at both ends. The battery has a small
disc shaped magnet tied to it. Above the magnet hangs a copper coil. The two
ends of the wire jut diametrically outward and go into two tiny holes drilled in
the metal strips. 'What do you think this is!' he asks me. I admit
defeat.
'This
is the cheapest DC motor on earth!' he says triumphantly, and taps the coil,
which immediately starts rotating very fast. The metal strips, in addition to
holding the coil, also supply current to the coil. Gupta has scraped off the
enamel from three sides of the end leads of the copper wire, so that the enamel
remains only at the bottom, touching the metal strip. Enamel being an insulator,
no current flows. When he taps the coil, the lead turns, and the metal strip
comes into contact with the copper. Instantly, current starts flowing, turning
the coil into an electromagnet, which, through the mutual attraction-repulsion
with the magnet below it, attached to the battery, starts spinning and continues
to do so, till its south and north poles are aligned to the north and south
poles of the other--permanent-- magnet. At which point the enamel part of the
leads again comes in contact with the metal, and the coil is
de-magnetized.
'The
cheapest electrical motor that children in India can buy in a shop costs Rs.
150, and it's a stupid outdated design,' Gupta says. 'But this motor any child
can make himself, with the means at hand. Anyone can get hold of a working torch
battery, some copper wire and a small magnet. These metal strips are pins from a
cooking stove. And once you have made this motor, you can perform an endless
number of experiments: What happens when you take a longer wire! What happens
when you take thick wire or thin wire? What happens if you add another battery?
Try out these things and you end up learning a great deal about electric
motors.'
He
shows me a hand pump made from an empty plastic film-roll can, a bicycle spoke
and a soft drink straw. He shows me an abacus made from the sole of a rubber
slipper, three pencils inserted into three holes in the rubber, and up to nine
rings on each of the pencils. His enthusiasm is child-like and infectious, and I
find myself playing with his toys. Take the rings off the pencils, apply
pressure on the rubber sole so it becomes concave, and the three pencils
converge as rays of light, explaining how a concave mirror works! Do it the
other way round for convex mirror!
'We
have this constipated notion of science education, that you can't do it without
pipettes and burettes and all those things,' he says, as he hunts for something
else to show me. 'Most schools are anti-child. In the laboratories, everything
is always locked up, and there's a layer of dust on the tables. I believe that
the best thing that a child can do with a toy is break it and try to see how it
works. Encourage the child to break his or her toys!'
He
brings out his matchstick models. Connecting matchsticks using cycle valve
tubes-extremely cheap, sold by weight in cycle shops--he has constructed two and
three-dimensional geometrical shapes. The basic shape is the triangle. As Gupta
points out, the triangle is the only rigid polygon (you press a square structure
hard enough, it's become a rhombus; you press a pentagon hard enough, it will
attain a boat-like shape), which is why trusses, bridges and electricity towers
are made up of triangles, to make them inflexible and strong. Once you have made
an equilateral triangle of matchsticks, you can add three more to make a
tetrahedron. You can join two triangles together with three more matchsticks to
make a prism. Place the prism on a cube of matchsticks, and you have a
house-shaped structure. And while you are having fun and letting your
imagination run riot, you are also learning three-dimensional
geometry.
Gupta's
book on matchstick models has sold half a million copies in more than a dozen
languages at last count. He hasn't taken any royalties for the book. ‘My needs
are very simple,’ he shrugs, ‘so I have managed to get
by.’
'Hardly
anyone remembers it any more,' he tells me, 'but each scrap of paper was once a
living branch or a tree trunk. We don't remember that each ball-pen refill,
broken pen, all other plastic comes from crude oil. That we have a duty to the
earth to understand this, and reuse and recycle everything. Take a newspaper.
Surely it deserves a better fate than being cast away after three minutes? You
can fold newspapers to make a dozen varieties of caps for children, you can turn
them into nice boxes to store things in, you can make them into gift packs. Use
a pair of scissors and you can turn small pieces of newspaper into happing
birds, talking crows, flying fishes, helicopters, stunt planes, the
possibilities are truly endless!'
It
all started with a lecture by educationist Anil Sadgopal that Gupta went to, in
1972, as an electrical engineering student in I.I.T, Kanpur. Sadgopal was a
molecular biologist who had studied at CalTech and come back to India to work in
the field of education. 'Those were pretty revolutionary times. There was the
Naxalite movement, the Jayaprakash Narayan movement was gathering force,
educated people were trying to find a more humane role for themselves in
society.' Gupta was deeply influenced by what he heard, perhaps much more than
he realized at the time.
By the time Gupta graduated in 1975, the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme, in the eponymous district in Madhya Pradesh, had already begun. Two voluntary agencies convinced the state education department to allow them to run a programme of teaching science, based on experimentation and activity, from Classes VI to VIII. Since most government schools had no library or laboratory, no equipment and no facilities, science was being taught—often by teachers untrained in science--without performing any experiments. Students learnt the textbooks--whatever was available--by rote, and passed, or failed, examinations. All independent inquiry was suppressed in the name of maintaining discipline in the class.
Sadgopal
and his team wanted to change this. In time, the Hoshangabad programme,
committed to teaching science the right way, through experiments, which children
perform in the classroom, spread to over 1,000 schools with more than 100,000
students in fifteen districts of the state. The objective was to make a
difference in science teaching,' says Gupta. 'The usual way that science is
taught in school - even schools where they have equipment to perform
experiments--is very mutilating. It's usually taught using western concepts,
western equipment. This is an alienating way to teach science. Plus it is
expensive, and on top of that, if there are other problems, like if something
goes wrong with the equipment, there's no replacement available. Yet there are
lots of possibilities of learning science material easily available at
hand.'
From
IIT, Gupta went to work for Telco in Pune making Tata trucks. In 1978, he took a year's study leave. He spent
that year in Hoshangabad, devising science toys and experiments for the
children. He then travelled to Kerala to work with Laurie Baker, the pioneering
architect who worked with local material and traditional living-space concepts
to provide cheap housing for the poor. He returned to Telco for two more years,
but by then he had found his life's calling. He resigned his job and arrived at
Shahdol (see Chapter 26) to work with Dunu Roy for two
years.
Returning
to Delhi in 1984, at a loose end, he wrote to Professor Yashpal, who was in
charge of the satellite television-driven school education project, SITE.
Yashpal gave him the break he needed. He published his first book. He started
making films on science (he has made more than seventy so far); he got a few
fellowships to support his work. Since then, he has written nearly a hundred
books, in English and Hindi. 'Hindi is my mother tongue, and there is an awful
paucity of good books in Hindi for children. So I translate a lot. In fact,
every day, I spend five hours translating.' He shows me his translation of Shel
Silverstein's The Giving Tree,
perhaps the best green book ever written. 'There are so many books available
in the public domain! All one has to do is publish them in India!' He shows me
Michael Faraday's The Chemical History of
a Candle, C.V. Boys' fascinating book on soap bubbles, and My Friend Mister Leakey - the only children's book J.B.S. Haldane
ever wrote.
He
has also conducted workshops for students and teachers in more than 1,000
schools all over the country, and across the world.
As
he recounts his wanderings, he keeps showing me his toys. ‘This is amazing!' he
exclaims often. 'Look at this! Try it! Isn't it wonderful!' Before I know it, I
am also whirling the astonishingly-simple-to-make paper bird round my head,
twirling the little broomstick-and-eraser thingie that could give the child an
understanding of centripetal and centrifugal force.
'Any
fool can make a thing complicated, right!' he says. 'It's simplicity which is
difficult to achieve.'
For
example, there's this toy with two straws and a string. He cuts a soda-straw
into three pans. One part he discards, one part he makes a hole in, and the end of the
third part he cuts at a sharp angle so it looks like a pen nib. He puts the pen
nib into the hole in the other straw part so the two straw pans are at an acute
angle to each other, and uses cello-tape to join them together. He then weaves a
string of wool through the non-pen-nibbed straw piece, ties the ends of the
string together to make a loop, and carefully trims the ends. He then hands the
contraption to me to blow into the open end of the pen-nibbed straw piece. I
blow and the whole loop of wool rotates in a circle. Any child would be
delighted with this simple toy, which takes less than five minutes and no money
at all to make. 'There's high incidence of asthma among children in Delhi
because of the particulate matter in the air,' Gupta explains. 'So what do
doctors tell children to do! They tell them to blow. The child can use this toy
and have fun and at the same time get therapeutic
benefits!'
Twenty-nine
years after it began, the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme was shut down
by the Madhya Pradesh government in 2002. Though technically the government's
orders stated that the government-notified curriculum and textbooks had to be
implemented across the board, and the Hoshangabad books and experiments could be
used as supplementary material, in effect, it was death knell for the
experiment. Among the reasons cited was that students from Hoshangabad were not
doing as well as those from many other districts in the school board
examinations.
The
voluntary agencies protested that the Hoshangabad pedagogical techniques were
limited to Classes VI to VIII so performance in the board examinations might not
be valid criterion to judge the methods. Besides, the board examinations tested
memory recall rather than any genuine understanding of science. And anyway,
there were many districts in Madhya Pradesh which did not use Hoshangabad
methods and whose students were doing far worse in the board exams. But it was
to no avail.
Like
most new ideas, the Hoshangabad Programme had always attracted hostility from
diverse groups of people. Many parents worried about their children being made
guinea pigs in some strange experiment. Publishers and sellers of the
standard-sub-standard-textbooks had been fighting against it since inception.
Many schoolteachers were hostile because the children didn't take tuition in
science any more; others were unhappy since they had to work harder in the
science classes without any extra monetary benefits.
In
1992, the Bharatiya Janata Parry government was about to close the whole
programme down when the government fell. In 2002, the Congress government
managed to do what the party it bitterly opposes failed to. Both had come to see
the programme as some sort of leftist plot. Many of the people involved may
indeed have been leftists, but the programme's content dealt only with the best
way to teach science to underprivileged children. It also reflects on our
education system that this enlightened experiment actually made no difference to
the marks and grades a student obtained when he or she sat for the board
examinations that would determine the student's career.
'School
education in India is such barren terrain that even a good seed would die due to
lack of soil,' Gupta tells me. 'My humble task is to find a bit of soil so the
seed can be nourished.'
I
ask him about the end of the Hoshangabad dream. He is smilingly laconic. 'I
suppose the government wanted control over the education system,' he
shrugs.
He
shows me the flute he has made from a soda straw. As he blows into it, he keeps
snipping off the flute from the end with a pair of scissors, and the sound
changes. 'So the child gets a qualitative understanding of the phenomenon of
vibration,' he explains. 'I work with children. Whatever I see that children can
do, whatever I see that brings a gleam into the child's eye, that's the work I
do.'
As I
leave, my head is filled with all the fun my seven-year-old daughter and I am
going to have from now on, all that I am going to teach her and be
taught.