Vivekananda College at Mylapore that occupies the pride of place in the heart and soul of Chennai is completing its Diamond Jubilee this 2007.

For those who have passed through its portals it is not just a college, but something far more than one. Its alumni is spread all over the country and across the world. All of them invariably and intensely feel the pride of being its products and proudly recall their studenthood through it. It has produced, as any other educational institution would have done, scientists, government officials, bankers, businessmen, professional managers, doctors, lawyers, chartered accountants, philosophers, and teachers in thousands. But that does not adequately convey what Vivekananda College is and what it existed for and is existing even today.

It is no doubt provides secular education as all other educational institutions do. But it was not conceived only for that purpose which is limited to providing knowledge of subjects for the students who enter its portals. It was intended to open the gates of understanding of the self to those who came to seek secular knowledge in the college. So it is a distinct institution, very different from those providing secular knowledge without setting the student on inquiry into the larger dimensions of life.

It bears the name of Swami Vivekananda who envisioned man-making and nation-building as the prime concern of all efforts in India, including in education.

Therefore, the main endeavour of Vivekananda College is to ignite the Vivekanadas among the students read the Narendras who pass through its portals, like Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa brought out the Vivekananda from within a rebellious Narendra. If R a m a k r i s h n a Paramahamsa who was, the modern sense of the term unlettered like a Mohammed and a Jesus, could transform a Narendra into a Vivekananda, logically, a huge educational apparatus like a college and a university should be able to do it more systematically. This was the idea behind the Sri Ramakrishna Mission establishing educational institutions like the Vivekananda College at Chennai all over the country.

In fact, this should have been the primary goal of all educational efforts in this country. But, for various reasons including the way the political and the intellectual classes interpreted secularism to suit vote-bank politics in this country, the purpose of education got reduced to shaping the student as an individual in pursuit of a career for himself, without any thought about his country, society, and without any idea of life in the larger sense.

Why free India's educational system could not repeat a Vivekananda or an Aurobindo or a Gandhi, not to speak of other great men and women whom an alien educational system could generate? Why could it not even replicate a CV Raman and a Ramanujan? It does not need seer to answer this question. The answer is explicit in the manner in which we handled education after freedom. While deciding whether the Kesri Trust established by Bal Gangadhar Tilak which ran a newspaper for public education was entitled to the tax-shelter provided for educational institutions in tax law, the Supreme Court upheld the government argument that, in the normal sense, education is understood as schooling and nothing more.

The official view is that education in a larger sense is not to be regarded as education in the sense of schooling. Most of the modernminded will have no quarrel with this view. While they may agree that education means schooling, they may not be able to argue schooling means education. Then what does education mean to the seeker as well as to the provider and also to the society which produces both. To answer this question a clear understanding of what education means is a pre-requisite.

'Education' said Swami Vivekananda, 'is the manifestation of the perfection already in man.' The issue is whether the schooling that goes on in the name of education including higher education is capable of leading to this larger idea f manifestation of the perfection that exists in every seeker of education? Buildings and classrooms, blackboards and the labs not to speak of the swimming pools and gymnasiums now added and advertised by private educational institutions to attract students from the market cannot achieve this larger idea of bringing out the perfection that lay deep inside a complex student.

To make matters worse, the vote-bank determined secular education system that was already bereft of the profounder dimensions commended by Vivekananda, is now caught in the web of market forces.

The education that the market dictates is the education that the schools can provide. With the market forces deciding the content, quality and also the purpose of schooling, the educational institutions that operate in the market and fight for student enrolment, on the contrary, escalate the imperfections that make today's students a 'boneless wonder' as Vivekananda lamented.

Consequently, in an educational environment whose soul is distorted by pseudo-secularism and whose body is shaped by market forces, education of the type that Vivekananda College had been struggling provide against all odds, is getting increasingly difficult and thus marginalised. So are institutions like the Vivekananda College. In today's situation, like all colleges the Vivekananda College is also like a government- run educational school, and unlike a school run by the Sri Ramakrishna Mission.

The concern of those who have passed through its portal and imbibed the higher notions of life is: can it recover the spirit of man-making and nation-building which permeated the larger idea of education transmitted at Vivekananda College not long back? Can we again think of the Monday morning prayer and the lectures of the Monks of the Ramakrishna Order that used to open the students' mind week after week to a dimension higher than the dimensions taught on the blackboards? This is the thought that should dominate the introspection and thinking of those who are concerned over the future of this great institution the Vivekananda College as its Diamond Jubilee celebrations are drawing to a close.

As a humble product of this great institution that bears the name of the great master whose very thought inspires me, the only thing I could do is to pay my tribute to its actualised greatness and also point to the potential greatness that is inherent in it even today; and finally hope that it re-actualises its potentiality.

Courtesy: www.newindpress.com, September 10, 2007