Strengthening the shaky foundations of my thinking – Ratika Deshpande
A couple of days ago, I wrote about questioning the point of gaining more knowledge and feeling helpless because I did not have the power to affect change in the world. As I’d mentioned in that post, I intended discuss this dilemma with my professors. I finally talked to Amman Madan today, who, in his characteristic polite and thoughtful way, put to me questions that made me realise how shaky and incomplete the foundations of my thoughts are.
This–and future blog posts–will be an attempt to outline where my thoughts are at present, where that understanding comes from, and how my thoughts are changing. I’ve been reluctant to think out loud about issues that don’t concern my own life, worried that I might unintentionally say something that’s wrong or that my words won’t carry any weight if I don’t provide citations for everything I say.
Yet thinking that way is impossible. We must begin somewhere to see what we know and what we don’t, and then fill in the gaps. It’s a circular rather than a linear process. And if there’s one thing I took away from my conversation with Amman today, it’s that although I’m familiar with most of the concepts we’ve been studying in Sociology, I don’t understand them in a way that I can think about it in relation to the education system in India and where I am situated in it in order to do something about it.
