Two Young Girls and their “Mere Facebook Status”!

I was never an admirer of Mr Bal Thackeray.  Following the dictum “de mortuis nil nisi bonum”, I will not talk about him.  I will also keep quiet about the man and his politics. 

But there has been a furore of sorts about the two young girls who were arrested at the behest of a complaintant who apparently did not like the comments made by one of the girls on the events following the death of the Shiv Sena leader.  The girls were duly arrested, apparently illegally, and now the policemen who arrested them are facing trouble.  A couple of them have been suspended and the honourable magistrate has been given the heave-ho – possibly to some undesirable place.  TV channels and papers were arguing the case for the young girls. Now the Shiva Sainiks have taken up the cause of the cops by calling a bandh!

I think the channels and the papers were wrong in their assessment and the defence they put up.  They kept describing it as a “mere Facebook status”.  How can someone be arrested for “merely” liking a status on FB– went the refrain. And therefore, the arrest is such a big punishment for such a teeny weeny action. 

One cannot hunt with the hounds and run with the foxes.

Experience tells us that social media can be quite powerful.  Recall the “Pink Chaddi” campaign which started off as a family joke and then went on to become a small movement with a handful of people. We have seen how it spread all over the country through the social media, with Mr Muthalik getting far more undergarments than he would care for!  

We saw the potential of a single MMS which went viral in the city of Bengaluru and that had frightening consequences for our brethren from the North Eastern states.  So let us not understate the potential of a single status posted on Facebook or a tweet on Twitter or a single SMS.

The defence for the two young girls from Palghar cannot be that they merely posted something and so it is a “mere post” after all.  That sounds quite silly.  The question that needs to be answered is whether a status is judged as “mere” is based on the number of people who see it.

Just because a status is one that would be seen by her friends does the young lady has the freedom to say what she wants to say? Supposing that the status had gone viral, and a few thousand people had seen it, would it have made a difference to the defamatory nature of what she had said?  Similarly, it is the first “like” which makes a FB status go viral.  It is the proverbial match stick which makes a forest fire.

I do not wish to go into the merits of the post made by the young lady on Facebook, or her opinion about Mr Bal Thackery.  But I feel the standard of evaluation used to judge the “status” should be the same as if the young lady had gone on stage at a stadium full of people and made those statements.

 In other words, each one of us have to keep asking ourselves the question.    Would I make this sort of statement I am about to make on FB or Twitter if we were in an open place where not just our friends are standing, but  also a huge crowd of strangers are assembled.  Before “liking” a status, we also need to ask ourselves whether we would be willing to share that same stage where such statements are made.

Bala@Panjim

Reclaiming the Sixth Term

One of the things which I have been thinking is how the sixth term (typically most B schools have three terms every year and the sixth is the last term) and how it has become quite different from what it was.  Typically, students used to be gearing up for their placements in the month of February and March and they would get a job and walk out of the b school with the graduating ceremony happening in end March or early April.  So the students used to keep their load a bit down for the last term.  They would get their nose down to prepare for the job interviews.  Since they had no idea of the jobs they would get, usually were serious about all the courses they were doing.  This was the fairy tale where everyone – the faculty, students and employers all lived happily ever after.

Now the situation has changed.  Placement happens in all b schools any time starting October.  Employers cajole, blackmail or threaten the B schools for early dates in their anxiety to be the early bird to get the fat worms.  Since students are uncertain of the number of companies, they try and get the companies in so that the companies do not exhaust their requirements in other campuses.  B schools leadership (especially those which have larger batches to find jobs for) now shut their eyes to missed classes, disturbance to the general learning environment and accept the situation.  Faculty go around murmuring about academic rigour being flown to the winds.

Long and short of this is that most students in B Schools, barring the few struggling ones or the few choosy ones, have jobs under their belt and typically their interest in the classes seems to wane in the sixth term.  They plead with programme office that “heavy” courses should not be scheduled in the last term or “meaty” courses which are needed from a career point of view should be in the fourth term before placement.  Professors wanting to schedule an elective in the sixth term due to workload in other terms would find registrations low.  Typically, students seem to prefer courses by visiting teachers in the sixth term as these courses get over in shorter duration as visiting teachers come in short spurts and try and finish up the course.

It is only a question of some reallocation or it is a mere scheduling problem and why should we worry about this?  I am afraid that the long term impact is deleterious for the entire system.

First of all the professors jostle around to get their courses included in the schedule in the first two terms of the second year and specially in the fourth term itself when students are perceived to be serious.  In other words too many courses get offered in these terms.  Students are bound by upper limits for the courses they can take in a term.  This results in students making suboptimal choices for the courses they would be taking in to their portfolio?   

The fact that the sixth term is now considered by all people around to be a “light term” would soon mean that the teaching activities which happen in the sixth term would be crushed back to the fourth and fifth term.  The question is can most of the work, in terms of the mandated courses, be actually completed by the students over the two terms in the second year.  This results in classes having to be scheduled at odd hours; sometimes as late as 10 in the night. Students are occupied in classroom work sporadically in the day and this leaves them with little quality time to do any co-curricular activity due to the scheduling issues created by the large number of courses.   Spacing out of learning and such learning principles are given short shrift of?

Typically, new and experimental courses would get pushed to the sixth term.  Here students would, depending on how they view it to be light or heavy, would choose these or avoid these.  Excessive registration for a course which ideally has to have smaller classes would kill the course.  Perceived heavy courses would not take off.  In the long run, this would mean floating newer courses would become that much more of an uphill task?

Younger or newer professors are likely to get pushed to teaching electives in the sixth term.  This means that they would not get the comfort zone of teaching in a term when the students are more receptive to learning.  It makes life tougher for the professors who are new to the system. It also leads to unnecessary politicking inside the faculty group and newer professors would be eyeing courses (which they need not necessarily be the best to handle) just because it happens in the fourth or fifth terms.

Sixth terms in many B schools now seems to be less serious, more of fun and courses are done merely because of the need to complete the credits. Learning and development seems to have become a casualty here.  How do we reclaim the last and sixth term of MBA programmes?

 Bala@Panaji

Back!

I am back to this blog after almost a year!  My personal life was full of ups and down -- including the demise of a close family member, a change of city and going back to work in a different capacity and a change of apartment!  Not an excuse.  With so much happening, I just did not have the time. I hope to be more regular here.

Bala@Panaji