NCERT campus

An amazing day almost didn’t happen as I couldn’t get an Uber and had to use my negotiation skills to make it to the appointment I had with Chong Shimray. She didn’t have much time, but somehow allowed me to stay there and connect with some pretty awesome colleagues way past dark and closing time.

Uber was not an option to get home, even flagging an auto was impossible, so Chong took me on the back of her scooter all the way across town in crazy traffic. I did have to close my eyes at times.

Besides seeing the science labs and outdoor demonstration science park, seeing how the textbooks are painstakingly reviewed and synthesized across so many states in India…  the highlight for me was breaking protocol to have a visit with Director of CIET, Prof Rajaram Sharma.  He was very generous in sharing the repository of digital resources he was working very hard to compile, it was an honor to learn from and spend time with such a clear thinking and passionate educator.  The same can be said for English Prof Sandya Rani Sahoo who told me stories of her own trips to the states and how human values and inputs have to be superior to the technology tools we’ve created.

I’m not sure how the breakthroughs in AI taking place now will fit in that worldview. In the future Internet of Things we can have sensors collecting data any and everywhere, it will be a wild west to scheme up ways to find patterns in the data. That’s where the jobs are gonna be kids.

NCERT basically writes the official curriculum for the whole country, so it was a big deal for me to hang out and network there. It’s not the kind of work I think I could do, I don’t think we have an equivalent for it in the USA