Episode 4 of Where Passion Meets Education (WPME). Sandeep Dutt in conversation with Sunil Malhotra.
Sunil Malhotra’s entrepreneurial experience spans Design, Manufacturing and Information Technology. A thought leader in Design Thinking and Exponential Transformation, Sunil founded Ideafarms to bring industrial design to ICT.
On the 7th of July 2024, Sunil joined us at My Good School. He talked about his latest book, YOGAi, a result of the author’s professional experience, embellished by interactions with Dr Karan Singh, Ervin Laszlo, Satish Kumar, John Maeda, Salim Ismail and other luminaries, making it a well-rounded treatise on the interplays of Yoga and Ai. The world will likely remain wildly unpredictable when the dust settles on AI hype. Use this book as a starting point for understanding the human quest for truth and wisely creating technologies to improve our lives and the world.
"You teach best what you most need to learn." ~Richard Bach
Sunil and Sandeep talk about learning, thinking and growing up. Eastern philosophy and Western thought, how the two work together today, and why Indian philosophy is advanced. Sunil believes that knowledge must be free to flow and help build a world of higher-order thinking, unlike in the West, where ownership of knowledge is the key to their profiteering and intellectual property is treated as the wealth of people and organisations. The oldest Upanishads from the 8th century BC, an ancient reservoir of knowledge, will be the core of any learning for civilisations; their message and understanding have not been indeed seized in the unlimited number of books and Western literature.
The Upanishads present a vision of an interconnected universe with a single, unifying principle behind the apparent diversity in the cosmos, any articulation of which is called brahman. Within this context, the Upanishads teach that Brahman resides in the atman, the unchanging core of the human individual. - Wikipedia.
The podcast, in a matter of 15 minutes, touches on the core of human learning systems as they exist today and what lies ahead. From the Upanishads to schools, how children learn, and the way forward for education, it touches on the core of the human learning systems as they exist today and what lies ahead. We need to unlearn first and not be hostage to the industrial-age school system, which, much like an industrial process, indoctrinates and robs every individual of #JoyOfLearning.
Design as a philosophy, as a tool, is with every individual. A true designer delves within. We design our own lives and move on. What bubbles up? Passion needs to come within yourself. The mind is all-powerful. We must free ourselves and use the mind as an instrument. True passion evolves.
Freeing the mind—is that education? The question pushed Sunil into another world; the conversation is yours to listen to!
‘Victims of education’: The problem is that the education system uses words that only promote literacy. There is a need for learning for life, and it must demolish the entire school system.
When talking about teaching and learning, does learning come before teaching? It does, and Sunil corroborates how. From mother tongue and perfect communication before going to school to the system's vagaries, there is a need to unlearn—signs of optimism and why Sunil wrote the book YOGAi.
"We can’t change the direction of the wind, but we can adjust the sails.”
YOGAi makes AI approachable by contextualising the evolution of technology. These technologies have crept upon us, even without noticing, yet we still tend to shy away from leveraging them. Technologies with broad, general applications take excessive time to emerge in their early stages. Still, eventually, their power becomes self-evident, and they take hold of society in disruptive ways.
Another goal of YOGAi is to make you accessible to yourself by contextualising the evolution of the human mind. Attention is brought to Yoga, narrowly understood as physical exercises from India, which are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Yoga is a powerful tool for self-discovery, enabling individuals to explore their innermost selves and cultivate a deeper understanding of their identities, purpose, and connections to the world. Ultimately, the convergence of Yoga represents a pathway towards realising human potential and creating a more equitable and sustainable world for all.
Let us together create space for passion and learning to blossom—the true meaning of education. We would be fair to the young people whose future is at stake in the hands of policymakers and institutions that are more business models and less about #JoyOfLearning.
Sunil Malhotra