Tea and technology

Punya Mishra

Pilani is a tiny village in India, on the edge of a desert and around six spine crunching, nerve rattling bus-hours away from Delhi (the capital). Pilani's singular claim to fame is an engineering college and it is there that I (along with 2000 others) lived for four years, as an undergraduate student in engin eering. I don't remember much of what I learnt in my classes there (apart from a sinking realization that I did not want to be an engineer). But if there is one thing I have wonderful memories of... it is of Tea!

Tea as in hot syrupy-sweet chai in small dirty glasses, oftentimes accompanied by freshly fried somosas or kachodis. This was real chai, none of that Starbucks, Cappuchino Cafe flavored water stuff. We would sit in front of a little hut that was the chai shop, either in the shade of a neem tree (with its beautiful tiny green leaves) if it was summer or directly in the sun (surrounded by the same tiny leaves, now on the ground and now brown or yellow in color) if it was winter. I remember the peacock that danced on the roof of the building next to the chai shop when the monsoon season came. We would sit in groups, shifting the seats/chairs around to face each other. We sat on broken chairs made of cane and talked, as 19-20 year olds are wont to do of life the universe and everything. We were mostly males but occasionally someone would invite someone of the opposite sex along. That was something we would notice, and talk about. The couple would sit a bit away from the others, self-consciously sipping their chai. They never stayed there too long. I remember wondering when I would, if ever, invite someone out the same way. And I also remember going there with a girl for the first time (a date, if one can call it that). I don't think we stayed too long either. But that's another story.

Tea was the axis around which our world revolved. We skipped class to have chai. We ran back from class too have chai. We came for chai in the afternoon and back again at night. Yes we had a lot of tea... and not much technology.

I was reminded of chai and what it meant to us as I hear some of the latest rhetoric about online learning. People make a strong case for virtual learning (anytime, just in time, bedtime, tea time what have you). But is it just me or do others also feel a sense of loss as they think of these virtual courses. The virtual world can provide us with a lot but I wonder what we lose in the process. Going to school or college is much more than going to lectures. It is being immersed in a world. It is just sitting around and chatting as if there were no tomorrow. How many of our memories of college have to do with classes and how many with spending time with friends, in bookshops, in coffeeshops, in bars.

The virtual university will have none of these things. Of course, they will have a little icon of a coffee mug (maybe with animated wisps of steam) that one can click on to go to the "informal chat room" (it may even be called "cafe"). But in T.S. Eliot's words "That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all." (You can see the entire poem, The love song of Alfred J. Prufock, at http://www.prufrock.org/poem/).

Now I am beginning to sound like the horse-shoe manufacturers facing the arrival of the Model T Ford. Decry as they might the rise of the mechanical world there was nothing much they could do about it. Either they got out of the way or got flattened in its path. There are huge economic interests and even social ones that will make virtual U's more common (and maybe even the standard way of doing things) in the future. And there is nothing much I can do about that my memories of chai notwithstanding.

And it is not that I want to stop this juggarnaut. I am no luddite (at least most of the time). I know the world of tomorrow will have its own way of handing these things. Its not going to be the way I did it but it'll work, for the most part. Strange though it does seem, people do fall in love online -- though the virtual version does seem messier in some ways (and not messy enough in others). However, I do feel that in educational terms we are on the cusp of something big here. Maybe not as big as print, but maybe akin to the rise of the universities way back during the renaissance. Only it may mean the death of universities.

My memories of my undergraduate life are, I am sure, quite similar to that of my father, and most probably those of my grandfather as well. My children, I think, will have very different memories. So something has changed. And yet, in certain ways our memories will be similar. I know that humans being the social creatures we are, are not easy to put down. We will find ways to get together and chat and have chai. The real kind, the one that can scald your mouth, not the virtual type, just a mouse-click away. But I am old enough to feel nostalgic about the fact that maybe no-one will sit below the neem tree, with a chai in hand, watching the peacock dance!