Classrooms Made of ‘Ticky Tacky’: What kind of Multidisciplinarity does the NEP endorse?
I t is quite alarming to think about how a song conceived by a Jewish Socialist Immigrant in Daly City almost sixty years ago can evoke such a fitting image of what the Indian academic landscape might look like in a decade. Released in 1967, Malvina Reynolds' "Little Boxes" would reflect the collective vexations of a burgeoning middle-class forced into a pattern of urban conformity and consumerist inertia. As academic institutions across the nation busy themselves in adjusting to a revamped, 'multidisciplinary' educational space, one is left to wonder- did Reynolds succeed in foretelling the emergence of what the NEP 2020 terms as "good, thoughtful, well-rounded" individuals almost half a century back? " And the people in the houses All went to the university, Where they were put in boxes And they came out all the same ". Surely, we have ample reason to believe that she did. One could come up with plenty of synonyms of multidisciplinarity, bu