Mid-Term Blues!
It’s been 5 weeks already. The way it works here is that, each term is 10 weeks and hence there are exams at the halfway mark and at the end. As I write this, I have taken my first real exam at IIMC this morning. (apart from the class quizzes, qualifying mathematics and presentation that I had to do)
Subject was statistics. No previous exposure to the subject (pathetic! I know) meant I had to work a little harder. The Stats dept. here is very well stocked in terms of profs – all being excellent imports from the ISI. That means that you’re basically in their hands as far as paper difficulty goes. We’ve seen unsolvable papers based on just pure probability!
But they chose to be kind this time. Thankfully. Grading is still relative, so I expect to be somewhere in the middle of the class – given my (lack of) previous exposure and relative ineptitude in quant-subjects. I should be relatively happy with that. Just for the curious (and for my record!) the syllabus included Discrete and Continuous probability distributions, a few results (Central Limit Theorem, DeMoivre Laplace, Chebyshev Inequality) and Bivariate distributions.
Tomorrow is the paper on Indian Economic and Political History. Two professors taught the course.(This being a semi-course, it ends after 5 weeks). The first prof concentrated on pre-colonisation India, conditions for the establishment of the East India Company monopsony, Peasant-Landlord-Zamindar power balances etc. You get the drift. The prof’s overall objective was to prove to us that “the planning model was chosen by the Indian political hierarchy in the insistence of the capitalist section of the Indian society”. I for one was not left convinced.
The second, more interesting part was the study of post-independence economic history. We’ve never studied this – even from a normal “historical” point of view, let alone economic. We did Mahalanobis, the Five Year plans, the events of July ’69, Indira Gandhi and the Young Turks, the “mini liberalization” of the 1980s. The end was of course with the Forex crisis of 1991. The course sort of seemed to make the point that our (major) problems ended when we decided to do what we did in ’91. Though this was not stated explicitly, the bent of this part of the course was to generally disparage the planning period, the License Raj and (once) even make fun of it. I thought we could’ve been presented with different, though controversial points of view, just to make us think.
There is also the probability that now, in hindsight those oppositions to liberalization must seem so ludicrous that the prof prefers not to state them. But IMHO its important that we realise that even seemingly “intelligent” people got carried away by prevalent thought, and now even as I speak – we might be absolutely wrong about what we treat as gospel. I’d like to understand through a study of history how, if at all, we could buck this trend.
Those were my comments about the course. Of course, nothing matters but the grade with which I end up. And that of course, does not matter to me. Not that much anyway. So I shall fondle my latest obsession (this!) and then go to sleep.
Wish me luck!
July 29th, 2008 / 3 Comments / Trackback