The Hindu Business Line : Academics vs activists

CAN academics be activists and vice-versa, or are they poles apart? Someone called Anonymous (who has plenty of quotable quotes attributed to him in every anthology of quotations) has said that academics build castles in the air and activists do so on the ground.

Academics beat about the bush, while the activists get rid of it. During the time the former are engrossed in writing long dissertations, the latter get busy giving short shrift to problems.

There was never a time when the world was not polarised between men of thought and men of action. Is there a way of resolving the dichotomy? The neatest solution was given by the philosopher Henri Bergman: Act like a man of thought, think like a man of action! The academics set much store by Descartes exultation "I think, therefore I am," supplemented by Shakespeare's dictum, "Thinking makes it so!" Activists go by H. W. Longfellow's stirring trumpet call: "In the world's broad field of battle, in the bivouac of life, be not like dumb, driven cattle, be a hero in the strife!" President, Mr A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, probably comes closest to harmonising all these prescriptions, starting from even the stage of dreaming.

In an exhortation that must elevate the spirit of every Indian, he says: "We must think and act like a nation of a billion people, and not like that of a million people. Dream, dream, dream! Convert these dreams into thought, and then transform them into action."

In other words, dreaming, thinking and acting form a holistic and dynamic continuum, in the sense there is no action without an impelling thought and there can be no thought without a corresponding dream.

The hexagonal carbon formula of benzene which is the starting point for the whole of organic chemistry and all its innumerable applications actually "gambolled" in the dream of the founder Kekule who was dozing while travelling in a bus.

Therefore, there is no reason at all to be derisive about being a dreamer or a visionary, a theorist or a philosopher. It is he who most often is able to visualise a possibility for being translated into a reality.

It is the synergy from the combined efforts of thinkers and doers that makes for great achievements. Of the many examples, the most impressive are Paramahamsa Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, and Godfrey Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan.

I would have fain added the names of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin but alas, history has written finis to their saga!

B.S.R.

More Stories on : Education | Offhand | Politics

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Stories in this Section
India and the West Asian dilemma

`Irrational' intervention

Is an oil peak upon the world?

UPA's Common Minimum Programme - II: Rectifying gaps and omissions

Low-cost remedies to remove arsenic

Academics vs activists

Home, smart home — Integrated building management systems

New measures

Creating jobs