As I have looked beyond tech in the past couple years and gotten more involved on working to bring political and policy change in India, I have acutely felt the lack of a liberal arts education. The only economics and stuff I studied was the few Humanities courses in IIT, which we sort-of sleepwalked through. The relevance of it for an engineer was at that time completely lost on me. Combine with that uninspiring teaching and I was put off from the liberal arts for a couple decades. The loss was entirely mine.
I really think we need to emphasise the need for learning liberal arts for every person, irrespective of what discipline one is specialising in. Just take a look at this lecture series from Harvard’s Michael Sandel and you will see the importance of understanding these concepts as part of everyday life.
The principles of freedom, liberty, justice are fundamental to our responsibilities and duties as a citizen and voter. We need to think of creating a series which combines Western and Indian philosophers that each of us can use to re-educate ourselves.
