by Sivamohan Sumathy
“Free Education is not something in the sky. I can touch it, I can feel it.”
A student in a basic writing skills class writes the line above, to my infinite amazement. I have never come across a sentiment related to free education so simply, so evocatively and so theoretically expressed. As battles rage across newspapers and the social media, among politicians and policy planners, and among educationists and administrators, I hold onto this expressive pronouncement of this student, who struggled to articulate her sentiment about free education in a language she was just beginning to feel is her own. She captures all that is meaningful in our universities; access, coming into knowledge, and coming into a knowing of the world around us, known among other things, as social mobility and as an awareness of one’s place in the country, society and the world.