TELUGU JATHI VIVEKAM

PREFACE During my annual visits to India over the years, I would have occasion to meet with students, professsionals and managers of IT companies. Invariably, I was cha-grined to find that almost none of them were familiar or comfortable with the culture and wisdom of Telugu - speaking people. They were not aware of many of the classic works in Telugu, the famous poets, or the history of our land. I discovered that the primary culprit is our educational system. Any aspiring en-gineering or medical student is immediately channeled in to a specialized curriculum which essentially banishes humanities and social science subjects from the syllabus. Thus, some of our brightest students are never exposed to our culture, literature, geog-raphy and history, which is unfortunate. I was reminded of the starting paragraphs of Niiti Chandrika which states that an uneducated person might as well be viewed as a blind person because they have been denied the obvious lessons of life that are con-tained in our literature. Recently, I was fortunate to be given an opportunity to help define the curriculum of a new university established by the AP Government, named Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies for educating gifted rural youth. This university offers a six year integrated progarm after the tenth class leading to a dual degree in IT and Engi-neering related subjects. This provided a unique opportunity to redefine the curriculum away from the early specialization that is usually the norm in the 11th and 12th class pre-university subjects and to provide all the students with a strong exposure to the Telugu Culture.