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ARVIND GUPTA
By Meeta Bhatti
Arvind Gupta is a ‘backyardigan’ par excellence. Like the popular children’s animation series by the same name, he makes real the fantasy play that happens in every child’s mind. Surrounded by junk, the 54 year-old, in his corduroys and khadi kurta, walks around barefoot at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) at Pune University, creating teaching aids that he loves to call “toys” — the only time he wears chappal (that he has crafted himself) is when he goes to the canteen for lunch or back home on the campus. His office is littered with Gupta’s finds from the local bazaar, garbage cans or his own house. There are broken CDs, used Tetrapaks, bicycle valves and tubes, film rolls, magnets, plastic straws, used refills of ballpoint pens, all types of paper, worn-out bathroom slippers, pins, matchsticks and matchboxes, mirrors, bangles and combs. And hanging from soft-boards, wall nails, doorknobs and handles are Tetrapak butterflies, needle and thread acrobats, paper birds, spiders and skeletons.
These form the bedrock of fundamentals in science for young students who visit IUCAA thrice a week in batches of 50, of which Gupta maintains a schedule on the Monaco Hindi calendar hanging in one corner by the window. Dr Jayant Narlikar, the famous astrophysicist who set up the centre, assigned the space at IUCAA to Gupta in 2004 (until then Gupta was a teacher on the move). This year, in celebration of completing three years here, Gupta has finished uploading over 700 books for children, parents and teachers on his website, www.arvinduptatoys.com. Inaugurated by former president A P J Abdul Kalam in June 2007, the website is a treasure-trove of rare books, also translated into Hindi and Marathi by Gupta and his friends. Soon the library will also benefit the visually impaired who can read books online using screen-reading software like JAWS.
“Only those teachers who punish kids by making them stand outside the class go to heaven,” quips Gupta. “After all, it’s outside the classroom that children learn the most.” His role model is Mahatma Gandhi’s contemporary Gijubhai Badheka, the teacher who broke all norms to sow the seeds of curiosity in his students. Badheka’s Divasvapna (Day Dreams), an account of the teacher’s experiment in Montessori education, is one of the books on Gupta’s website. First published in 1931, it went out of print before the National Book Trust printed it again in 1990 — since then it has seen five reprints. Some rare books on the site include the classic Totto-Chan stories, Isaac Asimov’s series of science facts and Irawati Karve’s Yuganata. And there are 18 books of architect Laurie Baker. Having briefly worked with Baker in his youth, Gupta met Baker again eight years ago and digitised all his books, even translating six of them in Marathi.
“It’s my dream to make this online library as big as www.gutenberg.com, the world’s largest online database of free books. Our focus will be on valuable literature that is out of print because publishers didn’t find it viable to print another edition,” says Gupta, who quit his job as an engineer at TELCO in the early 1970s to train rural teachers. Partners in project were experts who had quit their respective fields to reshape the educational milieu. “It was a time of intense political churn when a lot of social energy was released and a bunch of us decided to contribute to change,” recalls Gupta. “We believed that you couldn’t sit in an office and write curriculum for rural teachers. Our syllabus for children was 10 little fingers.” Gupta handed over the responsibility of earning to his teacher-wife Sunita to pursue his passion for making teaching aids, which remains an equally important component of his website.
Already up on the site are over 25 educational films, all of Gupta’s own books and over 250 teaching aids — Gupta’s beloved “toys”. Each is accompanied by an illustration and DIY details. There’s a pump to blow balloons, coke can airplane, three-blade paper fan, portable generator, windmill and floating forks, to name a few. In few easy steps, these explain the science behind centrifugal force, fiber optics and magnetic levitation. “The line between science and fun is very thin,” says Gupta. “It’s how you tread it [or not] that puts the joy back into learning.”
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