Today is Sunday the 6th of December and it's just after the reception following the conclusion of two days of development and climate days, the two-day side event that is done every year by IID. This year we did it together with the Overseas Development Institute as well as the Red Cross Centre for Climate Change and other co-sponsors included CDK and the Climate Development Knowledge Network. We had two days of very interesting and fun activities. Today's fun activity involved having a chef, a very famous international chef, Chef Ertiam from New York. He's originally Nigerian but he has a famous restaurant in New York who came and cooked insects and bugs and made it very, very nice and palatable and we all ate them and discussed how food is a very important part of our carbon footprint. Eating meat is a reason why we cause emissions and if we were to cut down on our meat consumption that would be a very important way for us as individuals to reduce our carbon emissions but it was done in a great fun way. Everybody enjoyed themselves. And then after lunch I chaired a parallel session that looked at some very interesting and innovative activities on community-based adaptation that are taking place in some of the poorest countries in the world and most vulnerable in Africa, least of our countries and in small island states and we had a very lively discussion on how best to scale these up and to get global finance to come to the local level which is not easy. It's beginning to happen but not enough and we discussed ways in which we might enhance it. And then finally we had a high-level panel with Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and now the Secretary-General's special envoy on climate justice. We also had Janos Pasteur who is the Secretary-General's undersecretary-General for climate change and the minister from Columbia and several others. He was moderated by Simon Maxwell who is the head of the overseas development institute and at one point I think to be deliberately provocative he suggested whether or not all climate finance should be stopped and included in development finance instead of climate finance and I obviously rose to that debate and challenged him and I said I would much rather the other way around have all the obligations of climate finance actually delivered and if the development finance isn't it doesn't really matter as far as I'm concerned because development finance is given under the paradigm of charity.  Right now many of the developed countries who used to give quite substantial amounts of development assistance are actually diverting that to deal with refugees in their own countries which according to their own rules is allowed seems strange to me but they allow themselves to do that. As climate change finance is under the treaty of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change there's no such treaty for developments of support and financial contributions are obligations that the polluters take and have to abide by in order to support the victims of pollution so it's not about charity it's not about rich giving to the poor it's about polluters giving to the victims of pollution and to me that is the principle under which we should ask for finance get finance monitor finance and as far as development finance is concerned it doesn't really matter as far as I'm concerned. Tomorrow I'll go back to the COP and I'll start reporting back from what's happening there it has moved to the ministerial level various ministers have been given responsibility to carry out consultations we shall find out tomorrow what's happening there.


Freedom!  Time management. It's very important as a YouTuber to be able to manage your time in the most efficient way possible. Usually what this means is you need to figure out how to get the most possible work done in the shortest amount of time. So for instance, if you have 7 videos that you recorded all in one night, how is it that you can take those 7 videos, get them ready, and get them up without wasting a lot of time? Usually for content creators that means editing them all, saving them, and then rendering in batch. This could also mean figuring out what shots you need to do where and when. So for instance, let's say I'm doing 3 or 4 episodes of The Anthony Show here on Freedom Central rather than filming one and then going and doing a vlog and then filming another and then going and doing an unboxing. Well, what do I do? I do 3 or 4 unboxings all in the same day, right in a row. Then I go and I do 3 or 4 episodes of The Anthony Show in a row and then vlogs are just filler content for my personal channel. However, that doesn't make them any less special. Most YouTubers aren't lucky enough to be able to do this as a full time job. Which means that those of us who have other jobs, in addition to this, usually have to figure out some kind of a balance between our fun time and what we're doing to get paid. Or even some of us that do it full time also still need to figure out some kind of balance between your personal life, your family life, and then what's going on outside of that. For me personally, my biggest source of struggle is trying to balance personnel time, that's meetings and talking to people to get business done, versus content production time. I would be very interested to hear what your biggest struggles are when it comes to recording, editing, uploading, content are. Because there are some things that you can do to maximize your output in your workflow. If you have any time management tips, let us know in the comment section down below. I'd be very interested to hear them. And if I hear any good ones, I might even do a video on it. I hope that this video has been helpful for you. If it has, let us know in the comment section down below. Till next time, I'm Anthony with Freedom. Like, subscribe, comment, please. Let's discover freedom. Click the first video to learn what is freedom and how it helps you grow. Click the second video to learn about sponsorships for all freedom partners, even if you have just 10 subscribers. And click the other videos like How Do I Leave Freedom to learn more. Click Get More Views to learn how to build your audience faster on YouTube. Click Get More CPM to learn how to make more money from your channel. And click Get More Music to learn where to get more music to spice up your videos. Click the first playlist to watch The George Show on Freedom. That's my show. Or watch The Anthony Show or The Alex Show also on Freedom.


Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. I'm here today with Roy Foster, who is arguably Ireland's greatest historian, some might say ever. I recommend his classic work, Modern Ireland. He's also written a two-volume biography of Yates, one of the best biographies written ever, I think, and numerous other books on the history of Ireland and also England. Roy, thank you for coming. Thank you for asking me, Tyler. I'm delighted. I have many questions about Irish history. If we go back to the 17th century and earlier, why is it that the equilibrium ends up that the English are so much more brutal to the Irish than to the Scots? That's a very good question, and the comparison between Ireland and Scotland and their relative experiences vis-à-vis the powerful neighbour goes on through many centuries, but the 17th century, notably, I think, as in so many other cases, it comes down to religion and ethnicos, if I can put it that way, a kind of cultural ethnic identity. The Irish were overwhelmingly Catholic in the global political world of the 17th century that meant being against Protestantised England. They were seen as an entry point for continental political influence from Spain and from France who were at war effectively for much of this time with England, and therefore, they were ipso facto disloyal. This is in the view of the English. Their first loyalty was to the Pope. Their ambition was to be an independent sovereign country which became stronger and stronger through the 19th century. The Scots, on the other hand, adapted, at least lowland Scotland, which was rich Scotland, adapted to being part of the Union. They united with England in the Union of Great Britain in 1707, and the Scots made a good thing out of it. Look at pro-consular figures all over the British Empire, so many of them are Scots. Look at generals in the British Army, so many of them are Scots. The Highlands are different. The Highlands have their Catholic identity to a certain extent. They have their poverty. They are exploited in the way that Irish tenants are exploited by absentee landlords, but that's a minority element in Scotland. The majority of the Scots do well out of the Union with Britain and have done until very recently. I think we may be seeing the end of that era right now. Adam Smith made the claim in one of his letters that the Scots elites did poorly out of Union because a lot of the positions they would have taken in the home country in essence went to English people. He argued, well, the Union is good for the country, bad for the elites. Do you think he was wrong? I would think I'd take a more nuanced view. I think the elites did a lot better than Adam Smith for his own purposes was admitting. We look to the 17th century. We see England in particular being ideologically radicalized along numerous dimensions, including religion, so much open talk of tyrannicide, politically, and Ireland doesn't seem to be. What accounts for that difference? It's an enormous question, but there are older loyalties in Ireland. The Irish adopt the Stuart, the Jacobut cause. The Irish definitively have adhered to the old faith to Catholicism. This rules them out from the Cromwellian dispensation which revolutionizes England in such a total way in the 1640s, from the 1630s through the 1640s, right through to the restoration in 1660. Ireland has a different social basis, really, in so many ways in land owning, in a history of colonization and dispossession from the Elizabethan period on. But in the 17th century, that process of colonization and dispossession takes a very particular shape of expropriating native landowners in favor of English incomeers and of planting, as the word went, in a plantation of Scots and Lola and North of England people into the northern corner, the northeastern corner of the island. From that day to this, of course, we've seen the effects of that. There's radicalization going on in a different way, if you like, in Ireland, and for different reasons. But it's a radicalization that essentially expropriates the old Catholic aristocracy, the land owning aristocracy in Ireland, reduces them to a tiny minority west of the Shannon and the bad lands of Connemara. If we think of the 19th century, as you know, I think it's what, in 1831, that free universal schooling comes to Ireland. Are there ways in which, in that 19th century, Ireland is more modern than Britain? That's a very interesting and subtle question. There is a theory that Ireland is used as a laboratory for British government and that they will apply further afield in India and the Caribbean models and lessons that they've learned in Ireland, which is sometimes referred to as Britain's oldest or England's oldest colony. I have a slight problem with that because Ireland is a very special kind of colony, if it's a colony. It's a metropolitan colony. The original inhabitants remain far more, one could say, in a far stronger position than in many of the areas of the British Empire, where they're effectively either enslaved or wiped out. But the point is really that what's happening in Ireland in the 18th and 19th century is, as I've said earlier, a kind of dispossession. But at the same time there are elements and this is true from the active union which abolishes the old very elite Irish parliament in 1800. There are elements of experimentation in the British government of Ireland, which aren't, I have to say this, entirely malign and you zero in on education. The attempt that was being made in the early 1830s was to introduce a non-denominational form of primary education for the Irish people. Ireland being Ireland, it was rapidly denominationalized. The Catholics used it for their purposes and the Protestants used it for their purposes. But the theory of it was that you had to overcome the religious differences, which by the early 19th century seemed to dictate everything that was happening in Ireland. The great novelist William Thackeray, who was married to an Irish woman said when he did a tour of Ireland and wrote his Irish sketchbook, where to get at the truth in this country? It is not possible. There are two truths, the Catholic truth and the Protestant truth. And by the early 19th century, this seemed all too true. Why did popular spoken Irish fade more rapidly than say Welsh? Welsh-speaking continued in the areas that became industrialized and prosperous in 19th century Wales, the areas of the slate quarries, the coal mines. People there spoke Welsh. The areas of Ireland that were comparatively prosperous and they were much fewer than the areas of Wales in the 19th century, were in the east of the island and in the northeast, where Irish was not spoken and had not been for many, many years. It remained the preserve of the distant western fastnesses, Connemara, the islands off the coast, certain pockets elsewhere. Irish-speaking therefore became identified, and this is when we get what we call the Celtic revival from the 1890s, became identified with a pure pre-Lapsarian view of an unmaterialistic, ancient, almost pre-Christian civilization, which inspired people like Yates. But Irish-speaking, Ipso facto was part of that distant time and was not seen as relevant to the modern go-getting materialist commercialization that was affecting much of the rest of the country. Now my own field is economics, and it's striking to me in the 19th century how much excellence there is in Irish economics. You've mounted for it Longfield, who may be first understood supply and demand, John Elliot Cairns, Richard Watley, Isaac Butt. Why this great flowering of economic thought in Ireland? I'm so glad you mentioned Isaac Butt, who I think is one of the great neglected figures of Irish history. He founds the Home Rule Party for autonomy within the Empire, but before that he is, as you and too few other people know, is a very interesting and intellectually original economist who lectures in economics at Trinity College Dublin, and declares at the beginning of one of his first lectures that the great question of economics is why are the many poor, and applying that to Ireland brings him straight into the thorny thickets, and this is the 1830s, of course, 1820s and 30s of protectionism and land-owning, and Butt is a radical land reformer in theoretical terms, long before the land reform issue galvanizes Irish politics in the 1870s and 80s. He is a protectionist for Irish purposes. He becomes, I think, a home ruler, somebody who thinks that Ireland must get some form of autonomy back because of what he sees happen in the famine. The theory of the active union between Ireland and Britain was that Ireland would be treated as any other part of the United Kingdom. The fact of it, when Irish people starved and died in their hundreds of thousands and indeed millions during the Great Potato Famine of the 1840s, the fact of it was that they were not treated as if they were a part of any part of the United Kingdom. They were treated as a special case, and Irish property landowners, such as it was, were left to take the brunt, which they didn't in many cases accept. Butt saw this happening all around him, and it radicalized him as a politician as well as an economist. I think to look to your larger question, Tyler, the reason why economics was something that people, intellectuals turned to in 19th century Ireland, and Lecce, the great historian, was also, I think, sophisticated and interrogative economist, was simply that there was that question that Butt kept asking, why are the many poor? Why was Ireland so poor when it had so many natural advantages? There is a simple, to some people, there's a simple political answer, English domination, but there were intrinsic infrastructural reasons as well, many of them to do with the way land was used and the way the population was going, and these questions had to be answered. Another very popular question is, how far back can we go to explain why Ireland developed so many first-rate writers and poets? Why is that in your opinion? Well, this is something that has preoccupied me more and more. I started life as a straightforward historian and wrote a book about Charles George Parnell, which was a kind of contextual biography. I then wrote a book about another biography of a British politician, Lord Randolph Churchill, the father of Winston. I then wrote my book, Modern Ireland, which I think you mentioned earlier, but especially writing Modern Ireland, I was fascinated to see how often our radical and questioning kind of discourse emerged through creative and fictional and poetic writings in Ireland. And then almost, I would say serendipitously, but it was a tragic case really, the person, a great mentor of mine, FSL Lyons, who was to write the authorised biography of W.B. Yates, died before he could write it and the task passed to me. And in writing about Yates, I also had to write about the heft and the power and the originality of Irish writing in the English language, which is so notable in the period when Yates comes to prominence, where you also have Joyce, you have Shaw, you have slightly later Beckett, you have a great number of less well known writers like George Moore, who I think is a very underrated and experimental novelist of this time. And they're using the Irish, the English language in a completely new way. Now part of this, and if you're structuralist critics following the great Russian critic, Bakhtin, would say it's because they're writing in a language that is at the corners of change. There are traditions of a different language, the actual Gaelic Irish language, which you mentioned earlier. There are also uses and changes and moldings of English that happen in the island of Ireland, which you don't get outside. You still will get this. I always think I had an aged Volvo once. This is not irrelevant. And I was on holiday in Ireland in the summers. I usually am on the boot, which you call the trunk, jammed. And I went into the local garage man in my Kerry village and said, I suppose I should take it to a Volvo dealer. And he lifted up a monkey wrench and hit the back of the car where the boot was jammed with a great belt. And as he hit it and it did spring open, he said, in matters like this, Volvo dealers wield no special magic. And I thought at the time, that could be something that Yates could have heard or Lady Gregory collecting sayings of the people traveling in the west of Ireland. There is an original twist to the English language in Ireland, which is unique. As I wrote about this more and I wrote another book called Words Alone, Yates and His Inheritances, I felt that looking back through the 19th century and into the late 18th century, the time when the Irish language begins to spectacularly decline and English takes over, the novelists of the early 19th century, Lady Morgans, that's Sidney Owenson, William Carleton, Sheridan Lyff and you, many others, who used to be seen as rather crude and ferocious and slightly rough around the edges writers, now look to us, looking back through Beckett and Flann O'Brien and other experimentalists, as far more subtle, sophisticated, intentionally destabilizing writers of the English language than they used to be accepted for. And I think critical opinion would agree with me in this. Why this is, is something to do with the decline of Irish and the way it seeps and filters into the way English is used. Part of it is to do with the way that the English language is often a way in which a medium, which Irish people in the 19th century use to conceal the truth or evade uncomfortable conclusions when they're dealing with land agents or police or bailiffs or the army, if it comes to that. And part of it is the oral tradition of storytelling and using slightly idiosyncratic but vivid turns of phrase like car dealers wielding no special magic. Why did Frederick Douglass visit Ireland and then spend six months there? Douglass' trip to Ireland is something people are looking at more and more now, because there are so many perceived parallels between the position of the native Irish and other oppressed or excluded elements in different cultures, such as the Native Americans and of course Black people in the antebellum and indeed postbellum states of America. I think myself that historical parallels and like historical precedents can be used as rather a blunt instrument, but certainly there was a feeling among radical politicians, nationalist politicians in Ireland and Black politicians in the United States that they had a certain common cause. There's also the overwhelming fact and this I think is very relevant to Douglass that the great leader of Catholic Ireland who brought about the so-called emancipation of Catholics when they were finally allowed to sit in Parliament in 1829, this great leader Daniel O'Connell was a very passionate anti-slaver and abolitionist and many of the people in his Catholic movement and then his movement to repeal the union with Britain and Ireland felt the same way. He was a great radical in the cosmic sense of radical politics Daniel O'Connell as well as being a founder of Catholic freedoms and an avatar of national autonomy. And what do you think Douglass learned in Ireland? I suspect that Douglass who is a subtle and clever politician learned that the parallels between what seemed to be the oppression of the native Irish and the very real oppression of Blacks in the United States were not exactly commensurate to each other but he whether he's he believe whether he the extent to which he absolutely noted that is isn't proven but I feel that and here here I'm chancing my arm rather that anyone as analytical as him as he would have seen that what Irish natives suffered under in mid-19th century Ireland was nothing like what Black slaves suffered under in mid-19th century America. Now my last name is Cowan and I'm Irish American can you tell me anything about Cowans and Irish history? Tyler I'm going to have to pass on that one I'm afraid. I'll send you to the genealogical office in the National Library of Ireland where they will tell you everything they can about Cowans. Sure now you grew up in Waterford correct? Yep. How do you think that influenced your subsequent views on Irish history the Waterford background not from Dublin right? Not from Dublin and neither of my parents were from Waterford either one came from County the border County my father came from County Cavern my mother came from County Wicklow just south of very beautiful County south of Dublin but the school they taught in and where I was taught was a Quaker school we weren't Quakers we were nominally Church of Ireland but the ethos of the education and very many of our friends were Quakers and Waterford was a strong center of the small but disproportionately influential Quaker presence in Ireland and the older I get the more I admire what Quakers stood for what they did what Quaker values are and the more I am conscious that those values infused the I think very impressive education that I was lucky enough to be exposed to so you ask for Waterford and I give you Quakers but Quakers were an intrinsic part of the history of Waterford and I was brought up at the center of that and you think your views on religious toleration and that the history of religion in Ireland were shaped by that background I think they couldn't not have been Quakers had been like other do senting Protestants in the late 18th the 19th centuries they had been rather discriminated against by the established Church of Ireland the one would have to say the Anglican Church of Ireland and so therefore they felt I think more at one with the Catholic majority of the island and anyway that squared with the Quaker beliefs and equality which go back to Charles James Fox to Charles Fox and beyond so I think yes if you take a Quaker view of Irish history you will have a more intrinsically sympathetic view to the varieties of religious experience that exist in Ireland than you would if you were either coming from a Church of Ireland hardline Church of Ireland background or a devoutly Catholic background Quakers sit rather attractively to me in a middle territory and a territory that doesn't privilege privilege if I can put it that way if we think of Ireland in the mid to late 19th century do you think there was a path where British Union with Ireland persists is at least you know moderately liberal and is permanent does that involve earlier home rule or giving Catholics access to the spoil system or how does that look was it ever on the table was it just fantasy there are two great missed chances one is when the active union happened in 1800 to 1800 one and did away with the old Irish parliament I mean this was later seen as a great injustice but it should be remembered that that old Irish parliament was a very elite Protestant monopoly implicitly part of the promise to the Irish for doing away with their parliament was that Catholics would be in the phrase of the day emancipated and be allowed sit in British Parliament and have access to the great offices of state thanks to the opposition of King George III this was ruled out and Catholics felt very reasonably that they had been misled and cheated and it took nearly 30 years to late in 29 as under Daniel O'Connell as I've mentioned for that injustice to be rectified very good recent book about it by Antonio Fraser this I think was a missed chance for reconciliation and those 29 years between the union of 1800 and Catholic emancipation of 1829 were suffused with bitterness which need not have been the case the other great missed chances in 1886 when Gladstone converted himself and a large part of his liberal ruling liberal party in Britain to the cause of Irish home rule and in the greatest speech of his life for nearly I think two and a half hours he tried to persuade the House of Commons that if they rejected giving Ireland an autonomous parliament within the Empire within the indeed within the United Kingdom they would regret it in the future and it would be a very ominous sign they did reject it the House of Commons they passed it a few years later but it was rejected by the House of Lords but I think 1886 was probably the last moment when conceivably there could have been united Ireland between the increasingly different northeast and the rest of the island with an autonomous parliament on the Canadian model within the Empire which I suspect would have disengaged itself over the next 50 years by peaceful steps as indeed the Irish free state after the Irish revolution disengaged itself from the Commonwealth by peaceful steps but by then Ireland was partitioned which to me is an in a tragedy if an inevitable tragedy still a tragedy and that could just about have been averted had Britain given Ireland home rule in 1886 how contingent was that partition in the 1920s is there a scenario where there's an attempt to make all of Ireland independent that is anything other than just a very bloody civil war no I think by certainly by the early 1920s that's the case and I think the First World War which was one of the defining events in Irish history split a deeper rift than ever between the northeast and the rest of the country mind you very very many hundred thousand more than 100,000 Irishmen volunteered to fight on the side of the Allies in the First World War but the real commitment came from the northeast the Protestant culture of the northeast which was determined to use the war effort as a way of showing that they were part of Britain not part of a putative home rule Ireland and the battle of the Somme which decimated the flower of Ulster's youth on the western front built this into stone just as the 1916 nationalist rising a few weeks before at Easter 1916 and the executions of all the leaders of that built into stone the resentment of the nationalist Irish against British rule leading to the extremely traumatic guerrilla war of independence and then the civil war which followed so you also think the periodic world war two talk of Ireland giving up its neutrality in return for unification that was never serious in your view no I think it was some Churchill with one too many drinks in him frankly if we look at the economic history of Ireland from say the Republic now 1920 through the 1970s it seems there's some bad trade policies the economic gap with Britain widens there's not that much industrialization what went wrong during that era in terms of policy or culture or whatever well I think devil era the leader of independent Ireland from 1932 3 took protectionism to its limit there was a trade war a sort of economic war with Ireland over we're sorry with Britain over the disagreement about outstanding payments for land reform and incidentally Tyler as an as an economist I think we we've got to mention the extraordinary achievement of land reform in Ireland when I went to live in England in the 1970s I was amazed at how feudal the English land system was how the size of huge estates the fact people in villages in Norfolk endorsed it didn't own their own properties this was so different from Ireland where thanks to the land acts from 1881 right through to 1909 with a great deal of government money the Irish occupying occupying tenancy were enabled to buy out their own holdings from the landlords who were given enormous sweetener payments by the British government this is one of the Irish revolutions that is less often mentioned and it created a very solid conservative small property owning rural putty bourgeoisie in that one fact in that one sentence you have a large explanation for why the Irish revolution when it did come was politically radical in some ways but socially very conservative you also have the reason for the I have to use the word backwardness or conservatism virus farming in the 1920s 30s 40s 50s 60s it was the small family farm and the absolute determination of the landholder to hold on to what he or more rarely she had fought in the land war of 1918 79 to 81 to to get hold of the stem system of inheritance the ruthless emigration of redundant siblings to leave one inheritor for the farm all this led to a fairly stagnant agricultural economy it was also a stagnant industrial economy in the for much of the 20th century until the 1950s when a very brilliant civil servant called TK Whitken Whittaker TK Whittaker brought in a whole new schedule of economically liberalising measures and began to invite outward external investment into Ireland and set up an industrial development authority to work on Ireland's resources and it did have resources I'm not talking about turf in the bogs and endless wind to drive electricity although this has now come to be the case I'm really talking about the the existence of a highly educated and quite disciplined and intelligent workforce because Irish education has always punched above its weight and we've seen this in the years of the so-called Celtic Tiger as well but from the 1950s 60s 70s the Irish economy did expand in a way that it had never done under the years of devil era and he was an economist we'll know this partly because I think the general tendency began to be to look outward and welcome outward influences coming in from the outside world whereas devil era had and this goes back to the years of the Celtic revival in which he was immersed devil era had a vision of Ireland which was inward looking which was purist which was anti materialist which was not going and he said this frequently in lecture in speeches which was not going to privilege the the creation of wealth and material comfort if it meant losing the essentials of what he conceived of as Irish identity if we think about the troubles they seem to heat up again in the late 1960s why does that happen at that time well many books are published about this the most recent ones actually have started emphasizing the examples of global movements of civil and libertarian unrest notably in America on a generation that had been educated to know how discriminated against the Catholic people where I think there's a question as to whether the outburst of violence that began in 1969 and then continued as you know until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 there's a question as to whether this was the bursting of a boil which was always going to happen because of the way the Catholics in the northeastern counties the statelets set up by the the angloiris treaty in 1921 that this was always going to happen more recently there's a more nuanced view that sees movements towards reconciliation movements towards peaceful civil rights demands movements towards liberalization within a certain wing of the unionist party that sees this as happening in the early and mid 1960s and um all that followed as a lurch into violence that could have been avoided had the unionist establishment behaved with more intelligence and foresight I think I incline rather to that view and I believe that it was the view of Seamus Heaney as well about whom my latest book is and certainly when you read about his life and those of his peers in mid 1960s Northern Ireland you get a sense of finally some new territories of interaction cultural interaction social interaction between the two communities opening up but due to the violence with which civil rights demonstrations were put down in 1969 and due to the rise of the original IRA as a result of that um that was not to be and we had 30 years and three and a half thousand deaths instead and why did the British intervene as much as they did because that had not been the general pattern right no absolutely not there was one of the first pieces of crusading journalism that drew attention to the way Northern Ireland was run and gerrymandering and discrimination and all the rest of it was in the British Sunday Times which was then amazingly quite a crusading paper which it no longer is and the article was called John Bull's political slum and it was a political slum and one reason it was a political slum Northern Ireland was that the British threw money at it when demanded by the Unionists and but kept their faces firmly averted from the kind of culture of discrimination that had been built upon and encouraged ever since the measures like the abolition of proportional representation and voting right back in the beginning in the 1920s when they did intervene it was I believe reluctantly um the there's a simple nationalist version which is that they were determined the British were determined to hang on to Northern Ireland for military reasons no matter what and that's why they poured the army in absolutely unproven and I think proven to be untrue by the recollections and the evidence that's come to light since Northern Ireland was never going to be anything but a running sore for the British and many of them secretly and covertly would have really done their utmost to wash their hands of it as indeed they may almost unintentionally be doing now because of the nonsensical position in which the catastrophe of Brexit has put Northern Ireland in relation to the larger island and in relation to the republic how much permanent cultural influence do you think it had that the republic did not fight in world war two again a very incisive and interesting question many Irish men and I think they probably were men did sign up to fight for the allies many Irish women went over and worked as nurses and doctors in British hospitals during the war in my own in my wife's family that's very true my own family four of my uncles fought for the allies but when they came came back after 1945 to Ireland they were not welcome certainly they were not welcome to talk about their experiences there was a kind of double think in that I think I think the vast majority of Irish people were engaged in a what might be called a pro allied neutrality certainly um allied so airmen who were shot down over Ireland for instance during the war if they are from the allied side were quietly repatriated to Britain if they were Germans they were in turn I mean there was a different approach too much emphasis is put perhaps on devil eras correctness in going to pay his respects on the death of Hitler at the at the German embassy or the German legation as it was in Dublin at the end of the war you can't really read from that that he was essentially pro-nazi though some Irish republicans certainly were he simply felt that as a head of state he was doing exactly what he should do when another head of state died in whatever circumstances but this is often raked up against Ireland implying that Ireland was pro-Germany pro-german during the second world war it wasn't by any means but preserving a position of neutrality was I think probably politically inevitable for devil era and I think one interesting fact is that so very few politicians in Ireland from the opposition side ever queried it I can only think of one James Dylan the Finnegale leader who was very much anti neutrality and believed that Ireland should have entered on the side of the the British it was I think as I've said a pro-British neutrality but a neutrality nonetheless it's one of those subjects in Irish history which has recently been coming into focus on the histories and the treatment of those people who did volunteer to fight on behalf of the allies and came back to a cold welcome or if they were soldiers from the Irish army who'd gone to fight for Britain they were actually disciplined when they came back this is now coming under view and a number of very interesting studies have been written about it it's left one of the it's it's one of those many issues in Irish history like the abuse of children and women in the so-called industrial homes run by the Catholic Church it's one of those no-go areas that is very recently coming under examination by a new generation of I think very impressive Irish historians after the war the republics which is its electoral system to a version of the single transferable vote why did they do that and how has it mattered for Irish politics it's mattered because it has encouraged as um sdv pr systems do all over the world a likelihood towards coalition governments often between unlikely allies I think this is a good thing and living in Britain where they have what I think is an archaic and crude first past the post system which has given repeatedly sweeping powers of government to parties who have not received anything like a national majority I think it's a it's a it's a much less admirable system than what Ireland manipulates the general line is often taken that it's too difficult for voters but actually anyone who's at all interested in where their vote is going knows very quickly or finds out very quickly the advantages and disadvantages sometimes of tactical voting in a PR system the Irish are exceptionally good at it the disadvantage might be that it produces a rather clientelist kind of politics and there's a lot of horse trading and and and pork barrel as you would say in the States politics that go on especially in rural constituencies as deals are hammered out for who gets what and what votes go to whom but in the end I think it's produced and I think this has to be admitted it's produced a remarkably stable political system in a post-revolutionary country when you look at the numbers of revolutionary revolutionary regimes that were set up in European countries after the first world war and I think Ireland should be seen as one of those when you look at what was happening in central Europe when you look at the rise of fascism in especially in Italy but also in Germany and to a certain extent in France Ireland though it had a miniature para fascist party in the 1930s kept a stable democratic democratic system going and it kept it going through the crises of war and poverty and a number of internal crises within the government itself right through to the present day at the moment we have again a coalition government in Ireland between the long-standing enemies finafall and finagale parties that emerged out of the civil war divide which is yet another of those until recently rather unexplored areas of Irish history the traumatic civil war that followed the Anglo-Irish war in 1921 and I think the PR system that Ireland adopted has stood it in good stead and I think that Ireland at the moment seems a far more mature and effective policy in political terms certainly than Boris Johnson's England and I say England advisedly because I think both Wales and Scotland are in a rather questionable position vis-à-vis the unity of the UK at this moment now there's so much focus on Joyce and Yates as writers but how does Irish modernism differ in your understanding if you view it through the lens of the Irish visual arts and painting stained stained glass sculpture this again is another area of Irish history that has been reopened with a number of um analytical treatments of Irish art putting it in the mainstream of European modernist art rather than as a interesting variant on the British experience which was far too often the case in the past that may be true of let's say Irish 18th century landscape painting but it's emphatically untrue of Irish painters of the fantasy great painters like Orpin and Laverie who are much more like French painters and have all stood and have studied in France in many cases rather than being variants of a British norm um you mentioned stained glass Tyler and that of course is a with artists like Harry Clark and Mayny Gillett and Evie Hone that is uh another area medium in which modernism and cubism even in the case of Evie Hone finds its way into Irish art at a time when the British are turning away for or aversion their faces from it um there's a great crisis or a great not a crisis of controversy in Irish art around the early years of the 19th of the 20th century when a man called Hugh Layne a great collector of art tries to set up a modern gallery in Ireland of impressionist and even early post-impressionist art and tries to give his great collection to to the Irish people to form such a gallery. I can't go into it now but it becomes a disputed issue when he dies in the Lusitania leaving a disputed will and the paintings are grabbed by the National Gallery in London where they largely still reside though a new arrangement for sharing them with Dublin has just been recently worked out. Now the interesting thing is that Layne and many Irish people had an eye for the new French painting as did some Scottish collectors long before they became valuable in the eyes of the British artist the English art establishment so I think there's always been a case for arguing that Irish art looks to Europe in many ways many Irish artists train in Europe um an exception someone who doesn't train in Europe is perhaps one of the greatest if not the greatest Irish painters of the 20th century who is Jack Yates brother of WB Yates and there is this absolutely wonderful huge exhibition of his work in the National Gallery in Dublin at the moment where the radicalism and power and poetry of these very expressionist paintings is just mind-blowing and you can't think of any English painter at the time who's doing anything like it you can think of Kokoschka you can think of some of the German expression of some of the colorists and you can see parallels but it's it's a very definitively un-British kind of painting so that's visual art we've long been used to the idea of Irish literature existing in a different a much more international a much more radical framework than English writing of the certainly of the 19th and early 20th centuries but I think an interesting development that's happening now in cultural history and cultural criticism is that Irish visual art is also being seen from this angle as well. Why is Jack Yates still so undervalued in international art markets you can still buy a top one for what a little more than a million British pounds and if you compare it to prices for say continental artists it could be you know 10 or 20 million pounds or euros. Million million pounds is still a lot of money Tyler in my in my book I think he is underestimated but well there is one very practical reason which is that Jack Yates didn't prepare his canvases and they there are fragile things sometimes when you look inside the glass along the bottom of Yates painting there are flakes of paint that have fallen off that's a very practical reason for perhaps not hitting the very highest values but during the boom of the Celtic Tiger I think a million would have been cheap for a major Jack Yates they were hitting large prices and recently they've been hitting them again I think to compare them if you're thinking of the sort of tens of millions you're thinking of Picasso or Matisse and I think that's a different ball game really. I don't think Jack Yates I think what you're buying with a Picasso or with a major Picasso or Matisse is a statement of a change in the history of art that affects the entire artistic world I imagine though I'm by no means an expert that that's one reason for the astonishing prices that these command as with to take a very different example anti-warrel if you're buying a Jack Yates you're not buying into a work that has changed the practice and effect and achievement of world art you're buying something very special and if you like it is synchronic and I think every bit is beautiful as a Matisse or a Picasso but that's perhaps a biased opinion. Do you think it's fair to say that Ireland is not a country of utopian theorists? That requires a bit of thought about no I think if you look at modern Irish fiction which is very often a barometer of of how a country thinks about itself in the early decades of the of Irish independence let's say of the 20s and 30s you had the short stories of Shauna Freelon, Mary Lavin, Franco Conner and you had a kind of not utopian but often a rather idealized though often quite a bitter view of Irish especially rural life as well but certainly a sense of specialness and removidness and a celebration of a certain kind of Irish identity this is I think true of many lesser known writers as well what seems to me to have happened since the 1970s when the whole focus of Irish literary achievements shifted from the short story to the novel when you have writers like John Banville, Compto Bean and Anne Enright they're Spasti and Barry they're going for a different kind of thing they are not in the least utopian though very often a novel will end with some kind of resolution but I think dystopian might be more the world that many of them are working in are working to to to represent the the novel of family life has become in many cases and Dermot Bulger is another example here a novel that explores imprisonment rather than safety and refuge the novel of rural life and think of the great John McGahn here is often a novel of cruelty hardness exploitation rather than a novel of pastoral beauty the novels of Sebastian Barry sent his characters often wandering all over the world to get away from a terrible Irish past though as I say there's often a resolution at the end Compto Bean who has also extended the range of the Irish novel immensely writes about the memory of the war of independence and the encoded cruelties and violences in Irish life so I think we're not in a position at the moment we're not in a situation at the moment where utopian theorists are going to be found writing about Irish life or we're at a very different moment partly because we're talking about things that had not been talked about and I'm thinking here of the so-called mother and baby homes and many other scandals about church authority we're talking about things that for many years were not to be spoken of John Stuart Mill once wrote this in a letter quote I know tolerably well what Ireland was but have a very imperfect idea of what Ireland is is that still true was it ever true it's true of many people it's interesting you quote Mill who wrote a wonderful essay called England and Ireland which reflects I think that opinion he also said something which I've often quoted which I like very much which is that Ireland is in the mainstream of European history whereas England is in an eccentric tributary and I think that's very true and a lot of what I've we've been saying today Tyler Tyler seems to me to bear that out from the 17th century on what Ireland was I think is something that is also in a sense up for grabs where we're trying to re-envision it we're trying to revise it we're trying to re-explain it something I wrote long ago which has been quoted once or twice is that the best history is written when we realize that people acted in terms in belief of an expectation of a future that was never going to happen and I think that's very true of well it's the true it's true of the histories of most countries but very true of the history of Ireland the expectations in which the revolutionaries acted in 1919 to 21 were of a future that didn't happen the expectations of unionists and imperialists in Ireland of which there were many in the late 19th century they acted in terms of a future that was never going to happen either we all act in terms of a future that's never going to happen but that imagined future is what dictates the way in which we behave I think in a sense John Stuart Mill's very honest admission is relevant to that as well as you probably know Oscar Wilde once wrote to William Yates quote we are a nation of brilliant failures but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks with so much Irish success today how will that image have to change is Ireland culturally prepared to be one of the countries that's doing better than all the other countries well again if I can instance my own work I wrote a book called Luck and the Irish a brief history of change 1970 to 2000 which is a study of how Ireland became rich successful a country of into which people immigrated rather than exporting its own people for emigration a country of which was producing large quantity of the world supply of Viagra to take one example of its pharmaceutical revolution a country in which not only big pharma but also silicon technology invaded from the 1990s and made a number of people very very rich it all would collapse no actually it wouldn't all collapse there would be an extreme check applied in the crash of 2006 to 2008 but neither we can look back from 2022 the upside is still there Ireland is a great deal richer more prosperous more fully populated and more I think optimistic than it was in the island I grew up in in the 1960s and early 70s I think Ireland has got very used to being a world player or at least an EU player if I can put it like that and that's can't be underestimated I think Ireland began being rich earlier than people think just as Ireland began being liberal earlier than people think people think that Ireland cast off the shackles of overwhelming Catholic power and social morality with the scandals that emerged about bishops having children and the mother and baby home so forth not so I think and I said this in the lectures that became that book Luck and the Irish I think it began with the Irish women's movement in the very early 1970s when the what the sociologist Tom English is called the the bargain the implicit bargain between the priest and the mother that kept Ireland going was was broken radically from the mother's side when women were not going to be instructed by the church how to live their lives and how to live not only their reproductive lives but their social and their work and their and their sexual lives that was an enormous revolution and it was it happened both quickly and irrevocably from the 1970s similarly I think Ireland became rich not just when the big pharma and the silicone valley began invading in the 1990s it became much richer from 1972 to three when it entered the common market as it was then called and became the recipient of very many grants and handouts and also more creatively was integrated into the European government with always punching below above its weight at Strasbourg and Brussels and doing very well out of it Ireland took to Europe in a very committed way and even during the years of austerity after the crash of 2006 to eight when it seemed at the time rather draconian implementations of economic policy were being ordered on Ireland from the so-called Troika of European financial authorities it wasn't objected to half as much as it was in in Greece or in Spain for instance the medicine was taken because so much good medicine or sugar or whatever you like to use metaphorically had gone down for the previous 20 odd years and Ireland has come through its a lot of its economic dislocation since then and is more I think I think I'm right to say more passionately and more committedly European than ever especially in the light of what brexit is bringing about in the larger island next door as you know Ireland has quite a low marriage rate so how do you think about the long-term repopulation of the country so could you imagine say 30 years from now that half the population in the republic is simply from the EU and that that's culturally stable and everyone's fine with it why should everyone not be fine with it there seems to be pressure brought upon politics in many countries when the percentage of non-native born individuals say creeps over 20 percent now Ireland may be different right there's less populism of a certain kind there many other differences you know I think it is Tyler I don't want to sound too um um chauvinistic about this but it surprises me there is of course racism in Ireland as there is racism everywhere but it surprises me given the and you've just drawn attention to yourself the extent of immigration into Ireland it surprises me how comparatively easily that has been absorbed and how little there is of populist or as you put it or nativist movements against the incomer partly because I think immigration has created among the Irish a kind of global sense which opens the mind to such things and there's also such a thing as reverse immigration a great many people from the boom years on re re emigrant wouldn't say re emigrate returned I suppose the simple way of putting it to Ireland how having emigrated earlier and returned bringing with them I suspect an outward looking and um tolerant view which perhaps they wouldn't have if they had lived all the time in Ireland I think given what you see in other countries and you're absolutely right it's it's it's I think unusual for for it to be so but I think there is a far lesser degree of resentment and expressed bigotry against incoming people from different cultures in Ireland partly because those people themselves become rather quickly what is called the new Irish as Northern Ireland becomes at least as much Catholic as Protestant uh does that increase or decrease the chances for a single Ireland to say that it would increase them is to perhaps assume too much that people people's political vote follows their ethno religious identity it used to be so it's less so now I think there you get far more middle-class Catholics who will admit to be to leaving in the union now than you ever would have before um you get on the other side I think more especially in the younger age cohorts you get far more people from a Protestant background prepared to envisage a united Ireland partly of course because the republic with which they would theoretically be uniting is such a younger more outward looking less priest-ridden more fashionable to use the word entity than the country that their parents or grandparents would have averted their gaze from at the same time I think there's much talk at the moment of a border poll and how it would go a border poll meaning a vote for re reunification I think inter-communal tensions are so high at the moment in Northern Ireland and that again brings us back to brexit or has a lot of its origins in brexit that I think it's the wrong time for such a poll if it narrowly turned out in favour of united Ireland I think it would be fairly catastrophic if it turned out narrowly the other way it would probably be catastrophic too I think at the moment things are too finely balanced to push it I suspect and here I'm pushing the boat out a bit that in about 30 years time the governing opinion in the six counties of Northern Ireland might well have shifted much more towards uniting with a European Republic of Ireland the south than staying with what will by then be a sadly diminished England but that's just a personal opinion in a scenario of that kind does Belfast become Ireland's second city or is it too de-industrialized is it ultimately going to be Cork in the south or how do you see the urban landscape of a united Ireland evolving Tyler I'm not a prophet I do know Cork would be very annoyed if it were to be demoted from the second city since as many people in Cork think they're the first city anyway um I think Belfast would maybe I speak from a the kind of slightly a de-syncratic Protestant culture I was brought up in but I think that too in united Ireland Belfast and what it stands for would supply something that was lacking certainly in newly independent Ireland that quality that's sometimes called northern iron I think the creativity and just think of the Belfast poets since the 1960s the creativity and the history and the Belfast energy would be a valuable adjunct to the the rest of the island that's not to say that there aren't great disadvantages in the case in the economic situation you as an economist will know the powerless state of the northern Irish economy and the fact that so much of northern Ireland society subsists on handouts that come directly or indirectly from the larger island that's an enormous question of assimilation which we haven't really touched on which is I think a great obstacle to to a simplistic form of reunification but where there to be reunification possibly after my 30 year period I think yes I think Belfast would supply something that would bring a new injection of energy and interest into into the reunited island and does Derry or somewhat prefer to say London Derry have an economic future or is it just stuck out there and it's going to get smaller and people will leave it I'm not qualified to say I mean London Derry Derry stroke city as some people refer to it because London London Derry stroke Derry has its own valuable traditions and again its own cultural traditions but it's hinterland culturally has often been seen as as much the Republic as Northern Ireland Derry London Derry would perhaps assimilate with a reunited Ireland rather easily than many places because in a sense culturally so much of it has looked south anyway but that's again a semi-educated guess last question to close this is in some ways quite a large one but you've throughout your entire life you've taught Irish history to Irish people to English people presumably to Europeans and to Americans what are the main differences across those groups in terms of how they understand Irish history or how you teach it one of my favorite Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen said that she wished the Irish the English remembered much more Irish history and the Irish forgot more of it and I tend to feel the same way if you teach Irish history to Irish people you can expect a certain party plea a certain attitude that is already there that you have to kind of challenge and I should say one of the great things about being an Irish historian is the sophisticated engaged passionate interest in history among Irish people we see it at the moment in the decade of commemoration so-called commemorating that key decade 1912 to 22 when so much changed in Ireland living in England I've been amazed at how little commemoration there was let's say for instance in 1991 of 1691 of the glorious revolution of the moment when Huig culture created essentially the modern British political system nobody gave a damn about it or remembered it I was in France in 1989 and again the the extraordinary level of commemorativeness about the revolution was something you never see in England perhaps because England is more secure and perhaps blinkered in its own views of itself and its past moving on to teaching Irish history to English people British people I think it's absolutely vital I've done it in London for many years I inaugurated the first chair of Irish history in Oxford which is still there the very brilliant successor I'm glad to say and teaching English people especially at the heart of the establishment which you would have to say Oxford represents is utterly vital because these are the people who will be the civil servants and possibly politicians of the future and the astonishing ignorance of English people about Irish history apart from some set pieces is one of the things that astonished me when I came in 19 back in 1974 to to be an academic in in this country so there's that that's the obstacle you have to get over when you're teaching Irish history to English people teaching Irish history to Americans which I have done a bit is another question again because you're encountering the emigrant memory of Ireland in many cases Irish Americans or people with some Irish blood in them will say I'm Irish not I'm Irish American it's a sense of identity which I think societies of emigrants bring very powerfully with them and sustain very powerfully but it does mean that all too often the memory of Ireland is the memory of the grandmother or the grandfather or the generation who emigrated and they've kept it in aspic and it's necessary to stir that around a bit to change it to to accentuate the complications the nuances the ironies of Irish history the unexpected futures and the futures that were expected but never happened as I mentioned earlier that's what you have to try and get across to an audience that thinks they have a kind of historic tapestry and an immobilized tapestry or mural of great national events one after the other leading in the end to liberation it was all a great deal more complicated and more difficult and more interesting and I think more creative than that it's been a real pleasure Roy Foster thank you very much thank you Tyler I enjoyed it


So, the Akash project as you know is actually called a affordable tablet computer and we have been working on the affordable solutions as I have mentioned to you. We have a lab called affordable solutions lab which I set up about 10 years ago. We have worked on thin clients, we have worked on smart card readers and we have worked on clicker devices. So, this is one device for example, which is a modified version of an earlier one. As I briefly mentioned when we enquired in the market the clicker devices were available for about 2500 rupees each which is actually more than the price at which we are able to get a complete Akash tablet. So, we redesigned that the earlier version of the clicker was a simpler version which cost us about 650 rupees. This device which was designed by our team. In fact, Rajesh is here somewhere. So, Rajesh Kusalkar released the team about 12 to 15 engineers at various times we have worked. So, this is the Konbananga Karolpathikind device. So, you can see some A, B, C, D etcetera and when a quiz comes you can press an answer and the answer is captured back through a small radio transmitter which is there. We used to use a simple polling algorithm. So, if there are 100 students in the class 100 devices would be polled we would collect back the results. Subsequently, when the Akash tablet project was to come to us we decided to stop further development of this device because Akash itself can be used not only to run simple quizzes, but in fact our people have actually ported the backend where a 20 minute quiz can be given on Akash. The multiple choice answers for different times and whenever they finish all the answers can be uploaded. So, that you know instantly what are the answers by different it helps tremendously in handling logistics of conducting. So, the official name for this is low cost excess come computing device or L-CAR. This was termed Akash when it was launched in October 2011. It was the first version which was launched. There were some problems with that first version and there were some other issues. The original institution which was running this project requested MHRD to take it back and give it to someone else. So, in the month of March it was decided that IIT Bombay will carry on with this project now. Since then we have developed several applications and we have planned for deployment. The objective of this phase of the project and I repeat this you must note is not for general distribution to school and college students at all. The objective is actually empowerment of engineering college teachers. There is the specific objective of this phase of the project which we are undertaking. Our proposal is for a two year duration. The first part is of course to acquire these tablets. The second part is to test them in the labs for which we have a partner which is SEALAC and the third part which is where you would be concerned is to jointly test these tablets for the effectiveness of use of these tablets in educational process. So, I will explain how we propose to do that here. Roughly or a tentative plan right now is to select certain engineering colleges which are willing to work closely with IIT Bombay for this project and deploy about 100 tablets in each college. And this is something I want to know from you. What is the size of an average class say a second year, a third year level elective course or course? 72. 72. 72. 72. 72. 72. 75. 75. Sorry 90 to 100. My God. So, either we will have to exclude you from this experiment or you will have to choose an elective course where a reasonable number of students are present. Reasonable only in the sense of availability of these tablets, nothing. This project has nothing to do with IIT. Achacha, up to 100 is it. Let us not discuss on how the classes are organized under IIT norms. All that I am interested in is whether you will be able to find a class, whether you will be able to enthuse a teacher teaching that class to use Akash tablets and whether the size of that class could be around 60. I would not like to refer to sanction strength because we run the project with ground reality not with what is on paper. And the ground reality is that in your opinion the best subject for which this should be tested because of the best teacher is enthusiastically interested and if that class has 70, then be it. That is the point. I think the way we should look at it, our main objective is to get a feedback on the usefulness of the tablet. It is not number and unless a complete class is empowered, even if you leave out two students that will not be good. That is the point. So, that is okay. I will take an average number as 70. Again, again these different colleges will have a different thing. Alright. Let us put it this way. We will put this as 75 as an average number to be deployed in the class. These numbers are important because I have to divide available things amongst different. So, I will make that as 75 for use in a specific class per semester. If after identification of a subject, if somebody says that I have only 60 students who will request you to keep these 15 tablets with you, because this is not a one semester thing. The engagement will be for two years, by the way. And you will be expected to use these tablets for that subject during the semester and use the same tablets for the workshops that you conduct for teachers during the workshop. So, if a workshop falls on a weekend, for example, during the semester, the students will have to submit back their tablets for that one day usage and then take it back. These logistics will have to be handled. So, as I said, for conducting positions and assignments, that is a very mundane role. But more important, access to video contents, access to notes, possible access to Moodal if people use Moodal, etcetera, etcetera. That is the objective. We also propose to provide additional 25 tablets for use by final year UGPG students for doing their research work related to new development, which could be either for applications or for contents or for both. So, do you think this 25 number will be good enough, because there will be teams of students doing the project. To each team of four people or so, you may allocate two tablets for use. And so, that way you can have 6 to 8, not all students will be working only on Akash projects, obviously. Second, I would like to emphasize that these projects need not necessarily be only CS or IT projects. These projects could have teams composing of different people from different streams, if they are interested in doing this. For example, the work that is being done here comes out of aerospace engineering, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering. That the nomenclature of the field is of no consequence, as long as somebody is interested in making this content. So, you are sure you will be able to identify such people. I have listed various R and D areas. Some of them are hard problems and basic problems. Some of them are not so hard, but difficult problems. And many of them require interdisciplinary activity. So, for example, take architecture itself, whether how do you deploy a faster process, how do you handle power consumption issues, how do you handle battery life issues, a whole lot of electrical engineering faculty members and students in IIT Bombay will be working there. And if there are any projects in your institutions relating to these areas. So, we will be forming small collaborative groups across the country, spirited by a couple of faculty members here with the concerned faculty members in respective places. Interfacing the devices to keyboard, for example, the USB port on this can take a USB stick, but cannot connect to a USB camera, cannot connect to a USB keyboard. Why? Because the power consumption is not supported. So, you have to connect a powered USB hub to the USB port. And from that powered hub, you can then perhaps connect a keyboard and so on. There are lot of activities that are required here, holding new versions of Android. Subsequently, as I said, Linux will be working on this. So, we have some researchers here working on this already. As I said, a small Linux port has been superimposed on these tablets already, using which we run C C plus plus compilers and what else. Automatic testing and performance issues related to tablets. How do you test, for example, if you have 100 tablets in your college? So, other than deploying them for the educational use, suppose you have to conduct a test of, let us say, performance of 2D graphics or running a standard benchmark. We will be requesting you to run these benchmarks on each and every tablet that you get. So, there is, for example, an Antutu benchmark or a Linpack benchmark. A Linpack benchmark comes. Linpack is essentially, many of you would be familiar, it is a computational benchmark. Tests with the performance of the floating point computations, performance of the integer computation, etcetera. Now, individually, I could take that Linpack benchmark program suit on a USB dongle, put it on this and then run it. And then when I run it, I will note down the timing that is required. But how will you do so on 100 tablets? How will you do so on 1000 tablets? How will you do so on 100,000 tablets? These are scalability issues. So, some automatic testing procedure. Some suggestions that we have, for example, what our people have attempted is that because there is a Wi-Fi connectivity. So, each tablet, we write a small script like a shell script in a convention unique environment, where from the back end, the applications get loaded. That is another point. If you have 10 applications, how do you load them on all the machines that you have? If a new application comes, how do you distribute that application to the available tablet? How do you install it on the available tablet? These are non-trivial issues, but these are not basic research problem. But still, that requires some R-A. Studies on Wi-Fi connectivity, how do you optimally use the bandwidth? What is the maximum number that you can connect simultaneously? We are sure that from one excess point, up to 100 devices can be connected with some usage. But if there is a heavy use, for example, of video lecture, downstreaming, etcetera, the numbers drop. What is that number? How do we increase that number? How do you make multiple Wi-Fi excess points available for a large class of 300 students, for example? And how do you automatically make sure that certain tablets connect to one Wi-Fi point, certain other tablets connect to another Wi-Fi point, etcetera? These are ticklish issues, not hard basic research problem, but nevertheless requires some effort and you will agree that many of these could form the basis of interesting undergraduate projects in your college. The more important things will come now, content rendering. There is a specific English, what should I say, font which is available. What if I want to render Telugu contents onto this tablet? Can I borrow an existing Telugu font and install it here? Does it work the same way that I install fonts on Linux and the fonts work there? We do not know. All Indian language scripts and contents is going to be a major push for these tablets in coming years, as I said, particularly for the school education. And again I would encourage you to consider content development projects. Again can be done by some final year students in conjunction with some school teachers, in conjunction with experts or even the engineering faculty members who are interested in school education. There are lots and lots of things that are possible here. Animation is another thing. We have a very strong group led by Professor Sridhar Ayer who develops educational animation. There is a site called Oscar site where all these, the educational animations are released in open source. The development of animation is also done in using open source school called Blender. Obviously, Blender will not work on the Acosta. It requires a large, but the animations which are created by Blender, can they not be used with Acosta. So, educational animations, again the creation of animation itself is a large effort where school children, college children, our students, whosoever is interested in contributing to contents can work. But the R and D problem is how do you optimize the animation formats such that they are most effectively available on the tablet. Secondly, how do you incorporate such animations into other content such as notes and things like that. If you go to Wikipedia for example, and you ask for the, what you can say is the technology that the human eye uses. So, there is a diagram of the eye. There is a nice picture of how the cone cells and rod cells work, etcetera, etcetera. And there is an explanation. But if you click in that text itself on a link, the eye gets eliminated and the light getting focused, the light getting captured, the contents getting consolidated, etcetera, etcetera is this way. Why cannot we make such things available optimized for the 7 inch footprint of the Akash tablet. Usability study, what is the interface, how easy it is to use. Even a single word matters on the screen that appears, does it convey the proper meaning. By the way, there are people who work on visual communication and usability who do PhD in this subject. Traditionally, engineers have kept themselves away from these topics. But increasingly, these are becoming important. So, there could be issues like this. Pedagogical studies, how do you measure the effectiveness of use of this tablet in education. How can students and teachers say that without these tablets, the effectiveness was so much with these tablets, the effectiveness is so much.  Now, can you do research such that when a teacher announces a quiz, all other functionality of the tablet is disabled and only quiz interface is available. This is not as simple a problem as it sounds. You want to control a device and then when you implement such control, there will be some smart jokers who will hack that and break that control. And then there will be a perpetual battle, which is an interesting battle from R and D. So, this is roughly the overall expectation from you. We would expect proposal to be sent by the institute, must be signed by the head of the institute. We will need an Akash project coordinator in each college. It could be one of the RC coordinators or any workshop coordinator or any one faculty member who is interested in doing, but there will be a lot of work involved here. Unlike the workshops, we will not be in a position to pay any honorarium to any staff there, because this is supposed to be a joint R and D project. That means your institute is interested in doing this project.  MHR didn't pay my salary. MHR didn't pay me any honorarium, but because I am interested in this project, I do it. So, that is how it will be looked at. Once an institutional proposal is approved, the certain conditions I am still writing them, I had mentioned some to you. For example, all the tablets given to you will remain the property of IIT Bombay. You will be responsible for their loss. So, when you allocate them and distribute them to students, you are required to maintain both your own internal register plus there will be an online registry that will be. We will be tracking each and every tablet to whosoever that tablet belongs. And the feedback collection we will try to automate to the extent that we require it, but if you think you need additional feedback, you can have your own mechanism. So, first will be the set of courses that you would like to identify where the teacher is agreeable to use these tablets and show the meaningful use. Ideally, we should have started from July. Unfortunately, the tablet deliveries may begin only in July. Is it possible then for some of you to enthuse your people to say that, look, the tablets may come slightly late. Can we use these tablets for meaningful usage after the mid-same exam, for example? So, somewhere around may be September middle. When is the mid-semester timetable in most of the colleges? September. So, suppose by August, we are able to reach a substantial number of tablets to your institutions. Will you be able to give some immediate feedback by using them in September? Meanwhile, in July and August, the concerned teacher can start looking at the contents which can be downloaded on to this and the other infrastructure can be created. I will talk about the other infrastructure in a moment. So, the first thing is the identification of the subjects and the concerned faculty member to submit a plan identifying activities and contents. Similarly, so the Akash coordinator appointed by your institution will have to do three things. One is Liza with IIT Bombay to keep track of the receipt of these tablets, etcetera, etcetera. The second is Liza with the subject teacher who agrees to teach this course and to distribute and control the distribution of those tablets. The third is Liza with the project students. Now, that Akash coordinator may not be the guide for all the students. So, there will be identification of the project guides who could be from CAS, Electrical, Mechanical, wherever. They will be submitting such project proposals to the local coordinator who will record them and will distribute the tablets there and keep track of the problem. This is the three part thing kind of thing that we expect. Some more part of logistics. As I said, 75 tablets for the use in a classroom, 25 tablets for use in projects. That makes it 100. But the following problem may happen. I am a student in one of the courses that you have identified. I have been given a tablet. I use that tablet and on the fifth day or sixth day, my tablet goes blank. Either the battery discharges completely, it refuses to charge again or the operating system hangs permanently. There is a small pinhole by which you can reset the machine. Usually, that is how you handle tablets or even cell phones, for example. Because Android is not as robust as a regular desktop operating. But suppose there is a permanent problem. Now, will you tell me that, you have no tablet now onwards. Therefore, you will not get any quiz marks for rest of the course. No. You would expect a replacement for that tablet. I will expect a replacement. Now, if you tell me, all right, you give me your tablet. According to rule number 13B or procedure number 14A, I have to send this tablet by post to IIT Bombay who will send it to the supplier. He has a warranty for one year. In his own sweet time, he will replace that thing to IIT Bombay, which IIT Bombay will give us. Come back next year to get your tablet. Not workable. Now, how do you solve it? Remember the difference between a low cost tablet and a high end consumer product. If something goes wrong with your TV, you will just make an angry phone call and somebody will come to your home to repair it. In the worst case, he will take that TV and give you a replacement TV for some time. Now, such a facility is not available at the cost at which we buy. So, what should be the solution? The solution that I have thought of is, I will issue 10 extra tablets to each remote center. But these tablets are to be kept under lock and key after initial testing by the Akash project coordinate. The idea is, the moment somebody says, I have a problem, within 5 minutes, the tablet should be repaired. And of course, properly record. Do you think this is a better workable solution? So, we start with 10 percent extra tablets, but they have to be accounted for. I will tell you the real problem that will happen. The moment your institution knows that there are 10 extra tablets lying in the cupboard and that they have not been used for one month at all because everything else is working, then suddenly there will be requested pressures. The director of the institute will say, I will give you a tablet to see. And it will be very difficult to say no. The coordinator's son will say, Papa, please bring me home one day. Which is more difficult to say no. How do you handle such problems? So, there has to be a fatwa. And the coordinator should cite that golden rule number three or whatever, which where Fatwa has said that any time in a surprise check, if all the reserved tablets are not found in the cupboard, the entire project will be cancelled permanently from that remote. That is the kind of strictness we have to observe because these state tablets are for emergency. And emergency does not come with a pre announcement. So, any is like insurance. So, if any tablet dies for whatever reason, please remember our main objective is that student and that teacher who is involved in this must never suffer. That is our primary view. You agree with this? Fine. So, we will go back. Go ahead with this. Yes, the reason is very simple. We have been given a grant by the government of 25 crore rupees to procure one lakh tablets and to use them for this R and D. This R and D concerns testing effectiveness of these tablets by education. So, we have no provision to sell these tablets. We have no provision to permanently give away these tablets. It is a good question. The answer is these tablets shall remain perpetually the property of IIT Bombay. And the ministry at the end of two year period can ask technically these tablets to be returned to them or to be given to someone. Many of you would have worked on sponsored projects. When you buy an equipment, the sponsoring agency says this equipment continues to belong to us. At the end of two years or three years, we can take this equipment back. So, you have to maintain a stock register and you have to maintain. However, in practice, I have not seen any sponsoring agency coming to you after three years saying give back that server, give back that machine. That may happen. But please do not quote me on record. As per the law of the land, I am not permitted to sell you that. I am not permanently able to give it to you. But it will be usable for the two years for this type. That is a different project altogether and that is supposed to happen in phase two, where the government will procure 50 lakh tablets. There are two types of booking. First is the commercial booking, which we will not talk about. That has nothing to do with the government. It is like I book a TV or I book a car. That is separating. That is different. That will happen in the market. The government does not control the market. The government project itself, the booking in a sense has started in the sense that the ministry has written to all universities and colleges, asking them how many tablets they would like to have for their students at such and such subsidies. Now, all that the government has done is it has collected this information from various institutions. As and when it procures those 50 lakh tablets, those 50 lakh tablets will be distributed ultimately to the students against payment of that non-subsidized portion by the colleges or universities or students or whatever. And in that case, those tablets will belong to those students or those. There are very interesting speakers which are coming up now. Suppose I am one such student. I get a subsidized tablet and I pay only 1500 or 2000, 3000 rupees and rest of the money is paid by the government. Now, I get it. Five of my friends build a private limited company. We all get these five tablets and sell them in the open market at price the rate. How will you prevent me from doing that? So, these issues have to be yet to be addressed. But as I do not know whether I mentioned or not, ever since I got this Akash project and since I have to run this mega workshop, I have been working like that. Tange ka ghoda, if you have heard it, a horse with a blinker. I do not see here. I do not see there. So, 50,000 tablets, free tablets, these that is none of my business. My business is strictly limited to get these one lakh tablets and to ensure that the effectiveness of their usage in education is shown. I have a two prong attack on this. One is for the Indian college itself whereby we test this with subject. But the second and more important you will agree is the R and D effort that will happen in your colleges for development of new content, for development of new applications, educational applications, educational game. That is that is the problem. So, these 10 percent extra tablets is a fair figure to start with. By the way, do not go only by that 10 percent. The numbers are not important. If some institution, for example, identifies 30 projects which require tablets, we would be, if there is a justification, we will consider that and do that. So, I am setting up a back end paraphernalia to answer that. The idea is to make things work to the best of all. Let me show you a small 6 minute movie clip. Now, I come to the second project which is the Akash tablet project. You have just seen the Akash 2 being soft launched. We will tell you about the applications that we have developed in the last 3 months in the institute. It is obvious that such applications cannot be created in a short span of 3 months. What we have done is we have utilized the expertise and the work done over the last several years by different groups in IIT Bombay and have excited them to help us port those applications onto the Akash tablet. Once the production of the Akash tablet starts, which will begin only after we have validated the samples that have been given to us, then we propose to give these tablets to the participating colleges to be used in their classrooms as also for their final year projects. I expect that over 50,000 final year students doing projects would be working on these tablets in the coming years to develop new applications and new contents to benefit the entire educational framework of the country ranging from school education in Indian languages to the college education and higher education. So, this is the team which designed and developed the proximity application, which was originally meant for desktop publishing of interactive lectures. These lectures now can be seen and heard on Akash. And now see an application which permits students to see the video recorded lectures. The proximity tool permits editing of video recorded lectures to create interactive lessons. For example, this is one lesson that has been created. I will wrap up for chapter 3 of the book. The spoken tutorials created by Professor Kandan's team are also available and accessible on this. How school level useful spoken tutors can be developed? The basic tutorial can be first written in English script. But once it is identified, once you have the visuals and animation or whatever, the spoken part can be in any Indian language. And we have engaged actually students, housewives, not necessarily IIT students, any students or anybody in fact, to come forward to write the script in Telgo, Bengali, Assamese and so on and actually to speak it out. So, this should be very useful is what we believe. The lectures and tutorials that you just heard were stored on the SD card which you can see protruding a little bit from this tablet. It is also possible for this tablet to connect on Wi-Fi to a back end server. And the same lectures can also be heard directly from a server. So, here for example is an NPTEL lecture which is located on the back end server. Yakash is connecting to the server through Wi-Fi. Our team has prepared interactive lessons. So, even on this lecture it is possible to go to any one particular topic directly. This is the team which has developed the clicker application on Yakash tablet. It is the same team which was involved in the development of original clicker application on the clicker devices which were designed at IIT Bombay. We will now see a demonstration of using clickers for collecting responses from students in a classroom for quizzes which a teacher might pose. This application permits a teacher to conduct a quiz in the class. What you see is the quiz module which is being controlled by the teacher. Clicks here to conduct the quiz. A quiz appears here. The teacher will set a default time for students to answer the quiz and will launch the quiz. When he launches the quiz, the quiz question will be available on the Yakash tablet and the student can answer this question by clicking on to the right answer that he thinks is the correct answer. After the time that has been set, all the answers from various Yakash tablets in the hands of different students will be collected and once the quiz time is over, I can view actually the result. These are the responses that come from different students against their ideas. I can also see a bar chart. Here is a demonstration of the programming environment that has been built by Professor Karnan Steem and Professor Madhu Bellur Steem on the Yakash tablet. In this, we have actually created a Linux environment on top of the Yakash Android operating system and provide for C programming interface for example. So, here is some sample code, the traditional program which when executed prints Hello World. Here is the execute button. This will compile that C program and execute it. You can see the Hello World coming out as the output. There are many exciting environments such as C++ and Python which have been built but perhaps the most useful for engineers and scientists is the open source Sylab. Sylab is a tool which is equivalent of the well-known industrial product called Matlab and it is used extensively by engineers. So, here for example, is the code written in Sylab which when executed will produce a milk dock image. We now show an exciting engineering application where a Robo is being controlled by the Yakash tablet. The Robo itself has been designed in IIT in Professor Kavi Arya's lab. This is the team of summer interns that you see who have programmed the Yakash tablet to control the Robo as well as to get the video stream coming from the camera mounted on the Robo to be displayed on the Yakash tablet. This is the Robo that you see. There is a Wi-Fi camera which is mounted on top. We will now see the operation of this camera and the Robo by using the Yakash tablet. So, this is the Robo control application. As you can see on the Yakash tablet, they have given a small control on the right by which the Robo can be moved. This moves forward, this moves backward. This can turn the Robo left. So, you can see that the control is very refined here and the video stream is being obtained by this Yakash tablet using a Wi-Fi connector. So, this is what we have been able to do in about one month's time, actually in 15 days time after we got the Yakash tablet. But you will appreciate that none of this work can be done in 15 days. This was possible because several research teams have been working for almost year, two years, three years. All that we have done is we have tapped into their work, taken that as a basis. For example, the Robo control application was built entirely by six summer interns, supported maybe by one project engineer to advise. These summer interns come from your colleges. There are I think two from VNIT. This is one from Dhanbad, one from Surat. These are the, just your scooters. And one of, couple of them are second year, just done second year engineering, electronics. So, how they could build it is, there was about 2,000 lines of code already written by professor Kavyaariya student in the last semester in the E. Yantral lab. So, they took that as a basis, modified it, studied the video streaming protocol that the camera was using, modified that code and made it work. These are exciting projects for the people.


Now that I've introduced you to resistivity, I wanted to talk to you about why different materials have different resistivity. The reason I find this so interesting is that resistivity varies between different materials more than almost any other property. Take a look at this table. It shows the resistivity for different types of solid materials. So as we can see here, some metals have a resistivity of approximately 10 to the minus 8 ohm meters. While other materials like rubbers and polymers, they can have a resistivity greater than 10 to the 15 ohm meters.  This is just amazing. Can you imagine just about any other property of a material that differed by 23 orders of magnitude? If I increased my weight by that much, I would weigh more than the entire earth. If I increased my height by 23 orders of magnitude, I would be larger than a galaxy. So how is it that the solid objects can have such different resistance? So the most basic explanation is that it comes down to how easily charged carriers, usually the electrons, are able to move through the material. If you've studied some chemistry, you might know that there are three ways that solids can be bonded together. So they are metallic, covalent and ionic. So those are the three ways that solids can be bonded together. In metals, there are many unbound electrons which are free to move throughout the metallic lattice, which means that the electrons can move around very easily, so they have a very low resistivity. However, in covalent bonds, electrons are shared between two different atoms, and there's very little capacity for the electrons to move. So these materials usually have very high resistivity, things like plastics and rubbers. In ionic lattices, what happens is one atom gives up its electrons to a neighboring atom. So overall, it's neutral, but any individual atom is charged. However, the electrons are still localized on individual atoms, and this means that usually ionic compounds are good insulators. However, there are a few exceptions to this. So the first exception I wanted to tell you about is a covalent compound, which actually is a good conductor, and that is graphite. So here we have two chemical structures of carbon. On the left we have diamond, and on the right we have graphite. It so happens that both diamond and graphite are covalently bonded. However, the diamond, every carbon atom is bonded to four other carbon atoms around it, and all the electrons are localized between two atoms. But in graphite, every carbon is only covalently bonded to three other carbons, which means that there is one free electron on every carbon which exists in between the layers. It's a much weaker bond that holds the different layers together, and these electrons are free to move between the layers, actually making graphite a good conductor. Another exception is that ionic compounds actually become very good conductors when they dissolve in water. On the left-hand side here, I have a picture of the molecular structure of pure water. This is pure water, water that doesn't contain any ions, any salt or anything. As we can see, it contains one oxygen atom with two hydrogen atoms. However, there are no charged ions or atoms in pure water, so pure water is actually not a very good conductor. However, if you take a salt and ionic compound like this sodium chloride lattice and dissolve it in the water, then all of a sudden the water will contain charged ions which are free to move around, and that actually makes the water a much better conductor of electricity. So adding salt to water will make it a better conductor. This property has been used by a man called, or goes by the name of Tesla Down Under. He's created a website where he uses a Tesla coil to create thousands of volts. He exposes himself to thousands, even millions of volts, and protects himself using objects of different resistivity. If you'd like to find out more about how he does this, check out the website TeslaDownUnder.com. There's some pretty cool videos and some pretty cool images of what he's been able to create.