So I told the professor, “The straight line is just an appearance. Because you cannot see the whole big circle, the small part of the circle looks like a straight line. But what to say? You cannot say it is a straight line, because that goes against Albert Einstein, and he is certainly right. You cannot say no, because it goes against our eyes, our vision. In front of us the straight line certainly is straight. Neither yes nor no. For that the word is po.

My professor left the room. He said, “Either you will be in this college or I will be in this college, because if you bring such things as po – I don’t know anything about them.”

I said, “That is your fault. For the thirty years since you became a professor, do you think the growth of knowledge has stopped?”

The vice-chancellor had tears in his eyes when he expelled me. He called me; he said, “I know you are right – and this is the first time I am expelling someone who is not wrong. Whatever you have said you have explained clearly, but our professor is old, nationally famous, and we cannot lose him. And he has given this resignation to me, ‘Either within three days you expel the student – and for three days I am not going to come to the college – or accept my resignation.’”

The vice-chancellor said to me, “What do you suggest?”

I said, “po. What can I suggest? The situation requires the word po. And that is the problem. The whole problem is po.”

With tears, he also started laughing. He said, “That’s true, the situation is such…. But help me.”

I said, “You can expel me, because all expulsions from all the colleges, universities, are my qualifications. And I am being expelled because I know more than the professor. So expulsion is a compliment, it is not anything derogatory.”

The Indian universities are suffering from lack of up-to-dateness. So create a central system, IES, which chooses the professors not just because they have a PhD or a first-class master’s degree; their degrees don’t mean anything. IES will examine them again to know whether they are up to date or not.

Consolidate the universities, so there are not one hundred of them. The very meaning of university in India has been lost. It has become a political thing; every state wants more universities than the other state.

What is the reason? The reason is that politicians are becoming vice-chancellors. Retired politicians, politicians who have been defeated in the elections, who are no longer chief ministers, cabinet ministers – they need some place of respect. The vice-chancellorship has become a refuge.

So make it an absolute law that no politician can become a vice-chancellor, because what does a politician know about vice-chancellorship? What does he know about education? He will pollute the whole university with politics – that is his profession. His whole life he has been in a wrong place, absolutely against the world of education, and suddenly he becomes the vice-chancellor.

And of course because vice-chancellors are chosen, elected by the professors of the universities; those professors can be pressurized. Their promotions…somebody is going to become dean, somebody is going to become the reader, somebody is going to become the professor – their own ambitions can be used.