Madhaviah Krishnan - Philosophy

Philosophy

Krishnan was unhappy with the Indian system of school education. In a 1947 essay, he wrote,

...The average educated adult knows little or nothing of the teeming plant and animal life of the country, and cares less. Livestock does not interest him, and the world is to him a place which holds only human beings. He can never make friends with a hill or a dog, and if he has no one to talk to, no book to read, and no gadget to turn and unturn, he is quite lost. School education is solidly to blame for all this.

In 1967 he asked several university graduates to name two red-flowered tree or an exclusively Indian animal. Nobody passed his test and he wrote

is there something radically wrong with the education and culture of our young men and women that they should not know the answers to these reasonable questions, or is it that I have become a monomaniac and am therefore unable to perceive how unfair my questions are ?

Writing about the Indian consciousness of nature he wrote

the public (both literate and unlettered) has no interest in the great national heritage of wildlife, of which it knows little and for which it cares less.

He refused a paid invitation from Air India for a trip to London for eminent Indians. He refused on another occasion an invitation from the Smithsonian Institution. He was a fierce individualist and a recluse. Author Ramachandra Guha called him a self-reliant, Thoreauvian individualist who would not allow a mere government to pay for him. He however accepted the Padma Shri from the Indian Government in 1970.

In some of his writings he was critical and opinionated and was not well known for his diplomacy. He would refuse to let editors change his texts and that was his condition when asked to contribute a column. He fiercely argued that the usage Himalaya was correct and that a redundant 's' at its end did not respect its Sanskrit origin.