MyTake

We grew in an environment which was surrounded by people who kept preaching us all through that ‘work is worship’ and somewhere in our inner self it got imbibed that we live to work and there is no escape from work.  The meaning of work changed according to time, for a child it was to go to school, learn and study and perform best in the examinations.  After studies it was to get a job and work as per the nature and requirements.  So the school and the workplaces were believed to be temples.  Temples where we worshiped our work, temples where we were allowed to meditate, temples where we were groomed and mentored by experienced and learned people, temples which helped us build ourselves, temples where we could find our call, temples where we learnt and discovered the purpose of our life.  These were places where we met different types of people and we learnt to deal with them to their and our satisfaction.  We debated, argued and quarreled on some petty i...

The other day we were discussing among ourselves the motivation of students to study.  And some of the views of friends were really surprising. One of them said,  'these students are not really students, they are individuals, the class is a group of individuals, not really group of students'.  I thought let me think in my mind what ideally a student is. A student has a drive to learn new things, a student has urge to know more, a student has desire to excel, a student want to compete with others, a student raises questions, a student prepares and participates, a student engages him/herself in studies, etc etc. And then it struck to my mind, if a student is not doing either of this activity, one can not really call a student a student.   This is what gave me questions to raise and solutions to find for the problem that we, the teachers, are facing. Our experiences may not be generalised to all students at all geographies and I also wish that it is proved wro...

Tomorrow India shall be playing world cup finals against Sri Lanka at Wankhede Statium, Mumbai. The match shall start at 2:30 pm. Before this finals India played semi-final against Pakistan on 30th March 2011 at Mohali. More than the finals this match was important and as any other cricket fan I watched the whole match on TV.  As I have been watching other matches I have been thinking of writing down my personal reflection on the world cup, which is much more than the sport, a great business opportunity, a great advertising venture, a profitable enterprise, full media masala, and a political platform for many. While we watched the semi-final there were many things and thoughts which kept my senses vibrant all through.  First when it was decided after the quarter finals (India Vs Australia, India won) that India shall be playing against Pakistan, the national media nerve took all counts and got busy in capitalising almost all opportunities.  The Prime Minister of India, Ma...