Tag Education
To wear or not to wear the Hijab
Let me start this by saying that the school of thought within Hinduism that we follow at home, teaches us to be not disrespectful of any school of thought. This does not mean we agree with everything, though; we instead appreciate the fact that there are more-than-one ways of seeing anything. Philosophy aside, I am a man of science. Scientific thinking partially goes in line with the school of thought we follow, but digresses a little, in that scientific thinking allows every form of questioning.
The Problem With Government Jobs
Happy 2022! May this year keep us all in a much better shape than the last two; in better health—physical, emotional and financial—better relationships, better work–life balance, better everything. (Holding your breath for the Budget, anybody?) Of course, not all is rosy in the country at the moment. We are looking at elections in three states, with politicians going around being all nice, making promises, and trying hard to apply chalk to the blemishes on their images, and of course, defecting.
Mid-brain Activation
Remember those days in school when you had people come over and show you how to remember lists of words, calculate complex arithmetic in seconds, etc.? We had such people visiting our school a couple of times as well. A lot of my schoolmates had enrolled themselves for these “workshops”, in hopes of achieving better scores. None of them worked; had anything so groundbreaking happened, our school would have organised these workshops every year, and we would have aced all state- and national-level competitive exams.
Is EdTech a Scam
About half a year ago, an EdTech (Education Technology) start-up came into the limelight. The company had found its way into serious controversy, including claims that the company had misled parents and children, ripped them off of millions of rupees and were home to some questionable conversations. The subject came up tonight and I did not know how to conclude one way or another. I thought I could try to untangle it using a post.
Can we kill a virus
In the last blog post, I had made a statement about how a living organism works, specifically, propagation. I had equated that with that of the behaviour of a virus. Later I realised that it could lead to some confusion, with some thinking that a virus is a living organism. A virus is not a living organism per se. Listen to this post on your favourite podcast platform. Per se, because a virus does show similarities with living organisms such as possibly contributing to the creation of eukaryotes, or even containing genetic information.
Is the JNU protest justified
Despite hating to say it, it started with WhatsApp University. WhatsApp University is a term used for all of those streams of knowledge tidbits that you get from WhatsApp, that replace your beliefs, your thoughts, your rationale with what’s now popular belief. There is a massive engine that drives this, and this engine includes people with the ability to write posts like this on their phones. This is amplified by people who have all the time in the world to forward them to the masses.
Where democracy should begin
Education is perhaps the most powerful weapon in the world. Education, starting from our childhood, shapes our thoughts, actions, interactions, and overall, our lives. Not only are our perceptions based on the learnings of our past, but our assimilation of new learnings depends strongly on the basis created by our experiences and past learnings. The talk of education brings to us the thought of literacy. We start thinking about how our rate of literacy is improving year on year.
‘Honourable members of the jury…’ (part three)
As I already mentioned in the last post, I’d like to end this series of posts on a positive note about my experience at Bhavan’s Rajaji Vidyashram. The first thing I’d like to talk about is the two good sessions I was part of: This house would restrict the media reporting of violent crimes to reduce miscarriages of justice This house would use the funds collected by the religious institutions as insurance for ‘Acts of God’ One could say that these topics were more common, and preparation for this was not a big deal.
‘Honourable members of the jury…’ (part two)
In my previous post, I spoke about three debate sessions that could’ve been better. For reference, let me list down the three sessions: This house would revoke all support provided by the government to the religious groups in the spirit of true secularism This house believes that all laws in India should be made gender-neutral This house believes that the judicial interpretation of laws should be purely literal to prevent subjectivity of the interpreter The reason I said these could’ve been better was that there was no passion seen in these sessions, when the debate began.
‘Honourable members of the jury…’ (part one)
I remember saying this in school, when I participated in debate competitions. Boy, those days… Sweeping aside the nostalgic thought for the moment, after having indulged my mind for a second, I re-read the message that I’d received on Facebook Messenger; I wanted to make sure I was reading it right. Sure, my eyes hadn’t betrayed me. Yes, it was real that I’d been asked to be a judge for an inter-school debate competition, organised by Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Rajaji Vidyashram!