Reflections

So it’s been quite sometime since I de activated my Facebook account. Well yes, it’s not a big deal. Thousands of people each day do that and I have perhaps just joined the bandwagon of the “oh so anti-social” people. But is not having a virtual presence really that anti social? Actually, not having a Facebook presence really that anti social? Are the ones who deactivate their Facebook accounts really like those movies that the audience forgets once they stop being aired on the television very often? Is the only way one can feel “social”; by posting one liners ranging from “I just woke up” to maybe “I just died”? Why the urge to open your account every 5 hours to see how many people liked your recent photo? Why the inclination to blow sirens over your “love” for your sweetheart? Why the ‘oh so intellectual” task of growing virtual plants? Barring the last things, I have done it all and that’s precisely why I am wondering about the “Why” of it all! Are these things something we a...

A little introspection and a lot of observation led me to finding a certain behavioral pattern followed by quite a large number of females around me! It might be pure co-incidence that I seem to come across so many of them so often or as they say, “Birds of a feather flock together.” Nevertheless, I figured that these observations will make for a good piece of writing for the “behavior enthusiasts” on this planet! For those who have read “The MIC Syndrome” posted by me a few months earlier, this might seem as a sequel to it. And for those who haven’t read it, well, no harm in spending a few extra minutes reading that one! So the females that I am going to elaborate upon are those belonging to the OCD class, short for Obsessive, Confused, Dependent females class. There aren’t no physical attributes specific to any of them that allow you to spot them from a distance. Yes, but they’re all pretty and they all exude this aura that pulls you towards them and before you know it, you a...

Today, with deep admiration for myself and a few others who helped me in my discovery, I present before my readers a not-so-new genre of males: The MIC males, short for The Messed up, In Denial, Crying males! At the risk of sounding sexist and fearing unwelcomed remarks, the usual disclaimer is as follows: The category of humans being described here is just from personal experience or/and experiences of others that I happen to witness quite closely and observed acutely. Before really describing this genre, it makes sense to tell you their importance in the world. Well, to say the least, they help in bringing variety to our otherwise boring lives! If you are finally tired of staring at the ceiling of your house, it’s time for you to go out there looking for these men! Where will you find them? Now that’s a tricky one! Generally, their physical characteristics can be quite deceptive and they do not hang out in clusters like the geese. You really have to be lucky enough to be able ...

All hail to the Supreme Court’s ruling allowing disclosure of evaluated answer sheets of any public or professional examination to students under the purview of the RTI Act! Now this I say, is some real good work! A Bench of Justice AK Patnaik and RV Raveendran upheld the order of Calcutta High Court regarding disclosure of answer sheets to the students stating that answer sheets come under the purview of “information” as defined in the RTI Act! Talking from personal experience of a nerd who perhaps slogged her hours mugging for the CBSE Board Examinations and yet landing up with marks below expectations, a step such as this would be just enough to satiate my curiosity regarding “where I went wrong” or perhaps “where they (examiners) went wrong”! Additionally, if I was planning to give my answer sheets for re evaluation, I would be more sure about the need for a re evaluation after knowing what really went wrong with my answers. It is understandable why the major examination bodies ...

They say experience is the best teacher. And two experiences then are better teachers, I guess. So here are two such experiences that gave me two entirely different perspectives, yet zeroing down to perhaps just one conclusion. The Staff Selection Commission conducts examinations for graduates and post graduates for various government posts, apart from UPSC and DSSSB. Examinations for the posts that can be taken up by Visually Impaired Students have the provision of Scribes to make the examination smooth and accessible to the students. Keeping aside the whole debatable concept of “posts that can be taken up by the Visually Impaired”, here I am going to discuss two such instances when I became a Scribe for a few Visually Impaired persons appearing for the SSC Examinations. During my first attempt at writing the reading and writing the paper for a visually impaired person, I went through three hours of emotional blackmailing by the candidate trying to cajole me into filling up the answ...

Looking at the present trend of Public Private Partnership in Education, it is clear that while there is a lot of scope of such collaboration, it is not being fully harnessed. Education in India can be broadly classified into two levels: University Education and School level Education. Collaboration at each of these levels needs to be handled individually with perhaps little similarities in the collaboration structure. Presently, the most common form of Public Private Collaboration is that the government provides funds to Private Educational Institutions so that they can reduce their fees. This is a crucial step in trying to achieve the goal of Education for All as subsidized education is accessible to more students as compared to non subsidized education. This scheme works well for College Level Education, given the wide variety of students that these colleges cater to. The problem here is not that the scheme is not working properly. The scheme is working just about fine, given the ...

Introduction “Love is not the greatest glue between two people. Sex is.” The book, “The Alchemy of Desire” by Tarun J. Tejpal, starts off at this witty remark which mesmerized me so much as a reader that I could not help but share this phrase and the paragraph following these lines with my friends. Little did I know that the author had established the theme of the book right from the first line, unlike a lot of other books which ramble around the theme all the while, only closing in on it in a few portions of the book and sometimes only towards the end. The book is filled with it; desire. The book is not about its characters. Desire: that is just what the book is about. Through each character in the book, a new aspect of the theme is revealed, creating a mesh of ideas which get sorted out only at the end. Summary Something between the narrator and his wife Fizz (nickname for Fiza) snaps and the narrator no longer feels the same intensity of love for his wife as he had felt earlier....

Here is a collection of the links of some of my articles published by youthkiawaaz.com, an online forum with which I have been working as an intern for quite some time! Mentorship: Celebrating People for Who They Are! Plagiarism: Challenging the Concept Understanding the Agnostic Viewpoint Badnaam Munni, Jawaan Shiela and Poor India College Fests: The fun. The turbulence Model United Nations: LOLing Moments! Suddenly, Last Winter NREGA: Bright Future Prospects? Censorship on the Internet: Some key players and Perils The state of 5 Rivers in Turmoil P.S. Some of these, you might have already read on my Blog! :) P.P.S. Thank you YKA for an amazing experience! :D

Lights, camera, Action! Put on your formals, yes those high heels and those professional ties! They should suit you with that plastic smile and the “Oh my God, I am so concerned!” attitude that you shall wear on the scenes for the next three days! You shall walk with those files tagged with those Green slips (pink for ladies, please!) and hope against hope that you have a file boosting of more pages than all the other delegates! Oh you have a laptop? Great! Now, you will not even have to miss your favorite episodes of Modern Family while the entire world is “discussing” world peace in the “Conference”! Thirsty for some cheap publicity? What are the Communication “chits” for? Works well for you if your chits pass through the “IP Ladies”! Almost like a double treat! Kudos to all the Delegates and the Executive Board Members for the immensely fruitful discussions that they have had, in the innumerable MUNs that they have attended. Kudos to The International Press Members who have dilige...

Recently, a random plan with a friend ended up in us watching three back to back hard hitting Human Rights movies. In the subsequent 3 posts, I shall be posting my Review/ Opinions on the three movies! Suddenly, Last Winter The movie portrays the struggle of a gay couple in Italy during the time when Family Laws were being revised in Italy, in the year 2007. While I have personally never imagined homosexuality to be something abnormal or requiring medical care, most people shown in the documentary held quite contradictory views. For some, it is “a disease which needs medical attention”. For some, it is just unethical to question the order of God, who apparently created a Man and a Woman as a couple and not a Man and a Man or a Woman and a Woman. The movie talks about whether legal status be given to marriages between same sex couples. I fail to see, in the first place, why they should be illegal or for that matter, criminalized. But, maybe it is just my amateur mind which cannot und...

“So you believe in God, eh?” “Uhh…umm…Yes…No…umm…I don’t know!” But, what I do know is that I don’t know who is God. Or, what is God. Perhaps It is a belief that justifies our existence and the occurrence of every event.   Perhaps, a concept that our super-human ancestors cooked up so that they could weave innumerable stories around it about hell and heaven and morals and ethics. Perhaps He is a super-human Himself who controls each of our actions like a puppeteer would do. And, why exactly am I using “Him”? “He” could just be a “She” or perhaps just an “It”. I choose not to discriminate and shall use “It” for any further reference. So, we have never seen It. But, we had occurrences which are mysterious to us. And, so we think It is there. Where? We don’t know! To avoid any hurt to people’s sentiments that I may cause by my rhetoric statements, I shall now only present My Agnostic Viewpoint: I think and choose to believe that t is really just about Faith. Faith in something, any...

Today, I shall do what women are considered to be best at. To put it in more sophisticated words, I shall express my utter discontent towards the Indian Education System. Though I fail to see any Systematic order in constant strikes, absence of teachers/students from classrooms, exam paper leakages, mediocre infrastructure and ill-motivated classrooms, for the best interests of all I shall keep that out of the discussion. I wonder why we even call it “Education”, when all that we go through is just rigorous training to work as clerks or “Managers” under the bosses of “hefty package” Companies! Whatever happened to the formal definition of education as “a process to develop mentally, morally or aesthetically”? Though I don’t have many memories of classrooms (considering the lullaby that my teachers religiously sang for us in most of the classes), the fondest ones are those of the teachers ranting about how the syllabus needed to be finished (I say finished, not “completed”) before exam...