Random thoughts..

My blog had kind of gone in hibernating mode, and these are just some random thoughts.

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 Actually these days I have been spending lot of time writing for this one magazine called Sattva. You can take a peek at this, it is not a masala magazine, it is a NGO magazine. It is a monthly magazine and every month  we do a focus on different topics, like education, health, alternate sexuality and so on. March edition was on Human rights. 

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Yesterday I was having an argument with my friend regarding buying a house in Bangalore. I am totally against it. My argument being, "Why to pay EMI for next 25 years of life, for something that I am not going to carry along with me. I mean think about it, all those small, no sunlight entering, kind of houses in one of the massive residential apartments, (they always give me identity crisis),  and when you die you cant take it along with you anyways. It may sound selfish, because my parents spend greater part of life trying to build a house, but it was different in those times.  And getting a beautiful house in the place you belong is different from buying this lunch box kind of houses in Bangalore. Home town houses are something nice and they are something that maybe people in future will cherish. Hence I find this mad rush for securing this ever expensive houses in bangalore not very meaningful. Sometimes I just feel that we get caught in all this web of buying a house, buying a car and before we know life has already gone by."

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My cousin in hyderabad is in ninth now, so this year that school finish their ninth class syllabus in feb and have started giving them rigorous tenth class education. I really find it so absurd that such big schools would think in this way, and put so much pressure on this poor kids as if tenth class is one massive exam and their entire life depends on this one thing. I think they did not see Taare Zameen Par, or even if they saw it, they just wept during the movie and came back and forgot all about it. Wonder if movies make any difference?

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The other day I was talking to one of the Maths teacher, in Ananya. Ananya is the school for underprivileged kids, and the school gives them basic education to prepare them for Open Schooling tenth class Exam. And he was explaining me that most of children there struggle with Maths, not with basic maths, but things like trigonometry and algebra. Not being from any regular school they find it very difficult to grasp these subjects. This could also be because they dont find much relevance of this in their daily lives. And then we were arguing if kids really needed to understand all these, and then if you think about it you hardly use it in day to day life. Further most of this kids dont plan to become engineer or doctors, they just want to get some basic education (like Home Science) and get some decent job and support their families. 

Also read this beautiful article called "A mathematician's Lament" related to above.  Swarna forwarded this to me and I absolutely loved it.