Wednesday, July 30, 2008

the WEST is shit scared of INDIA and CHINA


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.u want cheap and good quality
OUTSOURCE to INDIA and CHINA
NOKIA has

There is no morality in Business and WAR
USA is concerned
they are loosing jobs to INDIA and CHINA
so they raise the bogey of HUMAN RIGHTS Violations

more

INDIA does not have a strong Regulatory Body like the USFDA
so the Drug MNCs are outsouring CLINICAL TRIALS to INDIA

more

Monday, July 28, 2008

History of Nations




History of Nations. This is a site which has a history of every nation on Earth. At least, every nation which is currently independent. (There is nothing on Welsh history for example.) This is an informative and easy to use site which I am sure I will be visitng from time to time. From the site: Welcome to History of Nations! This site has a history of every nation in the world. Each country if covered by a brief essay which gives the highlights of each nation's history.

The national histories at this site are divided into six regions.

These are: Africa - This is for the nations of the world which are located in Africa. This includes some of the island nations which lie off of the coast of Africa. It also includes Egypt which also has territory in Asia.

Asia - This is for the nations of the world which are located in Asia. It includes Taiwan evn though Tawain is technically not independent of China.

Europe - This is for the nations of the world located in Europe. It includes Russia which is mostly in Asia but is considered a European nation. It also includes Turkey which is also mostly located in Asia.

North America - This is for the nations of the world located in North America. This includes most of Central America and the island nations of the Caribbean.

Oceania - This is for the nations of the world located in the Pacific which are not considered part of Asia. This includes Australia and New Zealand.

South America - This is for the nations of the world located in South America.
Posted by M at 4:19 AM

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ABOUT AUSTRALIA by VEST

Sunday, July 27, 2008

1000 posts done


I have completed 1000 posts

it is time for introspection

whn i started blogging

(after being coached by Keshi)

I was scretive about my identity

but now I dont give a damn

I even did a shocking HNT

I had bitter enemies who turned into best friends

I had lovers plenty who turned into Saby-haters

i will not live forever

my life is now an open book

I received many threats from annony mouse callers

my password was hacked and I lost many blogs

I have been cloned

I have been cussd

All in all, it has been funn

- Saby/ Jim/ Julia/ Rani

on Death



Today, a doctor reflects on death and the machinery of sustaining life. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.


Sherwin Nuland's book, How We Die, sat on my desk for a year. Now I've finally read it and it was a jolt. Nuland takes on the most forbidden topic of all. Society lets us talk about politics and sex as long as we're careful. But talk of death remains taboo.


Nuland is a surgeon and medical historian. His book deals with a primary dilemma. To be a doctor is to fight death. Yet death always wins in the end. Doctors, armed with spectacular new technologies, engage in a combat they cannot ultimately win. It is a situation that becomes more paradoxical all the time.


Nuland begins by explaining death itself. And it isn't pretty. Death is invariably caused by a lack of oxygen brought on by a hundred different scenarios of system failure. It is seldom a matter of passing gently over the Great Divide. In a harrowing sequence of chapters he explains how our bodies fail in heart disease, cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer's disease, and more.


For those of us old enough to know our time's limited, Nuland's book is frightening at first. But it grows reassuring as he demystifies death. He takes it out of that place where things go bump in the night. He puts it where it can be seen and understood.


He also deals with another seldom-discussed aspect of death. It is that the old usually reach a point where they accept it.

Nuland quotes Jefferson who, at 71, wrote to John Adams, then 78.
Our machines have been running seventy or eighty years and we must expect ... here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring will be giving way; ...

There is a ripeness of time for death ... when it is reasonable we should drop off and make room for another growth.


But Nuland's main concern is with doctors and their machines, their compulsion to win the unwinable fight with death, their frequent inability to talk candidly with patients. He tells of the reflex need to fight for a patient's life long after there's any profit in it for the patient. He tells how he cheated his own brother of the chance to deal with his death by cancer. He offered empty hope instead of joining him in grieving the inevitable end.


In the poignant apogee of this remarkable book, Nuland quotes the hopeless words doctors tell each other when they fail to level with a patient: "I could not take away his hope." Then he adds,
Unless [we're] aware [we're] dying and ... know the conditions of our death, we [can't] share any sort of final consummation with those who love us. Without this consummation, no matter their presence at the hour of passing, we will remain unattended and isolated.


Others have certainly raised questions about the technologies of preserving life. But Nuland, coming from the very center of those technologies, tells us what every technologist in every field should understand. It is that we cannot let the objective purpose of our machines become ends in themselves. The true purpose of any machine can only be shaped by the people it is meant to serve.


I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way inventive minds work.

Nuland, S., How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.



more


Chapter 1 Summary
In Chapter 1, "A Strangled Heart," Dr. Nuland relates his personal experience of an individual he chooses to call James McCarty. As noted in the Author's Note before Chapter 1, all but one name was changed in the stories the author will share. Dr. Nuland was in his third year of medical school and working an evening shift at a university hospital. Mr. McCarty had been admitted to the hospital after he experienced pressure in his chest and left side. James McCarty was the picture of an overweight workaholic who gave every indication of enjoying the good life in excess. He was admitted after experiencing severe pains and pressure in his chest and left side. His condition was evaluated as "recovering" and he was moved to a room for observation. Medical student Nuland.....


Read the rest of this Literature Guide with our How We Die, Reflections on Life's Final Chapter Access Pass.

more chapters here

Saturday, July 26, 2008

Rise India - We shall not, we shall not be moved




The Congress Govt survived the NO TRUST VOTE amidst charges of bribe giving and bribe talking, the SENSEX soared



Next day, Bangalore (the IT capital) was bombed - low intensity fire crackers

Then Ahmedadbad - higher intensity

Earlier it was Jaipur (the tourist capital) - cycle bombs

but of all these Mumbai had faced the worst





India and Indians believe in destiny

Life goes on as usual

NO FEAR, NO PANIC



We will get there

no matter what they try



We are one

hindus and Muslims and Christians and Sikhs

Watch CHAKE DE India at 12 PM today on TV

Friday, July 25, 2008

what is Love?


Paul tells it like it is
go here
if u want to find Paul fast
go to google search type original faith
and hit I AM FEELING LUCKY
I sure hope only the girls will go for looking for him
Paul is not that way inclined

Thursday, July 24, 2008











Now America will elect their President on November 4, 2008
u have a choice:


Gen Mc Cain, who wants a fight to the finish in IRAQ

he dont count the body bags

and u have Barrack Obama

who wants a political settlement


the Glory (?) of WAR

The United States presidential election of 2008, scheduled for Tuesday, November 4, 2008, will be the 56th consecutive quadrennial United States presidential election and will select the President of the United States and Vice President of the United States. The two major parties' candidates have not been officially chosen, but their presumptive nominees are John McCain, the senior United States Senator from Arizona, for the Republican Party and Barack Obama, the junior United States Senator from Illinois, for the Democratic Party. The 2008 election is particularly notable because it is the first time in US history that two sitting senators will run against each other for president[1] and because it will be the first time an African American will be a major party presidential nominee.

more

women bloggers amaze me ....


they have a topic every day to blog about
they talk more lissen less
most topics are I did this I did that
I met X

I went to a party

men bloggers talk about ideas and are more interesting
what if all men were Gays?

what if VEST becomes Prime Minister of Australia?
and I of India

more

Monday, July 21, 2008

Original Faith



Book Note: Original Faith Available . . .
Original Faith: Finding the Interfaith Soul of Progressive Religion and Spirituality has just become available on
Amazon and Target. (For libraries, it’s also in the WorldCat catalog.)

The number of inquiries about the book has gone up lately, so although the press release hasn’t gone out yet and parts of the information on the book’s Amazon page are still being developed, I wanted to let you know.We’re hoping to get an international sales channel that would allow people outside the US to order online without having to pay so much postage, but not sure yet if that can happen.

I truly appreciate your readership here – the level of thoughtfulness that people have brought to these threads has been wonderful.The book covers the whole range of spiritual life and growth as broadly and deeply as I’ve been able to experience and understand it. It was written over a period of twenty-five years, starting from when I was leading a full life, through years of disease progression, and into severe disability – “in sickness and in heath,” as they say. (I guess I was sort of married to it…)

Here are the contents. I believe that the book is likely to have something to offer you wherever you happen to be in your own experience and understanding of what our being here is all about:

Contents

Chapter 1: What Love Is

Chapter 2: Despair Under Heaven

Chapter 3: The Fact of Faith

Chapter 4: Stumbling Block: Ego

Chapter 5: Willingness and Practice

Chapter 6: The Nature of Work

Chapter 7: Nature’s Work of Transformation

Chapter 8: Working from World-Center

Chapter 9: Owning the Greater Claim

Afterword: Owning the Darkness

Love –Paul
Posted by Paul at 10:53 AM Permalink 29 comments


Sunday, July 20, 2008

Saturday, July 19, 2008

A prostitute may not be a prostitute: Pretty woman

Richard Gere was lost
Richard Gere picked up a hooker by mistake to show him the way
Julia was interesting
Richard got interested

He took her home
treated her well
He wanted her as a companion
Richard moved in rich circles
He got his man to teach her the fine arts
How to use cutlery, how to dress, and superficial stuf like that
knowing that is superficial and dont really matter


Soon Julia was transformed into a lady, almost
One day at an event at the race course, he had to tell his business partner that she is just a hooker
His business partner was an asshole
He treated her like a hooker

Julia cried, she wanted out
packed her bags and was about to leave

Richard walked in
where u going? he asked

She told her what he had done
Richard asked her to stay, she was adamant
Richard emptied the wad of bills in his wallet (a huge sum) and gave it to her
and said Bye

She left
without the money

Prostitute definition: one who can be bought by money

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Corrective Action

u see a starving man on the street

what do u do?

Suggested Actions:

1. take him to Mother Theresas home

Fine, but thats not enuff

2. Do a Root Cause Analysis now

Why is he starving?

Ans: No food, no money

Why is he so poor?

Ans: No job, no income

Why no job, no income?

Ans: No education, no vocational kills

CORRECTIVE ACTION

Kill the Root Cause - Teach him to fish

send him to a good FREE school

send him to Christian schools, started by foreign Jesuits

in Mumbai:

St Xaviers

Fr Agnel

Cardign

Don Boscos

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

He will be 82 today


He had a ruff childhood
studied in boarding schools
took the cane many times

joined the Royal Navy
before he cud pee straight

he was handsome though
got seduced by two elderly ladies
he cant recall who had him first

sailed many ships
destroyers and frigates

rose in the ranks
retired as an Admiral i think

got knighted by the Queen
wrote a book on his life

told all
the joys,the sorrows, the ecstasies

lived life to the full
and then married a Rose, named Mary

and stayed married 55 years and still counting
He is weird


Happy Birthday Vest
wish him here

Friday, July 11, 2008

What’s a hippie?

… maybe it’s the time of year. Yes, and maybe it’s the time of man. And I don’t know who I am. But life is for learning.

- Joni Mitchell/CS&N (Woodstock) 1970


What’s a hippie? What’s the difference between an old hippie and a new hippie? Once a hippie, always a hippie? These and similar questions are the source of much debate today. New subcategories like web-hippies, cyber-hippies, even zippies have become fashionable. But what is a hippie and are you one? To answer this question, let’s see what defines a hippie. Some say it’s the way people dress, and behave, a lifestyle. Others classify drug users and rock 'n' roll fans or those with certain radical political views as hippies. The dictionary defines a hippie as one who doesn’t conform to society’s standards and advocates a liberal attitude and lifestyle. Can all these definitions be right?


It seems to me that these definitions miss the point. By focusing on the most visible behavioral traits these limited descriptions fail to reveal what lies in the hippie heart that motivates such behavior. To understand The Way of the Hippy, we must look at those circumstances that preceded the birth of the hippy movement, the important events that changed our lives, our resulting frustration with society, and the philosophy that developed from our spiritual maturation.


Hippy is an establishment label for a profound, invisible, underground, evolutionary process. For every visible hippy, barefoot, beflowered, beaded, there are a thousand invisible members of the turned-on underground. Persons whose lives are tuned in to their inner vision, who are dropping out of the TV comedy of American Life.

- Timothy Leary (The Politics of Ecstasy) 1967


My view is that being a hippie is a matter of accepting a universal belief system that transcends the social, political, and moral norms of any established structure, be it a class, church, or government. Each of these powerful institutions has it’s own agenda for controlling, even enslaving people. Each has to defend itself when threatened by real or imagined enemies. So we see though history a parade of endless conflicts with country vs. country, religion vs. religion, class vs. class. After millennia of war and strife, in which uncounted millions have suffered, we have yet to rise above our petty differences.


The way of the hippie is antithetical to all repressive hierarchical power structures since these are adverse to the hippie goals of peace, love and freedom. This is why the “Establishment” feared and suppressed the hippie movement of the ’60s, as it was a revolution against the established order. It is also the reason why the hippies were unable to unite and overthrow the system since they refused to build their own power base. Hippies don’t impose their beliefs on others. Instead, hippies seek to change the world through reason and by living what they believe.


Imagine no possesions, I wonder if you can, No need for greed or hunger, A brotherhood of man. Imagine all the people sharing all the world.

- John Lennon (Imagine)


To be a hippie you must believe in peace as the way to resolve differences among peoples, ideologies and religions. The way to peace is through love and tolerance. Loving means accepting others as they are, giving them freedom to express themselves and not judging them based on appearances. This is the core of the hippie philosophy.


…see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn’t really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, …all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ‘em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.

- Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums) 1958


The hippy movement erected signposts for all to see. Some warn us of impending danger, others direct us towards richer, more fulfilling lives, but most show us the road to freedom. Freedom is the paramount virtue in this system. Freedom to do as one pleases, go where the flow takes you, and to be open to new experiences. This engenders an attitude that allows for maximum personal growth.


If you want to be free, be free, because there’s a million things to be.

- Cat Stevens (If You Want to Sing Out)


Our society only permits you one or two weeks a year of freedom to pursue your own agenda. The rest of the time we are slaves to the system. Hippies reject the 9 to 5 lifestyle and therefore are objects of ridicule by those whose lives run by the clock. Programmed people are jealous and resent the freedom we possess. The unmitigated freedom that hippies represent is the greatest threat to any system in which control equals power.


I like ideas about the breaking away or overthrowing of established order. I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that seems to have no meaning. It seems to me to be the road towards freedom - external freedom is a way to bring about internal freedom.

- Jim Morrison


With all this freedom comes a lot of responsibility. The system does not make it easy for us to survive without sacrificing our values. Therefore we must discover alternative ways to make a living without being a drag on our planet’s resources and our fellow humans. Hippies have pioneered numerous lifestyles and alternative businesses including communes, cooperatives, holistic medicine and health food. We focused everyone’s concern on the environment to highlight our responsibilities to our planet and to future generations.


I’ve been smiling lately, dreaming about the world as one. And I believe it could be, someday it’s going to come.

- Cat Stevens (Peace Train)


Other beliefs that spring from our core philosophy are: an earthy spirituality such as a belief in Gaia (the earth as an organism), the Greens movement (political activism), even shamanism and vegetarianism. These philosophical and political views reflect a respect for nature and the planet as a whole, something lacking in our capitalistic and materialistic societies. The world needs hippies to point out alternatives to the entrenched system and warn of the impending disasters that await us if we don’t change our lifestyles. The goal is not to make everyone a hippie (what would we have to protest?). Rather we can try to influence others by example, through tolerance and love and teaching the virtues of the hippie way.


You create your own reality.

- Seth (Seth Speaks)
So being a hippie is not a matter of dress, behavior, economic status, or social milieu. It is a philosophical approach to life that emphasizes freedom, peace, love and a respect for others and the earth.

The way of the hippie never died. There have always been hippies from the first time society laid down rules, to Jesus, to Henry David Thoreau, to John Lennon, to you and me. I believe there’s a little hippy in all of us. It’s just been repressed by our socialization process. We need to find it and cultivate our hippie within. Only then can we reach our true potential.


I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost (The Road Not Taken)


As hippies age they come to terms with the same situations all humans must face. Wiser than before, let’s help the younger hippies find a way to save the earth and achieve more freedom than exists in our wildest dreams. Let’s find our common ground, build a worldwide community, and once again let our freak flags fly and become all we are destined to be.
Peace and Love,

Skip
Return to Hippyland homepage

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Thursday, July 10, 2008

Hottest female blogger




click on the title



Wednesday, July 09, 2008

Original Faith





: A Few Book-Related Items
This low-traffic holiday week is great for doing chores associated with a book launch – and it’s been a lot of fun having some of you run into Original Faith becoming available here on the site.Some of you have asked if I’d sign your copy. Wish I could. Main obstacle is that I can’t mail things myself, so it would be added work for someone already out straight with doing things for me.Some have asked if I’ll keep blogging – definitely.I’ll be very interested in reactions to the book and welcome your feedback, either via this blog or email. I can’t answer all email but will certainly read it all and will answer as much as I can.If you like the book, please recommend it to someone and pass on my URL. This would be especially useful in helping Original Faith find a readership in my circumstances.Next up: Starting to think about love…
Posted by Paul at 8:00 PM Permalink 11 comments
Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Book Note: Original Faith Available . . .
Original Faith: Finding the Interfaith Soul of Progressive Religion and Spirituality has just become available on Amazon and Target. (For libraries, it’s also in the WorldCat catalog.)The number of inquiries about the book has gone up lately, so although the press release hasn’t gone out yet and parts of the information on the book’s Amazon page are still being developed, I wanted to let you know.We’re hoping to get an international sales channel that would allow people outside the US to order online without having to pay so much postage, but not sure yet if that can happen.I truly appreciate your readership here – the level of thoughtfulness that people have brought to these threads has been wonderful.The book covers the whole range of spiritual life and growth as broadly and deeply as I’ve been able to experience and understand it. It was written over a period of twenty-five years, starting from when I was leading a full life, through years of disease progression, and into severe disability – “in sickness and in heath,” as they say. (I guess I was sort of married to it…)Here are the contents. I believe that the book is likely to have something to offer you wherever you happen to be in your own experience and understanding of what our being here is all about:ContentsChapter 1: What Love IsChapter 2: Despair Under HeavenChapter 3: The Fact of FaithChapter 4: Stumbling Block: EgoChapter 5: Willingness and PracticeChapter 6: The Nature of WorkChapter 7: Nature’s Work of TransformationChapter 8: Working from World-CenterChapter 9: Owning the Greater ClaimAfterword: Owning the DarknessLove –Paul
Posted by Paul at 10:53 AM Permalink 25 comments
Saturday, June 28, 2008

About Paul


Saturday, July 05, 2008

Teach India



Education is India’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness. There are millions of children in fields, on the road, in factories—everywhere but in school.

You have it in your power to change that. All they need is a little bit of your time

Jaideep Bose Narendra Jadhav’s father, a Class IV worker with the Bombay Port Trust, was semi-literate, his mother not even that. Jadhav grew up in a Mumbai slum, his formal education started at an unremarkable municipal school and culminated in a PhD in economics from a US university.



He rose to become chief economist and principal adviser at the Reserve Bank of India, and is now vice chancellor of Pune University—the same city where his dalit ancestors were forced to leave before sundown and sweep their own polluting shadow with a broom



Nirjharini Bhattacharjee swept the corridors of her school and cleaned the cups to pay her fees and feed her family. She was an exceptionally bright child and her teachers encouraged her to keep at her studies. She grew up to join Rishi Bankim College in Naihati, West Bengal, did her Master's, and cleared the National Eligibility Test (NET), qualifying as a lecturer. Today, she is principal of her college, and thinks nothing of picking up a broom or wiping the blackboard clean
E Balaguruswamy was born to a small farmer in a hard-up Tamil Nadu village. Their home had no electricity but it did have a precious supply of candles, which the young boy used up to study late into the night. He became vice-chancellor of Anna University, is currently a member of the Union Public Service Commission and the author of several best-selling books on software languages
Vilind Shah’s lot was similar to Balaguruswamy’s, only far worse. Born into an impoverished farming family in Amreli, Gujarat, he went blind at three, was sent to a special school and would probably have lost his way but for the kindness of a gentleman who noticed the boy’s potential and paid for him to go to college in Mumbai. Shah is now a professor of history at the University of Chicago
Vinayak Lohani went to IIM-Calcutta. When he graduated, he did not compete at placement interviews with blue-chip companies. Instead, he went out and opened a school for street children in Joka, where IIM-C has its campus, on the outskirts of Kolkata
Over the next few months, we will bring you stories that will inspire you, warm your heart, move you to tears—and, we hope, to action. They will be stories of hope defeating despair. Of children who struggled through years of grinding poverty to put themselves through school and college and who are today leading scientists, professors, engineers, doctors, bureaucrats and CEOs. Of adults who have given up mouth-watering salaries to dedicate themselves to teaching the untaught so that they may have a fighting chance.
Education is modern India's greatest leveler and its redemption. It is the tide that lifts every boat. We are all prisoners of birth, but education has the power to snap the meanest bonds of economic and social enslavement. It is the route out of the caste ghetto, the path out of the slum, the road to the high table. A degree in engineering or medicine gives the child of a mill hand as much opportunity as any son or daughter of privilege.
At home and at work, chances are that your domestic help, driver, dhobi, liftman, watchman and peon are doing whatever it takes to send their children to an ‘English-medium’ school, buy them a second-hand computer, pay for their tuition, get them trained in IT. They dream of empowering their child with the kind of ambition they never dared have. And when the child excels in a board exam, gets into a big college or lands a good job, all those years of hardship and uncertainty melt away. In that defining moment there is a reinforcement of faith in the future—that it is possible to break the cycle of inequity by honourable means.
It is a well-worn cliche that ours is a country of glaring contradictions. Yes, we have one of the biggest education systems in the world—1.2 million schools, 6.3 million teachers and 290 million students, which in itself is more than the population of every country in the world except China, India and the US. And yes, literacy has grown from 28% in 1961 to 68% today. But the other end of the scale is crumbling. We still have over 287 million illiterate people (from the age of five)—the largest in any country, and larger than the population of Indians (five and above) at the time of Independence.
If India is today considered an emerging superpower and if the stereotype has shifted from snakecharmer to IT whiz, some of the credit must go to our education system, to our IITs and IIMs, and to grassroots initiatives like the midday meal scheme and the Navodaya Vidyalayas. This system has produced one of the world’s largest pools of science and tech graduates and created a robust middle class. And with well-educated Indians in influential positions in the developed world, notably the US, India has a voice that commands respect and attention on the global stage.
And yet, the many successes cannot hide the system’s sprawling underbelly. Millions of underprivileged youth have no access whatsoever to any form of schooling: of the 460 million between 6 and 24 years, 170 million are not in the education system
The drop-out rate is depressing: a staggering 90% don’t make it to college.
There are thousands of schools and colleges, both state-run and private, that provide no real education, and we don’t need empirical proof to bear this out. There is enough and more anecdotal evidence
There’s a massive deficit of teachers. And of the 4.7 million-odd who teach between classes I and VIII, almost half have not studied beyond senior secondary
Infrastructure is dismal: almost a third of primary and middle schools don’t have pucca buildings, 87% have no computers Ironically, our greatest source of strength is threatening to become our biggest weakness. Our education system is choking. Strategically, we are in danger of losing our global competitive advantage. Entrepreneurs have found that education is a great new business, and there’s nothing wrong with that so long as there is a genuine intent to provide quality education. But private education comes at a price, and the question is, can it reach children in slums and villages? If it can, can they afford it? The answer quite simply is no. As aspirations rise and disparities widen, and as the need for equity assumes even greater urgency, there is only one solution: to redeem the classroom.
For all of us at The Times of India, education is a near-obsessive priority. In many of our editions, we have more correspondents covering education than any other beat. We believe the time has now come for us to do more than just write about it. We think we can play a role in helping to bring education to the boy who in the pouring rain hawks pirated books at the street lights, the girl who runs after you with a bunch of roses she needs to sell before the day is out.
It is with a deep sense of mission that we are launching Teach India. There are thousands of good men and women who are doing exemplary work by teaching children who cannot afford a ‘good school’, children who survive on the brutal fringes of society, for whom living is a daily struggle and learning a luxury. We cannot even hope to equal their efforts.
What we hope to do, instead, is bring together those who want to make a difference and those already making a difference in education. So many of us genuinely want to give back to society and do something for the less fortunate. Many of us are doing things in our own limited, unorganised way by writing a cheque to an orphanage or paying the school fees of the house help’s child. But what if you want to go beyond the cheque book and give of your time as well? Are you faced with the dilemma of where to begin?
Teach India could be the answer. It taps into a powerful combination of urge and need. It seeks to put those of you who have the urge to lend a helping hand in touch with NGOs who work with underprivileged children and are in need of volunteers. It’s for you to decide what you would like to teach, and how much of your time you want to commit. And it is for the NGOs to decide the skills they require most.
Every survey has shown that an overwhelming majority of our readers belongs to the elite – technically termed SEC A, the highest socio-economic class. They have money; more importantly, they have had an education. What could be more satisfying than being able to share your knowledge and experience with children who may be wise beyond their years, but have never been taught how to write their name, or told why there is day and night, or why an apple falls to the ground instead of soaring to the sky? Do you think you can spare two hours a week — or even two hours a fortnight — to teach, to make a difference? You could be a college student, a bureaucrat, a doctor, a lawyer, an actor, an architect, a police officer, a pilot, a housewife, a retired professor. It doesn’t matter, as long as you take your commitment seriously. What’s more, we suspect it’ll be great fun—and you might end up learning a thing or two.
In the second phase of Teach India, which will unfold in a few months’ time, we will support a newly formed non-profit organisation, Teach For India, with board members such as Rajat Gupta, Anu Agha and Shaheen Mistry of Akanksha, to enlist some of the country’s brightest graduates who are willing to give two years of their lives to teaching underprivileged children. A similar program in the US called Teach For America (TFA) has been an astounding success. Today, students graduating from the most prestigious colleges vie to be accepted in this program, and TFA alumni have gone on to become influential voices in education policy in corporate America and in US administrations.
When we launched India Poised on the first day of the last year, we found that in vast swathes of our society, public governance—most worryingly, in education and health—was on the verge of collapse. Our Lead India campaign, which we rolled out on the sixtieth anniversary of our Independence, was born out of our belief that the country was in dire need of a clean and effective leadership. Lead India, we believe, struck a chord. (We are committed to the initiative and hope to carry the lessons of the first year into our next Lead India campaign.) In the course of our India Poised and Lead India campaigns, we have felt a growing need to focus on education, especially at the primary level, and among the underprivileged. Education has been a life-altering force for millions of Indians, and it will be our endeavour to bring the joys of learning to many more, and perhaps in the process, help level the playing field. The boy at the street lights could be a future vice chancellor, the girl with the roses could blossom into a principal. Think of how much joy it would give you to know that you played a part in making that happen. For all of us at The Times of India, an initiative such as this—which we hope will grow into a movement—gives us a meaning beyond ourselves, a greater purpose in life. We believe it’ll do the same for you.


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