Degradation of education system
Monday, July 31, 2006
Today on ndtv.com, I read the news about selling of school seats by a famous private school of Delhi.
A middleman along with the school principal sold a seat for class 11th science stream to a student (this girl was with NDTV staff) for 2.5 lakh rupees even though admissions had closed two weeks back. The student was admitted even when she performed dismally in her interviews with the teachers. “So the whole thing is that ki bhaiya sabse bada rupiya”. Read the full article
So now, schools also join the who-is-more-corrupt-of-all race, as if colleges were not giving them tough competition in this area.
Two weeks back when I was at home I heard a news on TV that new books for Hindi syllabus of class 6th, 8th and 9th by NCERT are having literature containing raunchy language. It also contained stories by a person “Avatar Singh Sindhu” (he is a secular poet). His stories contain references to certain SC/ST communities. He explicitly uses words denoting these communities whereas Supreme Court has banned the use of such words. More surprising was how the union minister Arjun Singh responded when asked about this in a press conference. He directly pointed the question to Director of NCERT who replied, “There is no censure board in our education system hence, this type of literature is printed”. Many have an opinion that there is a political angle in it.
This is the second time NCERT is in bad limelight (earlier for printing wrong facts in history books), but this is a more serious matter when class 6th students will read literature till now limited to only pocket Hindi novels.
At home, I was reading a book by famous Hindi satirist Sharad Joshi “Yatra Tatra Sarvatra”, it is such a nice book, so comically written and perfectly highlighting the social evils of the society, I was wondering why aren’t such books introduced in CBSE and ISC syllabuses. We have such a rich collection of Hindi literature, why aren’t novels by Premchand introduced in the syllabus, later a came to know ISC board has already introduced a novel by Premchand in senior secondary classes, and I really appreciate this move of ISC board.
After this quota issue, this is where India is heading, lets see where all this ends up.
Before closing, let me quote what UNESCO recommends about the education system of a country
“Education system of a country must be such that it reflects the social and heritage culture of country”.
So sit back and see how the education system evolves in India.
(I am not a regular listener of news, I have written what I recall from my memory, and some facts may not be up to date, sorry about that)
Posted by :ubuntu at 1:41:00 AM 1 comments
Lovely poem by Robert Frost
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Hi guys,
I just came across a poem by Robert Frost. It is so meaningful.
Have a look at it.
The Road Not Taken
TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost (1874–1963)
Posted by :ubuntu at 7:28:00 AM 1 comments
Khaali baithein kya kare, karna hai kuch kaam
Friday, July 7, 2006
Happy B’day to me !!!!
This is my first ever blog, I'm sitting almost idle since past three months and sitting completely idle since past two weeks (no, I’m not on bench), so I thought better to write a blog during this time (inspired by Abhishek). This involves a time frame from post march till date.
Let me first tell you few trivia- my blog URL 21bakerstreet is, as most of you would have guessed, address of Sherlock Holmes, during this period I read few e-stories of Holmes and I’m totally mesmerized by his deducing powers ( ok, credit goes to ACD). So I’m acknowledging the fact by making a URL like this.
Secondly my display name ubuntu, is an African word meaning “humanity to all” or “I am what I am because of who we all are”. It is a good thing to respect the society and be grateful to humanity, as JRD Tata said to Sudha Murthy when she was an employee under him “always pay back something to the society, you owe it something’s”, ubuntu is also a popular open source Linux OS (I’m a great fan of both, open source and Linux), hence the name.
Third thing, the word paronomasia in my blog title, while creating this blog I was searching for funky words, so I went to Webster’s and looked in word of the day section (July 6, 2006) and found this word meaning: a play on words, pun and found it apt to be used here (so I was lucky not to search a lot).
So what was this post all about, I forgot, oh yes it’s all about staying focused and getting distracted by other not-so-important things (got the joke).
It was march last week when we got the official news that are current project has got on hold and we all have come on bench, it was a sad news for us, as this was a very good project. Now we use to sit idle whole day, thanks to the account policies, internet use to work whole day and without any restriction, first week was exciting, I installed what not on the comp., played every game on miniclips.com, it was fun.
Another week passed like this, I saw almost every video under Google Video’s favorite category, and these are my best three:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=515642196227308929
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6176491654107670145
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=36099539665548298
I was quite happy with my life and then I started losing focus (ISLF). Now what to do, we got a mail from my PM, do some internal courses to hone your skills (we never thought of it before), so I registered myself in five six courses but I wasn’t able to clear one of them (it was a certification course), you know why , because ISLF, the exam was a bit late and didn’t feel like studying a lot for it , I took it lightly and I was googled by very first question of the test, I’m trying it this quarter also, lets hope for the best. By the way how boring is banking and finance domain, had to read a lot of domain related docs and it was painful.
I also read a wonderful article on toddler’s memory in SCIAM magazine which I thought of publishing a synopsis of, but Isfl.
In the meanwhile, I got hold of many e-books on the net and started building up a mini library of our own).
After this episode I thought of giving CAT this year as I was on bench, I surfed the net for the material, tips to prepare, read blogs and even bought a CAT stuff from a friend and asked a friend to deliver a book from Delhi, I started with math section, so far so good, but soon ISLF.
Then I was shifted to another project, I was glad for now was the time to show my PM what I learnt in past few weeks, but the day after I was allotted a project, I got a call that I’m being permanently transferred to Chennai along with several of my ex-project mates, it was a heart breaking news, my whole paradigm changed, I quickly recovered from the shock and talked to senior management about letting me show my worth here in Bangalore. Luckily transfer was stopped (amazingly none got transferred), so now I was here in a new project, first week was a matter of adaptability, here we were segregated from our main company network and no mailing and chatting sites not allowed, not even gaming sites. It was some what like a cultural shock; anyway, I recovered and was taken through three weeks of KT. Now I’m here and there is not much to do, I passed time by calculating the value of pi to 5000 decimal places using BBP formula and then generating a random series out of that, and comparing the goodness of series with a random series generated by a java PRNG, well I couldn’t conclude the results, but what I found was that in the value of pi, frequency distribution of digits is almost same (if this is helpful). But I soon gained focus, first time in this post, realized that CAT is too near to give (it was June) and instead decided to give SCJP, luckily I got e-books on the network.
Well till now, I haven’t slf and let’s hope all goes well.
So this may look like an essay to you but please bear with me, I’ll improve with time.
“Abhi abhi hua yakeen, ki aag hai muhjme kahin …”
Posted by :ubuntu at 2:00:00 AM 3 comments
