RESEARCH

While our educationists’ endeavour to increase the content of reasoning in school curricula is welcome, an examination hall is the last place students would like to be taken by surprise. CBSE must wait for a year to let students develop Higher Order Thinking Skills before testing them A ll those who had been lamenting for decades that academic education in the country is all about devouring bookish matter and regurgitating it in the examination hall must welcome the new format for AISSE and AISSCE question papers, especially those of physics, chemistry and biology. But a basic doubt remains: Shouldn't such a scheme have been announced last year in April so that the students could practise analytical questions the whole year and, if announced now, shouldn't it be implemented not before the session 2008-09? It's good that 'reason' has finally prevailed, though only up to 20 per cent! Well, that's the weightage for questions of reasoning. What can be philosophicall...

Are book fairs serving their purpose? W e are told that books are important, and they indeed are. However, what comes across from the sight of authors and poets -- some singers and actors too, if you consider the Kolkata Book Fair -- chatting in circles inside and outside the stalls, taking themselves for Socrates, is the fact that intellectuals are perhaps more important. Indians who have lived in the eastern parts of the country will recall that once upon a time parents used to exhort their children to read The Statesman to improve their English, if nothing else. Trying to please the parents thus was quite tasking for the li'l ones though. If allowed to celebrate the naïveté of this nincompoop a little, I'd recollect how painful it was those days to sit with both the newspaper and a voluminous dictionary, underline the most unusual of words -- curse the self-indulgent reporters/sub-editors who had a fascination for them -- in order to enhance one's vocabulary instead of ...

Illicit trafficking in human organs is shocking news. But there's a much older racket that is thriving - unnecessary Caesarean section for childbirth. I expose a nine-month long conspiracy to create a medical situation that leaves women with no choice N ot only to medical practitioners, but also to the huge population of lay people who must see a doctor for the treatment of apparently routine to dangerous diseases, the recent arrest of five kingpins, including a doctor, in a kidney trade racket should come as no surprise. This is not because many tend to presume that organ trade must be thriving "somewhere out there", but because when it comes to manipulation of patients, including those who are highly educated -- education serves no purpose when at the eleventh hour your doctor turns livid and says, "You may go to any other doctor if you don't trust me!" -- it has perhaps become fait accompli. Never mind if you are a PhD in cryogenic technology; anybody who...

Government is once again displaying its shocking lack of preparedness to prevent bird flu from entering the country and containing its spread among poultry thereafter. If people have not been infected so far, thank luck, not authority A s this article is being written, an Associated Press report filed at 5.30 pm, Saturday, January 19, informs that Government officials in West Bengal, despite accepting that the disease they are trying to fight and control is avian influenza, are "still waiting for test results to determine whether it is the H5N1 strain of the virus, which has been blamed for the deaths of 217 people worldwide since 2003". This shocking laggardness of the health department, which could -- let's pray it does not happen -- lead to the deadly virus crossing the species barrier to infect human beings, is unpardonable. "If some initial sign, initial indication a pandemic happens, we have to immediately pick up, detect this initial sign or signals and imple...

T he Indian Railways’ act of using signal detonators (crackers) about a quarter kilometre away from outermost signal points to warn train drivers of approaching stations and yard’s staff of incoming trains under foggy conditions is a ludicrous anachronism in this high-tech era. The news comes in the wake of a recent Press release by the Railways that talked of a laser technology to be developed jointly by IIT, Kanpur, the Research Design and Standards Organisation (RDSO) and other industry partners on a “fog vision instrumentation” project, which will allow trains to run unhindered in foggy conditions. This is nothing impressive. The largest public sector employer has never suffered from a dearth of ideas. But converting science into practicable technology has always been a problem with it. Browsing the documents of the Commission of Railway Safety, one comes across a plethora of ideas for safety that were either not implemented at all, or were meant only for privileged trains like Raj...

{ Excerpted from my autobiography } An immense hunger for knowledge that about a dozen of us had ensured that we kept ourselves abreast with the latest that was happening around the world not in the fields that comprise matters of general knowledge interest, but ones that the students learn reluctantly. We found mistakes in the suggested academic curricula. We suggested improvement in teaching techniques. In the third quarterly issue of the school magazine, Panorama HCS , for which I was entrusted the task of editing, I brought in features – like interviews and debates – that were hitherto inconceivable for school-goers. As teachers from Kerala were slowly replacing the European ones, we feared our perfect Surrey accent would go for a toss. When the brown mem-sahib s came to know of our consulting the ex-English teachers at their homes, a sense of inferiority got the better of them. The school library was a favourite spot for unwinding. Curiously, our relaxation too was fuelled by expl...

“Dream Girl” of yesteryears Hema Malini was, in January-February, in the eye of a storm for reportedly asking the migrant labour class from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar — it’s funny, they are referred to pejoratively with the respectable address bhaiya — to leave Mumbai for ‘home’. It must be her personal opinion as none from her party, the BJP, seconded her ‘motion’, though some said she was misquoted. Her concern, if it may be termed so, is however not uncommon among Maharashtrians and people from other parts of the country eking out a living in Mumbai. This is a bogey often raised by the Shiv Sena too. It would do Maharashtrians a world of good if they stopped looking at Gujaratis with envy and Biharis with disgust. Why not compete with them with entrepreneurial skills and hard labour respectively? Those averse to the bhaiya s forward a specious logic of economics to make their grievance sound authentic. They say these people mostly do not have identity proofs. Obviously, they also don’...