It’s hot, hot! Record-breaking weather, enough to compete with General Election 2024 for front page coverage. With 2023 having been confirmed by scientists as the hottest year ever experienced by Planet Earth, the auguries for 2024 were not good. March, the first month of spring, has been cruel, setting new mercury records across the country. […]
The new wonder technology of artificial intelligence (AI) – defined as technology that enables computers and machines to simulate human intelligence and problem-solving capabilities — has sparked hope and despair in equal measure. The world’s tech billionaires and gurus including Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Sam Altman are engaged in a public slugfest […]
The onset of summer coincides with the start of the exams season countrywide. Every year in February-March, in the great majority of India’s 281 million households, there’s pervasive fear and nervousness as 30 million students prepare to write the make-or-break class X and XII school-leaving exams conducted by the country’s 57 examination boards. And another […]
To say that the world — India included — is facing an unprecedented environment destruction crisis is an understatement. Climate change, air pollution, deforestation, water and food insecurity, melting ice caps, rising sea levels and global warming are gradually despoiling the life supportive ecology of Planet Earth — and threatening the survival of humankind, and […]
In recent years, there’s been growing public concern — even panic — on the issue of children becoming addicted to digital media. Educationists, social scientists, psychiatrists and health experts have expressed alarm that children are being incrementally distracted by social media platforms such as Instagram, Tik Tok, WhatsApp chat and the like. Suddenly there is […]
The mental health and emotional well-being of the world’s largest child and youth population — 21st century India negligently hosts 480 million citizens below age 24 — is ballooning into a national, and perhaps a global, crisis. With all developed OECD countries including China, confronted with the challenge of rapidly ageing and declining population, India’s […]
Child health-related queries top internet searches by parents anxious to ensure their children’s physical health and well-being. Internet search engines, social media chat rooms and whatsapp groups are abuzz with parents searching for home remedies and therapies for common childhood ailments. Increasingly, parents are veering towards natural, home remedies as the first option to treat […]
Child health-related queries top internet searches by parents anxious to ensure their children’s physical health and well-being. Internet search engines, social media chat rooms and whatsapp groups are abuzz with parents searching for home remedies and therapies for common childhood ailments. Increasingly, parents are veering towards natural, home remedies as the first option to treat […]
Almost every second day these days daily newspapers flash headlines of young American students perpetrating a mass shooting in malls, and often schools. The right to bear (own) guns is a fundamental right under the US Constitution and angry young teens often access their parents’ guns and go berserk. Nor is youth and child anger […]
India is inhospitable terrain for people and children with disabilities. It grudgingly hosts 26.8 million (Census 2011) people with disabilities including 7.8 million children. The country’s education institutions, public spaces, transport systems and workplaces have dismally failed to provide ease of access and make an estimated 27 million citizens — that’s a huge number — […]
Over the past half century parenting has evolved into a highly developed behavioural science. A mountain of research studies, books, and manuals has been written explaining and dissecting parenting styles to best develop children into happy, confident and successful adults. In the 1960s, American clinical and developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind was the first to formally […]
A wave of student suicides is sweeping India, and there’s a danger of it assuming tsunami proportions. According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), over 13,000 students committed suicide in 2021 — a five-year high and a rise of 4.5 percent from the 12,526 deaths recorded in 2020 when a student died by suicide […]
Since Lord Macaulay famously pronounced that the prime objective of his Minute on Indian Education (1835) was to produce note-taking clerks for the smooth function of the British raj, there’s been a persistent and consistent bias in Indian society against vocational education and skills training. Though through the freedom movement, Mahatma Gandhi strongly advocated educating […]
The mental health and instability of children has always been a taboo subject in Indian society, spoken of in hushed whispers, if at all. The Covid pandemic which shut down schools for 82 weeks — the most prolonged lockdown of education institutions of any major nation worldwide — has changed this tradition. As children struggled […]
Everybody loves the summer holiday. It gives children and parents a break from stressful school routines and valuable time to rest and recharge for the next academic year. As recently as the 1980s, it was normative to pack off children to visit grandparents, cousins and sundry relations during the summer vacation or laze around at […]
Post-Covid, sleep deprivation is emerging as the new pandemic. A rapidly multiplying number of millennial parents, Gen Z, the young and old are all to a greater or lesser extent suffering this 21st century lifestyle malady. Compulsion to work hard and play hard in the age of the smartphone, social media, and OTT revolutions, has […]
The mind-boggling late 20th century invention, the internet aka the worldwide web, which has provided humanity instant access to an ocean of information, real time news, advice, communication, educational resources, and entertainment, has comprehensively changed the way we work, play and entertain. And while adults are digital immigrants, new millennium children are digital natives unfamiliar […]
With the prolonged nightmare of the Covid-19 pandemic fast receding into a bad dream, despite headwinds of inflation and rising unemployment, the national mood — as testified in the high voters turnout in the recently concluded legislative assembly elections in several states — is upbeat. There is palpable hope and expectation that 2023 will be […]
In his famous Minute on Indian Education (1835), British Raj era educationist Thomas Babington Macaulay articulated the objective of India’s then new English language education system was to fashion “a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern” i.e, a system which would churn out obedient clerks ever-ready to serve […]
Although moral education — development of social and emotional learning (SEL) — has been dispensed to children for several millennia through scriptural instruction, sermons and moral science and civics textbooks, the idea of developing formal SEL syllabuses and curriculums — the “missing piece” of education — is a relatively recent phenomenon. In 1994, a multi-disciplinary […]
The ever expanding menu of after-school tuitions, co-curricular and sports education programmes available to children can be too much of a good thing. Although it presents 21st century children with unprecedented opportunities to learn new skills which could transform into Plan B careers, it often prompts FOMO (fear of missing out) parents to sign them […]
Surely, it’s ironical that in a country with the world’s largest child population — 165 million of India’s children are below five years of age — and millions of them orphaned, abandoned and experiencing dreadful, joyless childhood experiences, a mere 3,142 were adopted in 2020-21 when the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated their pathetic condition.
It’s not that […]
Much of the national debate within the educator and parent communities during the past two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, has centred around dangers of children contracting the virus, pros and cons of reopening schools, efficiency of online learning, and the learning loss suffered by children. Several studies have assessed and documented children’s learning loss […]
At the best of times, parenting is a stressful and demanding obligation. In the era of the pandemic more so. During the past two years of the Covid-19 pandemic which shows no signs of going away as new variants sprout continuously, parents have been confronted with new and unprecedented challenges. With schools, colleges and universities […]
For all 260 million households of the world’s most populous democracy — and perhaps for households worldwide — the year 2021 has proved to be the most tragic 12 months of the new millennium. The recently concluded year was defined by images widely circulated on social media, newspapers and television of people gasping for breath […]
For centuries India’s durable joint family system smoothly integrated grandparents into childcare duties. It was normative for grandparents to play active roles in raising their children’s children, keeping traditions and customs alive and providing valuable life lessons. However, with the sudden spur in the number of nuclear households in post-liberalisation India the involvement of grandparents […]
In India’s exams centred K-12 education system, life and soft skills education has been continuously neglected. Except for a handful of top-ranked progressive private schools, the great majority of India’s 1.5 million private and government schools have neglected to simultaneously teach children valuable inter-personal communication, team-working, time management, conflict resolution skills and plain old-fashioned good […]
Evidence of the irreparable damage done to children’s education and future livelihoods by the prolonged 63 week pandemic phobia closure of pre-primary, primary and secondary schools countrywide, is assuming mountainous proportions. The latest is a report (August 6) of the parliamentary standing committee on education which forthrightly says that with 70 percent of the country’s […]
Most parents will vouch that unsolicited advice on ways and means to transform into perfect parents starts pouring in right from announcement of pregnancy. From tips on maintaining good health during pregnancy to infant care and nurturing children through middle and turbulent adolescence years, parents are bombarded with a plethora of parenting information and advice.
In […]
In a society where marriages are less the union of two individuals and more about an economic alliance between two
families, divorce in instances of irretrievable breakdown of marriage is being grudgingly accepted. Over the past decade, divorce rates countrywide have zoomed from 1 per 1,000 to 13 per 1,000 marriages (2019). Several factors including […]
In a society where marriages are less the union of two individuals and more about an economic alliance between two
families, divorce in instances of irretrievable breakdown of marriage is being grudgingly accepted. Over the past decade, divorce rates countrywide have zoomed from 1 per 1,000 to 13 per 1,000 marriages (2019). Several factors including […]
The Covid-19 pandemic sweeping the country has rained unprecedented pain, suffering, loss and misery. On May 1, India recorded 401,993 new Coronavirus infections and 3,523 deaths in a span of 24 hours, the highest single-day tally in the history of the current pandemic which began — the evidence is overwhelming — in Wuhan, China in […]
The pandemic has resurrected the vintage proverb ‘necessity is the mother of invention’. One year on, as the Covid-19 pandemic takes its toll around the world, necessity has pushed homo sapiens to reinvent the way we live, eat, work, study, party and holiday. Latest information communication technologies are being adapted, applied and reshaped to ensure […]
The accelerated ICT (information and communication technologies) revolution, which began in the 1990s with the invention of the Internet aka worldwide web, has connected the entire world. Currently people — especially youth — are connected in real time with peers around the world through social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin. But within […]
Almost a year after the first Covid-19 case was reported in Kerala last February, the pandemic is on the wane in India. The caseload has fallen from a high of 97,860 infections and 1,173 fatalities per day (September 30) to 9,100 and 96 (February 10); industry and businesses have reopened; domestic air and rail travel […]
As 2020 faded away, the hashtag #2020worstyear was trending on social media. People the world over were happy to see the back of a pandemic year that wreaked havoc and misery upon humanity in every nook and corner of the world.
The Coronavirus aka Covid-19 pandemic, which originated in Wuhan, China in November 2019, has exacted […]
A new academic phenomenon which is becoming incrementally popular with school-college leavers, is to take a gap year to explore career options, travel, perfect a new skill or sports intelligence, sign up with a community service NGO and/or contemplate future directions. A decade ago, this option would have been considered a waste of time and […]
For three quarters of known economic history, i.e, until 1750 AD, the Indian subcontinent accounted for one third or 33 percent of global GDP because of its free markets and private enterprise-driven economy. The subcontinent’s manufacturers, traders and businessmen freely established business enterprises and marketed their goods across the country and around the world. This […]
The death by suicide of Bollywood Hindi cinema star Sushant Singh Rajput on June 14 has focused an overdue spotlight on contemporary India’s illicit subterranean narcotics trade and growing substance (including tobacco and alcohol) abuse within the world’s largest adolescent and teenage population. According to a survey conducted by the Union ministry of social justice […]
The prime objective of British historian-educationist Thomas Babington Macaulay aka Lord Macaulay’s famous Minute on Indian Education (1835) was to produce note-taking clerks for perpetuation of British raj over India. In this document, which initiated the process of wiping out traditional Indian education that included vocational education and training (VET), Lord Macaulay famously asserted, “all […]
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