This is the sketch by a Santiniketan artist who was working with me at the school I founded in my remote village in South India. This is the view of the original tiled roof along with the trees and the backdrop of western ghats. The school started in 1962 soon after I returned from Oxford….
Rural development cannot happen in isolation
Urban development and much of new infrastructure investments only can change rural India’s fortunes. Sam Pitroda, yes, this is the wizard, who befriended Rajiv Gandhi and helped to bring about the PC booths all over India. That was the first telephone revolution that reached almost the rural interiors also. It was later; now, the new…
TV channels have flashed the news breaks!
It is about the expected wheat short fall. NDTV flashed this news for a near half an hour in prime time news. Also the agriculture minister Sharad Pawar brave assertion as of now there is no cause for worry. Yet the minister in the same breath assures that in case there is a shortfall the…
Our freedom of the press is very thin!
Our civil society must shout more loudly! The AP and Karnataka cases remind us our intolerance of open mind! What education, what liberal values, and what civil society we can be proud about? Open mind is what education is supposed to teach and inculcate. But in India we are yet to travel far. Our education…
A life unparallel/a life with few parallels/an incomparable life/an unusual personality
Each generation learns to study, learn and like to remember certain historic moments or some individuals whom that generation takes as extra-ordinary individuals. They may be leaders, leaders of politics or society or in some significant ways some individuals who in the short run might have had immense impact on that generation. However in the…
Higher education is in crisis and confusion!
Our morale is so low! Yes, we are now in the midst of a terrible crisis and confusion in our higher education sector. On the one side is the government with no plan. On the other is the new breed of education exploiters who fleece the poor and the middle classes! Now come the foreign…
India produces so many billionaires and millionaires!
IIM students get sky-high salaries! So, India now a Superpower? It seems it is time for celebrations for India! This year, the American Forbes magazine that tracks billionaires all over the world revealed for the first time that next to America India has produced so many billionaires! Not even China is near India in this…
Stephen Hawkins’s new book-How to walk the space? How to travel in time?
There is no word, God, in Hawkins’s latest book. A Briefer History of Time (2005) is a deceptively simple book of just 162 pages but is a very hard going reading indeed. I grappled with it for sometime and then honestly given up! But one can read it or glance through the pages for the…