The American teacher in the Indian school

In the school where my mom is a teacher, Bala Vidya Mandir, a teacher exchange program is being conducted in which a teacher has arrived from US to chennai to this school and a teacher has left for the US in turn. This guy Mr Jeffrey Peterson is from a school in Indianapolis and teaches biology in high school. He has come along with a group of 10 teachers under this program who are at present in different city schools in India. He is in my mom's department so I heard there was this ice breaking session where he got to know all his would be colleagues for the next 6 months. My brother went to see him earlier as my mother had heard he was interested in animals and my brother was also studying to be a veterinarian and while they discussed Jeff happened to ask if he would take him to the beach just for some sight seeing. My brother later asked if I would tag along so we hit the beach couple of weekends back with this teacher from the US. It was cool to hear this guy who finished his bachelors degree at ohio state univ went on to do research in the university about African elephants and has been to Africa to observe the species in the wild. It's cool to observe the exposure of school teacher in the US and of how much he can contribute to a science class experience wise. He says the schooling system there is very relaxed and that there was no strict syllabus. The teachers can teach whatever the class as a whole find an interest in. This way it is not hard a child to take school seriously because he doesn't have to force himself to learn.However he said the competition is higher as every student is learning something that interests him/her so he says he sees good grades in the tests. Jeff claimed the teaching system in India is very methodical, having chapters to be finished with a period of 3months at a time. The students have an idea what portions they are up against as the syllabus is well defined. He says students can study in advance and be prepared for class. (I don't think I've heard of any 'Indian' in a school do that though) We then probed into whether he finds any particular purpose in this exchange program or is it for mere international exposure. He replied saying most kids in the US tend to prefer going into the business field rather than take up science. Only a smaller fraction of students actually take up science or engineering for undergraduate studies. He wanted to study what teachers do to inspire more students to pursue science over commerce by making them take more interest into studying subjects like physics and biology. He asked for my opinion and I just joked talking about how there is this great "ambition" among students to pursue engineering especially in south india and that the actual reason is that job prospects are better with an engineering degree since the IT industry grows healthily in the country. It was a good chat we had regarding all this while we had a walk around in Besant nagar beach and over to broken bridge. He took some snaps of the fishermen children. I was happy a man stopped throwing stones at a dog when he saw this foreigner walk past his home clicking photos. Anyway that was a day spent fine. Jeff like Dosa a lot apparently, one of the only things he's had as indian food as of now, my mom had asked us to take him to murugan idly shop nearby but we ruled it out as in our conversation with him he told us that he found indian food too spicy and has his dosa with jam at times since the chutney was too hot for his tongue. Had a decent insight into how an average american was like from this guy. Was not too curious about India though, maybe because he wasn't here on a vacation. However, He said he liked New Delhi a lot, this group of ten had stopped over at Delhi just to have a look around on their first visit to India.
Hope he has a good time here.

The first step to studying abroad- an insight into an educational fair

I happened to go for a Education fair organized by Edwise which features universities from UK Europe Canada Australia and Singapore. The visit to the fair was quite useful in a way that I got an idea why people go to education fairs in the first place. According to me it is just meant for people who have enough money to spend and are desperate to show to progress education-wise so they tend to join colleges at random without any insight into what they are actually doing. However by accusing a certain set of people of such foolish decisions I am only referring to a particular section of students I saw at the fair. Others are parents with a mindset to get some info on how to send their children off abroad for higher education. If one wants to find the real focused student groups who have a firm resolve and purpose of going abroad to study one needs to look very closely into the crowd as this category of students would have done their research at home and shortlisted schools they would prefer to join and only attend briefings by those universities that are in their list. However the main thing was that generally the universities that come to fairs are those which are not popular names in foreign countries or those which are new to the foreign student enterprise. There are few universities that come with the intention to boost their brand image, more likely to officially sponsor the whole education fair to emphasize their purpose, one can try to apply and get through at these universities. Coming to what I learnt about universities in the U.K are that most of them require IELTS and decent academic credentials. That's it. Application processing takes a whale of a time so it is best to apply  at least 8 months in advance. Quite a lot of importance is given for good profiles with paper presentations. So I'd say don't go to a fair if you are just desperate to do something about your career because they are more likely to push you to make a decision in a matter of 3-4 hours.. that's not exactly advisable. I'd say if you feel all confused then go to some free counselling centre, I believe the counsellors at Edwise itself are quite good themselves, and sort out what you really want to do. You need to decide keeping in mind your academic background, what your field of interest is and what sort of coursework you want to study and the exposure that you want to get. Define a set of colleges that have prospective courses you can apply for and get. break into top class intitutes, gettable institutes and sure shot colleges. Go to a fair now after you have done all this and ask about how good chances are of securing admission and then apply. 

Such an effort ensures you are not stuck with a course that you had no interest in doing and to make matters worse, in another country altogether just because of a hurried decision made in a couple of hours.

I'd like to believe I've got my message across

"I'm going overboard by saying anything is possible if I just put my mind to it." This is probably a common thought that plagues an average mind. If we encounter something that is a little beyond our reach at that particular moment we tend to catergorize it as "impossible". Nevertheless we see miracles happen around us that can't go unnoticed. But still our mindset doesn't get influenced too much despite witnessing them. The reason that only certain people make it big while the others watch with awe arises from the simple fact that people are unwilling to change the way they think about things. Every action that we do, according some philosophies can be categories into positive and negative. Believe it or not, stuff we learnt in physics back in school about something as trivial and gravity has a lot of... I stress on it, a lot of influence far beyond what we can imagine. The universal law of gravitation is in fact universal at an unimaginable level. Let me quit exagerating and get to what I try to make you understand. I suppose you must have full belief in the law of gravity, simply because of the reason that you are still on earth is a result of the law. In physics, gravity is a result of an attractive force that exists between the earth and us i.e. between two bodies. There exists such a force between anything and everything in this universe. Hope I've made that clear. Now, lets get to my hypothesis. Our thoughts, what we think are a result of brain activity. This activity consumes energy and I guess produces some energy as well (I dunno, possibly as heat or something) and some energy is lost. This energy is extremely negligible of the order of 10^-##. But it's still energy. What did the guy with big thoughts, Einstein propose? E=MC^2. The mass-energy equation. I'll extend this to my previous statement and say, our thoughts, which actually is energy, at some level can be considered as mass. And there exists an attractive force that exists between masses. so it can be proclaimed that thoughts attract other thoughts and actions. Now, if I say that masses that share a common frequency are more likely to attract each other, I wouldn't be wrong in saying positive thoughts are more likely to attract positive actions. So if one actually thinks positively about something, there a likeliness that it may lead to a positive result. The first step according to this theory possibly is to believe that what you've read till now actually can be thought of to be possible. Well, it is quite not my intention to convince you that this is true because all I want to do is give you something to think about and decide for yourself whether it may be true or not. On actually believing that it can be possible to influence actions happening around us by the way we think and what we think, we can give ourselves the power to channelize our thoughts and ensure only favourable things happen to us. This requires a great deal of effort and belief, something an average person might find hard to do, it is this fact that separates the winners from the rest of the crowd. What is meant by "putting one's mind into it" is focusing on that favourable positive result that is to be achieved and working towards it. The positive result can be something extraordinary, the focus that is required for it to become reality also grows with its extraordinaryness!.
So this tendency to "categorize" things as impossible is total nonsense and impossible may be called as a bad word. Also, No one is going overboard by saying if anything is possible. This focus also gives you the ability to change whatever that is written here to suit your thoughts, this explains the fact that I had mentioned earlier- if you believe in it, its more likely to be true! Likewise, I can also focus my thoughts into believing that I actually haven't bored you too much with this article and that you've benefitted from reading it at least a little.






Post Script: While editing this blog entry, I did some reading about my reference to the einstein's equation. My reference was ridiculous and wrong. So please don't try to infer any physics concepts reading this blog (it also shows how pathetic my knowledge of physics is) , but do try and figure out what I've tried to convey.

Are we all thinking right?

All of us Indians have been following the news and media closely following up this uprising against corruption in our country. Anna Hazare is doing a good job with stirring up a sense of doubt and questioning the Government of its ways of ruling the nation.. I've found it hard to stick to one side upon this issue and as to how effective it will be even if I take sites.. Should blame it on this lack of regard for things I have in general though.. Anyway.. At first when the movement started with Anna and that other saint guy were protesting over how things were running, the first thing I did was google Hazare... ex army, social worker built up the only self dependant and richest village in India (somewhere in MH). Lol couldn't quite figure out the term "rich village" but anyway.. He struck me as a guy who starts off good things and does them well.

Reading articles here and there gave me an opinion of what was going on and about Hazare fasting here and there...But this guy fasting in front of a helpless government was hopeless because it only made me recollect my childhood when I stop eating if I wanted my dad to buy me some toy or crayon set. It's childish. At one point it only really looked like all that Anna will succeed in doing in over turning the Government than anything else. However, to see an old man fasting for a cause on t.v instilled some sort of unrest among the public and he became a popular and crowd pulling personality. Another thing I don't understand is why people in India especially need some sort of leader who is at a level above the crowd to lead the pack. Why can't we all all fight by ourselves? Coming back to Anna's fast, it gathered steam as I found people even in my city huddling up here and there and shouting slogans, but all I saw was people who are just generally upset with how the Government runs comparing it with western countries and their level of development and the general mentality of joining the mob just to have fun. Of course there are people who are serious about the issue I should mention, like that fellow who flew down from Honk Kong just to support Hazare.. No lay man would put his job at stake for something like this unless they've been gravely affected and I don't see that levels of patriotism in the general public either as in thinking so far ahead for the nation.. People really don't care even about the garbage that may pile up in a street corner within a week if they dump their waste there today and the host of germs and diseases it may bring.

As far as I see it the Lok pal bill and all that will work for people who are oppressed by corruption. But corruption will still persist because it has helped many get their work done faster or when they need something that they don't quite deserve fully. Its the public attitude that needs to change for something such as corruption to be removed. Remove corruption from the root level we say, but the root is in fact our attitude and it is to change for such a social menace to be eradicated. There are a lot of factors some uncontrollable that has lead to the growth of corruption and now to such an intolerable extent that some local vigilantes rise up for the occasion and perform some stunts.

All we really have to do is give it some thought. It's a cruel world out there all right. Your benefit of getting your passport faster, or getting your son an admission into a college which is in demand is someone else's loss, hawkers need to bribe the local policemen so that his shop is not brought by them claiming some non existent law. You got to sacrifice a little on your part for the greater good. Its not just you but the country as whole. Show some patience, wait for passports to be processed at its own pace, talk to your son about the fact that he get only what he deserves because he ruins someone else's chance at it who is more deserving as well.

This engineering and medical admission scandal if I may call it actually has lead to lessened interest in students pursuing other branches of education such as fine arts, social sciences, core sciences or management at the graduate level. This is because students either get admission working really hard to get to study engineering simply so that they have better job prospects and not for the course. They really don't think about doing well in something they would like to work in. Parents too pressurize their children to aim for engineering for the job surety and even if they don't make it they get in through the management quota of bribing the college officials for a seat. (does anyone think that all this money dutifully goes into the development of the college? hence called a bribe).

All in all the actual fight of corruption just does not involve blaming the governement for their inefficiency. We too contribute to the prevailing corruption problem that exists so we rather first practice what we preach. If we want our governments to stay clean of black money we should abstain from offering bribes in the first place. When we change the system changes as well. Change is always resisted that's why it's so hard so some effort from our part can inspire someone else to stop corruption as well. We all need to find that Anna element within us for India to really become corruption free.