Cycling to learn

Archana Somshekhar

As an academic investigator I had visited Shikshantar, an NGO in Udaipur, to see their work on alternative education. Shikshantar believes in zero-schooling, which means not admitting a child into a school at all, but letting him/her learn on his/her own if and when the child is interested. 

Shikshantar is also associated with ‘Swaraj University’, a new concept in today’s world, though an old concept if you look into ancient history. Swaraj University does not give any degrees, believing that a degree is not necessary for one to become successful in life. One can successfully practice a trade/ profession/ occupation to meet one’s livelihood needs without a degree. Students who join Swaraj University come from backgrounds and may even be school dropouts. Called ‘Khojis’, or seekers, these students interact with various experts from varied fields, seek to find out what they are most suited for themselves, and then train as apprentices under an expert in the field to learn the skills of the trade, so that they can earn their livelihood.

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Reclaiming Intent

Dr. Rajiv Trivedi

It is said that words profane an idea. As our restricted technological advance commits us to human communication through imperfect linguistic expression, we conduct ourselves thus. It is this elasticity of language that accounts for greater use of fuzzy logic in all human affairs. So while most people use this phrase to describe a process in which the direction of brain-drain changes, I use it as an appeal to change the nature of such a drain.

• Several NRIs honoured in Britain
• Yahoo to cut website features after layoffs
• Nokia to scrap 300 jobs in India by end of 2012 
• AOL cuts jobs in India
• Monster.com launches website for NRIs seeking jobs in India

It all began with quantification of human being. For some time, it seemed a good thing as historically, human being had been treated as less than that. But while in the past, it was a product of instinct-based more-barbaric-than-civilized society; in the twentieth century it was a conscious act to place human-beings at certain pre-conceived levels. More than anything else, this century can be adjudged as being consumed with the process of evaluating man. For the first time in his history, man had focused his eyes away from gods and heavens towards his own tiny but real existence.