Itihasa made itihasya...

A presentation by Bunker Roy the founder of Barefoot College, Tilonia in Rajasthan at a TED conference whose arguments and contentions and the way his vision and convictions have so actually panned out, materialized and converged at his college, only augments and further bolsters the perspective I had tried to put across in my previous post. Three cheers for Barefoot college !!! I would imagine colleges such as these appear to be far more relevant in terms of its cognitive appropriateness and sociological relevance than an IIT, an IIM or even a JNU for that matter. Hope one day I get to visit this place and glean more about its pedagogic processes and the cognitive and social implications of its curriculum. Here is the video: Its inspiring. 

Globalization as a conceptual category to explain various facets of change that this contemporary world defined by fractions, attritions, divisions  (and much of it violent)  is witnessing, emerges as a useful shorthand. Indeed the very bloody attritions and convulsions, widening social, economic, gender and cultural schisms and disparities themselves are undoubtedly aggravated, if not precipitated, by it.  But then being a shorthand,  many of the actual and finer workings of globalization's negative impact is often missed and inadequately understood. I for one particularly feel that the educational consequences in general and globalization's cognitive impact has not been adequately and sufficiently recognized and understood. That globalization with its determining attribute of single division of labour, not just in the context of the developed world like North America or Western Europe but even for a country like India, results in "white collarization" of our econ

This I got as a forward. Please read it for more than a good laugh. I for one, felt it is in many ways a 'smart' and 'creative' reading and re-reading of India - past and present. It is very similar to the world history post I had published few years back in the humour section. Now could a IX standard kid really do this or someone of the likes of Gautam Bhatia behind it...?? A Brief History of India As written by a Std IX schoolboy, with all the original spellings . The original inhabitants of ancient India were called Adidases, who lived in two cities called Hariappa and Mujhe-na-Darao. These cities had the best drain system in the world and so there was no brain drain from them. Ancient India  was full of myths which have been handed down from son to father. A myth is a female moth. A collection of myths is called mythology, which means stories with female caricatures. One myth says that people in olden times worshipped monkeys because they were our incestor