Blissful Life

Month: September 2012

  • Are You Cool if You Perform Bad in Your Duties?

    It is not cool that you don’t touch your textbooks.

    Seriously.

    I’ve hundreds (literally) of friends who when asked how studies are say "Who cares?" maybe because they actually don’t care, or maybe just to appear cool.
    But it’s just painful. To think that not studying properly, having fun all the time, makes one cool in a degree college, is like thinking not practicing in the nets will make Sachin a cool cricketer. It’s just wrong. You’re cool when you do it all.

    You are cool when you play carroms till midnight and then learn till you sleep. You are cool when you text your girlfriend "I love you" and then read your books with the same amount of passion. You are cool when 5 or 10 years later you still remember what you study this year in your college. You are cool when you are the most awesome professional in your field inside a 10 mile radius. You are cool when you can stand up in an international crowd of colleagues and speak for 10 minutes without losing attention. You are cool when you just don’t give up your integrity and sincerity for the sake of running with the crowd.

    It might be something about our classrooms too. Maybe we do not have classrooms where active, interactive, and amazingly creative learning is promoted or encouraged. Maybe we do not have students who are willing to learn what they are not required to. Maybe we do not have down to earth professors.

    But that doesn’t prevent us from changing it all.

    We can direct our classroom story in any manner we find fitting.
    We can choose to have lively, enthusiastic, energetic, amazing, persevering, smart, creative characters in our story.

    Talk to the professor in the classroom, search all over the world for the derivation of that formula on the board, learn the nuances of your craft, embrace success, be willing to be a master in your art.

    And then they’ll tell you, you’re cool! Only that this time it’ll be honest.

  • What Ails Our Higher Education? Let’s Stop Blaming The System

    This post is intended to supplement the post of the same title in SVYM founder’s blog.

    "Simple living and high thinking" was Gandhiji’s motto.
    But most of the Indians have failed to imbibe that.
    And that’s indirectly led to all problems we are facing today.

    Education, from the elementary level, is failing to make children think high. That’s because the faculties, the teachers aren’t themselves thinking high. And that’s because the whole system is only very slowly changing.

    And where does that change come from? From people who think different, who go down untrodden paths, who communicate and exchange ideas with foreign cultures, who read books other than prescribed textbooks, who embrace the idea of change, and self improvement.

    It’s a positive cycle. We stop blaming the system, and improve ourselves. Slowly, the system begins to improve.

    And as a student who boastfully regards himself as having broken free from the rat race, I give you a few tips on where to begin.
    There’s actually just one tip.
    Use the internet. The world wide web.
    Read blogs, articles, newspapers, journals, magazines of different geographical regions.
    Learn about the culture, ideas, notions, and the system at other places.
    Find out interesting leads.
    Be willing to change.

    And to begin go to google.com (No, I am not paid by google for leading you to them)

    Go find out "how to win a nobel prize", "life at MIT", "buddhist philosophy", "barefoot running", "minimalism"

    You will soon run out of things to search for. But things keep popping up too.

    And while reading you’ll find out new books, blogs, websites, ideas, philosophies, games!, activities, organizations, mailing lists…
    Do not skip any. Follow them. Subscribe to blogs, add yourself to mailing lists, play games, do further searches on things.
    And you get more pages.
    More to read.
    More ideas.

    And that’s all you have to do.
    Slowly, your mind will begin to expand, to see alternate views, to discover solutions that never seemed to exist, to think in new patterns, to imagine, to create, to evolve.
    And then you can never go back.