~Shikshit Bharat, Saksham Bharat~

Imagine a world without schools and colleges. Impossible, right?

No matter how much we hate waking up early for school or study all night for those tests and exams, we all know that education is very important. I'm not saying that an uneducated man has no chances of being successful or an educated man will surely do well in life. However most of us will agree that an educated person gets better opportunities in life.

Today,17th November, is observed as the International Students' Day worldwide.

'Shikshit Bharat, Saksham Bharat' -that is educated India, capable India. So if every Indian citizen is educated properly, it will lead to a more capable or competent country.

Today, I will be giving few views related to the changes that need to be made in our current education system. Change why? Because the old education system is not doing much good.

Education has been a problem in our country and lack of it has been blamed for all sorts of evil for years. Even Tagore wrote lengthy articles regarding how Indian Education System needs to change.

Funny thing is that from colonial times only few things have changed. Rote learning still plagues our system. Students study only to score marks.

If there are few centres of educational excellence, for each of those there are thousands of mediocre and terrible schools and colleges-now even universities.

So here are my suggestions for the betterment of education system:

      Communication skills: This should be taught right from the beginning, say class1, because this is the factor where many people lack. In order for our country to develop, people should know how to communicate with each other in a proper manner.

      Encourage innovative work and reward them- Nobody would like to invent anything perhaps without a reward in return for their tedious hard-work.

       Focus on skill-based learning- There are so many other skills to learn other than studies, like singing, dancing, sports etc. I don’t know why India doesn’t encourage all these activities much.

      Feedback based up-gradation of syllabus- The teachers should send a feedback to the council of education every year in order to keep updating the system.

      Make English mandatory- English is a global language and everybody must be able to speak and write it in order to make a good impact in the world. I have seen so many students coming up saying "I have been educated in a Bengali medium school, so I am not a very good speaker. I can't speak English fluently, etc" This should not be the case. Every school must give a high weightage to this subject.

      No to reservation- This is my personal opinion where I feel if reservation is eradicated, brilliant students will get more opportunities.

      Practical approach instead of theoretical- I feel out here theoretical knowledge is more looked upon rather than practical work. It should be the reverse so that students can learn better.

      Skilled teachers- Teachers are the ones who impart education to the students. So they must be really skilled in their profession, they must be trained so that they can train the students properly.

      Instill patriotism in the mindset of the kids- I feel there is a lack of patriotism in the kids nowadays. Nobody wants to stay in India after graduation. Everybody wants to go abroad and serve other nations. Why won’t they work for the betterment of their own motherland?

We may have the most number of engineering graduates in the world but that has certainly not translated into much technological innovation here. Rather, we are busy running call centres of the rest of the world-that is where our engineering skills end.

I would like to throw some light on an interesting article I read few days back called the 'Bhagat Singh Syndrome'. It states that we all like Bhagat Singh but won’t want one to be born in our family.

We like and support Kejriwal for his courage to come out in the open but willl slap our son if he thinks of doing anything apart from being a doctor or an engineer.

How many of us support and encourage our kids to visit places where they can make an impact and do good to the society? The impact is more when we take the kids out of the classroom and urge them to ask themselves how they can make a difference in the life of a rickshaw-puller.

I strongly believe that you cannot change the system sitting indoors; be it a cubicle, classroom or Parliament. You have to step outside in the field. And same goes with the kids.

Let us make sure that they do not feel awkward while hugging a chaiwallah. We need to teach them empathy, not sympathy and they will not learn it by reading a chapter on Gandhi, they will instead be more responsive by spending time with the bottom of the pyramid.

And this does not happen by once in a month field trip to some slum, it will happen when schools start teaching these underprivileged children in extra hours and allow the regular students to interact with them, give them the responsibility of other kids and empower them.

Creating few more schools or allowing hundreds of colleges and universities to mushroom is not going to solve the crisis of education in India. We are in a country where people are spending their parents' life savings and borrowed money on education and even then not getting standard education and struggling to find employment of their choice.

The mind numbing competition and rote learning do not only crush the creativity and originality of Indian students every year, it also drives brilliant students to commit suicide.

I'll end my article by stating what the goal of Indian education system should be. They are- to create entrepreneurs, innovators, artists, scientists, thinkers and writers who can establish the foundation of a knowledge based country.

This is how India will prosper. :)

Fall For Someone Who Doesn’t Love You

It occurred to me the other day that there might be people in this world who have never known unrequited love, have never fallen for someone who didn’t fall too.

I know it’s rarer than a solar eclipse, but it seems likely that some have managed it; people who married their high school sweetheart, who got it right on the first try, who were seemingly born with enough innate confidence to walk right up to the object of their affection and say, “I think you’re great, would you like to go on a date sometime” and whose confidence was rewarded with a resolute, “Absolutely, I’d love to” and a Happily Ever After. The rest of us would be inclined to murder a couple like this if we ever came across them, but I maintain that they are the ones who are missing out. Everyone should fall for someone who doesn’t love them back at least once.

People who don’t love you can be found in many places. Pick the person in a brand new relationship; they can’t see more than five inches past the face of their new love, let alone far enough to see you pining away in the corner. Pick the girl you’ve been friends with for ages, the one who refers to you as a brother and will never see you as anything else. Pick the boy who flirts with everyone, sleeps with everyone, the one who doesn’t know what he’s looking for and never seems satisfied. He’ll do just fine, too.

This has to be more than a crush, more than just a fleeting attraction. Thinking they look cute when they smile, or letting your imagination momentarily wander when they touch your skin isn’t enough. You must love them with every fiber of your being, from the moment you wake up until the moment you fall asleep, day after heartbroken day. Memorize the rhythm and cadence of their voice, the subtle gestures of their hands and each expression of their face, so when you’re asleep and dreaming of a world in which you’re together, it seems real. Feel your soul fracture each morning when you wake up and realize it isn’t.

Let the agony, the obsession, consume you. Nothing hurts quite as exquisitely as loving someone who doesn’t love you back.

Perhaps you think I’m crazy for suggesting anyone let themselves fall into this pit of despair, that I’m an emotional sadist of the worst variety. But darling reader, I assure you I’m not, because eventually something happens to every single person who loves someone who doesn’t love them back: they manage to stop being in love.

While it takes varying amounts of time, everyone finds their breaking point, that moment when enough becomes enough. It could be the third night you cry yourself to sleep, the fifth time they cancel plans with you to be with someone else, or the eighth night in a row you spend getting drunk alone. It can take months, or even years. But here’s what you’ll have once you get there:

After surviving that kind of ache, you’ll be so much stronger, so much more certain of yourself. You’ll see that all pain (physical, emotional, and metal) is a temporary state of being, not a permanent one. There is always a reason to go on, always a reason to fight for yourself.

You’ll realize that because you are not loved by one does not mean you are not loved by all. You’ll understand that love cannot be won like a teddy bear at the fair; cannot be stolen like a rare painting from a museum in the dead of night. You’ll see that real love comes first from within, not from anyone else. You learn that those annoying people who say things like, “real love comes from within” were telling you the truth this whole time, but you had to learn it for yourself. Don’t worry – you don’t need to tell them they were right.

Getting over unrequited love feels like having a blindfold removed – you suddenly see all the love you’ve had in your life this whole time, and you’ll appreciate those individuals like never before. You will be humbled, you will be grateful, you will be wiser.

Here’s the best part, though, about getting over someone who doesn’t love you: you realize that nobody healed your heartache, that you were able to fix yourself all on your own. And once you’ve proven to yourself that you can recover from that, you won’t be afraid to go looking for love again.

And again, and again and again.

And one of those times, you’re bound to be rewarded with someone who reciprocates every ounce of your unbridled affection, who loves you just as much as you love them, and that will be the most supreme feeling of ecstasy you can fathom. You’ll see that loving someone who didn’t love you back was totally worth it.