Zindagi roz hamari class leti hai

A beautiful commerical from Britannia but aptly covers the idea of 'School of Life'

Lovely poem by Dharmavir Bharti

Ravi Shankar Prasad from BJP quoted the first stanza of this poem- Munadi in the Parliament session of 27th Aug. This poem was written during the JP Movement by Dharmavir Bharti.

The MP wanted to draw the parallels of this poem with the existing movement lead by Anna Hazare

Time to say less and understand more

There is so much to be understood about Anna's movement against corruption. A remarkably chequered movement it has been but has attained a great end so far in terms of the Parliament passing a unanimous resolution in favour of the demands.

One of the common though highly simplistic understanding as voiced by the actor Om Puri but commonly found amongst professionals in India is that all politicians are able to buy votes through notes and liquor. The actor in a demeaning way ever termed the politicians as 'ganwar;. There are clear loop holes in the way our law and order has not been able to subvert such realities but to say that thats how political leaders capture the imagination of people in the country is naive to say the least.

Winning elections in this country is a really really tough mental game and few really capture the complexity of what it takes to jump into this foray. 


Sharad Yadav one of the leaders who has risen from student level politics gave a befitting response to this perspective when he said

“Without the wisdom of Ambedkar and Mahatma Gandhi,” he said, people like him would not have been allowed to bring even their cattle to graze in Delhi. “This House,” he said, “is the only place, where you can see the face of the entire nation”, where Dalits can be seen as equals and where names like “Ghurau Ram, Garib Ram and Pakaodi Lal” walk around as MPs. It is only thanks to Gandhi and his freedom movement that today a Pakaodi Lal can come here, he said. A Pakaodi Lal in your Lok Sabha? Does that answer Om Puri’s description of a place filled with ganwaars? And if so, does that make you feel embarrassed? Mahatma Gandhi would have only been proud.

One can image that if such a versatile actor who has attained national fame can carry such views and feel it fine to vocalize it as if its a shooting which is going on, what can we infer about the views of people at large. The other funny part is that a politician will not want to talk about technicalities of acting but an acting would be 100% sure about the technicalities of what politics is!!! At times its a funny arrogance with which we tend to interpret our worlds.


Politics is very less understood as its formal study generally ends with a a 100 page book read last time in grade 10th.  Rest it left for media to teach since there are few who really tend to venture into it profesionally. Time for Anna like movement to serve wake up calls for educated and uneducated alike. Indian democracy has a lot to attain.  We all need to grow up.

Dismal performance of aspiring teachers

National Council of Teacher education at the directive of Ministry of HRD conducted a national wide Teacher eligibility test that is going to be mandatory for any teacher wanting to join a government or a private school going ahead. The results of this test which was conducted this year through CBSE in June this year was declared last week. To say the least, the findings are highly discouraging. Amongst the over 7.15 lakh candidates who gave that test, barely 14% were able to get through.

At the outset, we need to laud the government for hitting the problem at the right end by revealing to itself and everyone around, the yawning gap of quality of teachers. It also throws up a lot of questions in parallel.

With the Right to Education getting included as a Fundamental Right, if we don’t have teachers to translate that legitimate right into a reality then what does it leave us to feel elated about.  RTE opens up a need for 6.5 lakh teachers for its successful implementation. And it is just one of the several complex requirements that it gives way to. Teacher quality is one of the fundamental pre-requisites for ensuring that a school delivers. Thus if this Act has to see the light of the day in both letter and spirit, it would require a systemic view to the problems that plague our education system- starting with the issue of addressing the challenge of getting teachers who can deliver followed with aspects of resources, enrolment, reducing drop-outs, incentives, public private partnership etc.

Secondly, we need to have requisite checks and balances to evaluate the effectiveness of the teacher training programs. A society which is transforming gradually into a knowledge centric economy has to understand these aspects from the very core. This becomes all the more important in an environment where unlike Finland and Singapore, teaching as a profession (particularly in primary and secondary levels) in India doesn’t attract huge number of bright minds. And thus the nature of intervention and its currency with regards to changing times has to factor in this reality.

Thirdly, this test was not meant for the existing teachers who are already on the job so we can’t say how they would have fared. But still we can rationally presume that there may be a significant number of teachers who would have not fit the bill. If teachers who are not fit to qualify such an exam are assessing students and their learning, what is the credibility of those assessments? How many a tender minds must they be labeling incorrectly to thwart their learning journey for long..

Fourthly, on one hand there is our growing economy with its ever increasing need for skilled people and on the supply side at the farthest end we have teachers who are not in a position to teach children.  Does that imply that more and more students would end up in either being under-employed with no idea of what their strengths are or else seek short term vocational courses to atleast be fit enough to earn their bread and butter. Last year Aspiring minds managed to hog front page news http://www.aspiringminds.in/news_items/Aspiring_Minds_employability_report.html by coming up with the startling finding that just 18% of our tech students are fit for IT jobs.

Another problem that this result gives way is the fact that it further convolutes the debate on whether the system is weak or is it that we don’t have the right teachers to work within the system which may or may not be really so weak.

The only silver lining to this outcome is probably the fact that it should encourage our institutes and aspiring teachers to introspect and try harder going ahead so that they are able to shoulder the responsibility which the entire country is expecting them to do today.  Build a truly powerful nation. 

India's growth story

The elephant that became a tiger-  A well researched and thoughtful paper on India's growth story since it embraced liberalization in 1991.

The problem with NREGA

An important perspective by Ila Pattnaik on why NREGA is bound to perpetuate the structural nature of unemployment in India.

Whats your Mt Everest?

I happened to listen to the talk from Apa Sherpa organized by NHRDN Mumbai and two other Sherpas who have in a way conquered Mt Everest by cracking the enigma of scaling its awe inspiring altitude not just once but multiple times. Apa has been successful in scaling Mt Everest 21 times. I am as far removed from mountaineering as he might be from probably what I am into. But its not so difficult for me to imagine what kind of an adventure it must be.  Sherpas are basically natives of the mountains who have braved their lives to scale the Everest and now they share their knowledge and efforts with people who want to realize similar dreams. In a way they are leaders amidst the mountains.

His story is about someone who is humility personified and comes from a very struggling background. He grew up amidst difficulties and drew his strength from the experiences that he encountered as a result of those difficulties.

Lets look at what Apa Sherpa is not? He is not flamboyant, he is not verbose, he is diminutive, he maintains a low profile and if you meet him along the road, you won’t find any halo over his head. Yet what makes him a prolific leader is worth reflection.

Few things that struck me about Apa Sherpa:

1.       His leadership is about DOING:  He is not a great story teller who will talk to you about metaphors drawing Sun Tzu type analogies between war and business or mountaineering and business. He has never dived into the topic of business parallels to quote instances from the industry.He has done what is considered one of the most difficult feats and everyone reveres him for that. One can’t read a book to scale up the mountains. There is no book that can equip one to the feeling that one can get on base camp 4 where they say temperatures go as low as minus 40 degrees celcius with wind velocity close to 200km/hr.

If you are on the mountains and you need to know where you have to go, just listen to him.

He is going to be your leader there.

2.       When we do something multiple times, we make it appear even simpler:  You scale a danger once and you are somebody to listen to and you make a habit of scaling up dangers and you become an expert at it for anyone to approach you. Thus when leaders repeat their performance, it doesn’t translate into monotony because in those multiple experiences they are proving that it may not probably be as difficult as you think it is.

Also when he was  asked about whether he also finds mountaineering monotonous after having done it so many times, his answer was- if you are monotonous in your cubicles come to the mountains for trekking. It seems that he is naturally aligned to what he is doing. The motivation is completely intrinsic. His message is his life as Gandhiji famously remarked.

3.       A child of hardships:  Apa lost his father at a tender age of 12 and then he had to support his family for a living. He had to drop off from school and become a porter which made him carry more weight than his own body weight. He laughingly states that probably that may have hampered his height since he appears not more than 5 ft few inches. He struggled his way after that and only after a few years the same capacity to carry more weight than his body along the heights became a vital quality which is a prerequisite of a Sherpa. Thus when we try something unique in the middle of difficulties, it can become one of greatest differentiating strengths of ours. We should try to listen to the lessons of difficulties with patience.

4.       Contextual nature of leadership- As outlined above, Apa’s leadership is what it takes to be a leader in those terrains. It is different from a business or political leadership. He is driven by feelings and connects to people along their aspirations. He has some very prolific young people from Asia Trekking company who deeply respect his greatness and value that he brings to the lives of people for whom scaling Mt Everest matters a lot. He doesn’t appear to be a person who would get ruffled up quickly and that is such a vital trait when they are meeting trekkers from various parts of the world who may have risked a lot in their aspiration to scale up the mountain. Thus leadership qualities vary as per the demands of the situation in which you are required to lead.  There is no fixed template for it. Probably that’s what makes it such an enigma.

We salute you Apa for your attainments and probably your persona that those attainments have given shape to. 

Guess we all in our own domains of work can figure out models of excellence in our conduct and become shining examples like Apa. His story left me to think about ‘What was my Mt Everest’. Do you know yours?

Ask an unscripted question

Harvard Medical School commencement speech of Atul Gawande. Worth a read

The IMF chief post

Here is a strong argument by Swaminathan Aiyer on why the post of IMF chief should be going to a technocrat rather than to a politician. Lagarde, the Finance Minister of France is leading the race at present. Considering the fragile state of many of the economies in the European Union, it is highly likely that the decisions made by this person might get influenced keeping her essential nature of a 'politician' in view.

Need for a new model for growth

Can't agree more with these thoughts. The author talks about the fundamental fallacy about trying to replicate the western intensive capitalistic model of so called 'growth' to economies like India and China which by their sheer strength of population base can catalyze the process of environment degradation.

The difficulty of being good

Dr Jayprakash Narayanan was manhandled yesterday in AP Assembly over the Telengana issue by MLAs from another party.

He has the wherewithal to state his opinion on the reason for not wanting the formation of Telengana despite the flood of opinion in the contrarian direction. A former distinguished bureaucrat and brilliant demagogue who has given opportunity to young people to join his party and provided them tickets to contest elections purely on the basis of merit. He is one of the rarest of the rare people in the country who has wanted to do something about Indian political scene and managed to make headway by winning a seat in the AP assembly elections in a context dominated by rowdy and milieu of corrupt politicians. There are plenty who have wanted but few who could actually prove their tenacity. Hats off to this person.

There is something terribly wrong about our democracy and if it doesn't get the requisite interest from people at large, we will continue to go on the downslide. Its manifestations are all over the press in the form of scams that are getting unravelled on a regular basis. Our insitutions meant to protect democracy are much sluggish than the people who know how to break laws. This can also be seen from the number of RTI activists who have given up their lives for wanting to make the government more accountable. Its so terrible.

Loksatta Party which he heads still will take years to mature as a sound political group for a variety of reasons but his efforts, commitment for a clean political culture and leadership is all in front of us. We need to figure out if we can also participate in some form and may be support him as well.

The end of third world- Speech

An illuminating speech.