yet again ... getting lost ... then enjoying self-discovery ...

How much can you learn by listening:  The educational potential of conversations online. Thanks to the team at Deccan Herald for publishing this. Webinars and online sessions are the norm today in many of our education institutions. Listening to conversations, too, can be an equally effective tool. Listening to conversations between people who have made the best of life's opportunities, are well-versed in their fields, and have lived inspiring lives can open up new worlds. These are conversations where two people discuss, at length, a topic they are passionate about - conversations that Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to as “ art ” and “ the best of life ”. These conversations, available on YouTube, include sessions from events such as literature festivals. Watching these videos provides us with an opportunity to listen to people who leave us flummoxed by their sheer brilliance - people we may never get to meet. These conversations can make us aware of people we were ignorant of unti...

Newspapers once took children beyond textbooks. What happens when they disappear? Published at Deccan Herald here . Thanks to the team at Deccan Herald. One of the happy memories of the school days, for many of us, is reading the newspaper at the library - we began with the sports or the entertainment page and then slowly moved to the other pages. Another major attraction was the magazines; Illustrated Weekly was a favourite with its large format and eclectic content, and India Today followed suit. There would also be the colourful weekend newspapers like the Sunday Observer or the, loaded with numbers, salmon pink newspaper that we picked out of intrigue. Skimming pages was fun as was the element of surprise these newspapers and magazines brought in. Today when I look back, they took us beyond the text-books and helped us realize that there was a lot else happening in the worlds beyond our small worlds. They got us hooked on reading, made us aware of our interests, and our country, an...