Teaching and parenting

What would I be doing 10 years from now ? Tough to say, but I think I would like to do some element of teaching. Could be to my daughter, for all you know :-)

Trying to teach or explain something to a 6 year old can be a lot tougher than you think. Often I find myself losing patience with my little one. I hope I can remember these wonderful lines by Yeats, immortalized by Sir Ken Robinson’s closing comments in his second lecture on TED.com ( see the video below)

“Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

I hope I can remember this every time, I should do alright then ….

The festival of lights

Diwali, Deepavali, Devali .. whatever you want to call it. Festival of lights, that is what I am talking about.

The whole country is taken over by decorative lights, crackers, fireworks, festivities, sweets ……….. Except the state of Kerala, that is. Well, there is a token celebration, but none of the color or excitement that you would see anywhere else.

I wonder why is that ??

I saw some theories floating around on the net. One of them being that Onam and Deepavali are celebrated almost along similar lines and since Onam has more regional roots, it has prevailed. Maybe that is true. Onam does have its own charm, but ever since I have been in Bangalore, I have begun to love the colors and life of Diwali.

It just seems to be a happy and bright festival, nothing much can be wrong with that !!

The Confession

The latest in the series of books from John Grisham, one in which he goes back to what he does best : Create scenarios based on the US justice system that gets you wondering “Just hold on a sec, is that really possible ? What if it really happens like this ? “

The theme of the book is around an innocent man who is executed by the state of Texas, and the mayhem that breaks loose once the real killer admits his crime. It triggered a lot of thoughts about the death penalty, which sadly is also a practice allowed by the Indian judicial system and laws.

I thought a bit about the rights and wrongs of the death penalty, here are some of my thoughts

I do not believe we can pass a judgement on whether a fellow human being should live or die. Nor do I believe that any civilized form of governments should have the blood of its own citizens on its hands.

I am aware that once a person breaks the laws established by society, he has to pay the price for that. The price however cannot be his life. Keep him in prison for his entire life if you want, but let us not pass a judgement to kill.

And surely the issue of sustaining the cost of the prisoner for his life should not be too much. After all, at least in India, the death penalty is supposedly reserved for the rarest of the rare cases. I saw that currently we have around 300 prisoners on death row. We are a country of over a billion, we should be able to take care of 300 more without breaking our budgets too much.