Learning In a Flat World

Recently, I was fortunate enough to be a part (after a long period) of a team at an Engineering College at Odisha. We were helping the young engineering students to get ready for their professional career ahead, and more specifically, their campus interviews. This isn't the first time I have done mock interviews or group discussions, and I hope there would be many more to come! I have interacted with students in different states, including Delhi, UP, MP, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Odisha. My experiences have been strikingly the same irrespective of the state and closeness to the city. There is a similar scenario in all campuses, the ratios only varying depending on the social background of the students. This isn't something that you wouldn't be suspecting already, yet I felt it was important to bring this out in the open to explore solutions. But first, the problem statement. To define the problem, we must try to answer these questions as accurately as possible: Are o

I have always come up with "digital" as a prefix whenever someone mentions the term "divide". And I expected the same on the ground, when I went on a "rural tourism" holiday at Pranpur, a dusky village near Chanderi. While the family enjoyed a rare late morning start in the well-furnished resort room, I rushed down for an appointment with the Headmaster of the local government school. I had been lucky to get a go-ahead for a video interview on my last day's visit to his school. I said lucky because a similar request in a public funded school near my home in the city had been declined on fears of "what will I do with the video"! The teachers there had warned the principal that I could use the video in some harmful way! Trust , the important aspect of a society that can be very effectively transmitted to passing generations by teachers and parents, clearly is a big divide between a simple rural setup and its urban counterpart. The Headmast