Example 1: I almost fell off my chair this morning reading the newspapers. Kanpur University thinks the sight of bare hands on their female teachers was distracting students enough to ban them entirely from their faculty’s wardrobes. Noble thought indeed. Wonder how the sight of bare arms is more distracting for a student than the ancient methods he or she is adopting to teach. Or even the fact that he or she might be in the class chewing paan or gutkha. Besides what’s education got to do in a learning organization. Why should the organization teach men about respecting a woman’s wishes and her desires? Isnt it more appropriate that they learn early that its OK to ban anything they fancy in the name of decorum and discipline? Don’t the educational institutions realize that outdated knowledge and methods of teaching that is disconnected with where the world is moving today is the biggest distraction that’s keeping kids from learning?
Example 2: I was channel surfing the other night and came across this ghastly serial called “Laado”. Supposedly, it is a serial made to bring to the limelight rising cases of female infanticide in Haryana. What I aw in the episode was anything but. There was this loud-mouth village ruffian (a woman no less!) who had dragged her daughter-in-law to the Panchayat on some flimsy case of adultery (not yet proven). The husband is conveniently missing, and to cut a long story short, the Panchayat, after some arguments back and forth with the “victimized girl” tell her to spend 6 months in the house of her mother-in-law as a maid….
I am sure this happens in reality in some boondocks in the Haryana hinterland. But there are all kinds of audiences for television, and I cant for the life of me understand how one can promote the cause of preventing female infanticide, if this is the general tenor and storyline the awful serial is taking. Am I glad I hate telly soaps!!!!!!!!
Example 3: Nothing gets my blood boiling more than seeing small kids travelling in fancy cars with their parents throwing trash out of the moving vehicle as if the whole neighbourhood was their personal trash can. The parents have lost their civic sense anyway, but cant they at least pretend to be socially aware and teach their kids a thing or two about basic etiquette? Wish they’d at least read their children’s environmental science book once when they are asking them to mug the answers. I get into an argument with one such callous parent at least once or twice a month on an average….but is that the answer? Cant we find a simpler way to instill a basic sense of civil behaviour in public?
