Skip to main content

Creating Winners

 These are busy days for me and that's the reason for the irregularity of my presence here. What keeps me busy is the state level cultural competition of CBSE being held in my school. The event started yesterday and will go on till Sunday.

About 7000 students from 1400 CBSE schools of Kerala are here on the campus of my school participating in events like singing and dancing and acting being held on 21 venues . These are all winners from their respective zones.

The purpose of this Kalotsav is the all-round development of the students of CBSE schools. It is based on the conviction that every student is a precious individual with immense potential. Events like this seek to provide the students with a hierarchy of platforms where their potential can be materialized, skills honed, and personality unfolded to its ultimate fulfilment.

Education is not all about textbooks and the labs. In fact, there is more that should happen outside the classrooms. The writer and the musician and the artist are born not in classrooms. Ironically, the classroom seems to stifle such potential. (Sometimes the potential does show itself in spite of the stifling. The other day I was amused by the opening sentence of an article written by a grade 11 student of mine. The topic was 'Students and Social Media'. My girl warmed the cockles of my heart with this opening: 'A mobile phone without internet is like a tomb without a corpse.' I loved the analogy and its creator. I prophesied a prospective auctorial future for her.)

I love that sort of creativity in my students. I gave my phone to a grade 9 student who was assisting me at the announcement desk yesterday, Delna Anna Benny, and asked her to click a few snaps from the Kalotsav. Delna turned out to be creative too. Let me bring some of her pics here to end this post.





Trophies for winners





Comments

  1. Hari OM
    What a heart-warming and uplifting thing, to see so many youngsters striving for improvement and approval. Seems you had an enjoyable time too! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's still going on and I get to meet a lot of students and teachers/parents from other places.

      Delete
  2. So my daughter not a very studious student but when I went for the parent interaction surprisingly teachers didn't have anything bad to tell about her because they said that she knows the stuff just that she can't reproduce it on papers. As you said real learning happens outside the text book

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Some highly successful people were not particularly good at school.

      Delete
  3. Missing school and these kalotsav days❤️

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Chhattisgarh Story

Deforestation in Chhattisgarh Kerala’s Catholic Church is teeming with rage these days because of the arrest of two nuns in Chhattisgarh on false charges. No one seems to understand the real politics behind the Modi government’s enmity towards Christian missionaries in Chhattisgarh as well as other backward states in its neighbourhood. Modi is selling the tribal areas and forestlands to the corporate sector part by part, his friend Adani being the chief benefactor. The Christian missionaries are a severe hindrance in that commerce. Let us get some facts right, at least. The Adivasi villagers allege that Gram Sabhas (local governing bodies) were forged or manipulated under pressure from Adani and the BJP government officials in order to take away their lands. In Hasdeo Aranya, minutes of the local body meetings were altered to show the villagers’ consent for land transfers. Also, the Chhattisgarh Scheduled Tribes Commission found that Panchayat secretaries were detained and coerc...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Are human systems repressive?

Salma I had never heard of Salma until she was sent to the Rajya Sabha as a Member of the Parliament by Tamil Nadu a couple of weeks back and a Malayalam weekly featured her on the cover with an interview. Salma’s story made me think on the nature of certain human systems and organisations including religion. Salma was born Rajathi Samsudeen. Marriage made her Rukiya, because her husband’s family didn’t think of Rajathi as a Muslim name. Salma is the pseudonym she chose as a writer. Salma’s life was always controlled by one system or another. Her religion and its ruthlessly patriarchal conventions determined the crests and troughs of her life’s waves. Her schooling ended the day she chose to watch a movie with a friend, another girl whose education was stopped too. They were in class 9. When Rajathi protested that her cousin, a boy, was also watching the same movie at the same time in the same cinema hall, her mother’s answer was, “He’s a boy; boys can do anything.” Rajathi was...