Friday, April 20th, 2007
Waiting for labour appears to be stretching longer than waiting for Godot. The bags have been in the boot ever since I came back from work with what is now being described as mock labour pains.
Mock indeed! Considering it appears to be making a mockery of the entire baby ejection procedure. That was ten days ago. Someone said, try milk with castor oil. It apparently triggers off a tummy upset which in turn induces labour. Don’t ask me how. However, now we’ve even covered one end of the loosies to labour route.
Liberal dividers of labour that we are, the husband promptly came down with a tummy upset when his lassi went astray. Loosies done, we continue to wait for labour.
If you really want to know all the ways in which you can coax the baby to come out of its comfy cocoon, try this site: Natural ways to bring on labour while I watch my due date go by!
Friday, February 9th, 2007
Pitara finally has a shop to call its own.
This week, Pitara, powered by Amazon, launched its niche online bookstore for children. The big idea: to make Pitara the best place to buy books for children between the ages of 0 to 14. A place quite like the small neighborhood bookstore, where the person behind the cash counter knows the books, knows the authors, can lend a helping hand when you’re lost in the maze of colorful book covers, and most importantly, truly loves books, and absolutely adores children. That’s what the Pitara Shop aims to be. More…
Friday, December 15th, 2006
Can’t stand politicians, but God bless the man for taking a stand! The news just hit the stands that India’s Union Health Minister, Mr A Ramadoss is hoping to push through a blanket ban on colas and junk food in schools and varsities. According to an article in The Times of India, he also wants to introduce compulsory yoga classes to fight the growing fat in India’s urban school-going children. More…
Saturday, December 9th, 2006
I’m a convert! Not to any kind of “ism” because that’s been anathema since forever, but a convert to the power of Yoga to instill stillness in constantly vibrating kids. The most visible effect of this can be seen in my 12-year-old avid soccer-tennis player son who can spend two hours running all over the field, but ask him to squat or touch his toes, and boom! he collapses like the proverbial pack of cards. More…
Wednesday, December 6th, 2006
Have you ever landed at work and realised that the trouser you picked up does not really fit you anymore? I came to this painful, yet hilarious, realisation yesterday when I sat down to work yesterday. More…
Wednesday, December 6th, 2006
Our son Siddharth is about to turn 12 and we’re living with a size-8 kid wearing size-12 clothes, artfully rumpled hair, purposely scuffed shoes and clouds of deoderant every time he steps out. From the boy who thought girls were an unendurable pain, he’s now kind of day-dreaming about them in his spare time. I would have freaked out if he were a lone case, except that I look around and see 10-year-old acting pretty much the same way.
In her feature on how tweens are fast becoming the new teens, AP writer Martha Irvine says, “Child development experts say that physical and behavioral changes that would have been typical of teenagers decades ago are now common among “tweens” — kids ages 8 to 12. More…
Monday, December 4th, 2006
Could computers be changing children’s brains? It sounds like science fiction, but a growing number of specialists feel that tomorrow’s classrooms are likely to be filled with pupils who will think more episodically, have shorter attention spans, communicate through pictures rather than words, have more learning difficulties, and be less able to control their impulses and emotions than the children of today. There’s a lot of more on this in an article titled Young Minds in High Tech Turmoil. More…
Monday, December 4th, 2006
Let’s hug our children’s suicidal tendencies away. In the face of an alarming rise in student suicides, the Delhi state education board has made it mandatory for students attending 600 government schools to begin their day with a “jaadu ki jhappi”, an embrace, to ward off stress. According to the article titled Suicide schools give lessons in hugging, in The Times, India’s rigidly conservative school system has adopted a touchy-feely approach to counter a rising youth suicide rate by introducing a daily hug to the curriculum. More…
Sunday, December 3rd, 2006
I went through another gruelling session of trying to teach my son to write cursive. To execute an ‘f’, our pencils went up to Manali, came down to Delhi in a loop and after a halt, went down further to Ghaziabad and came up again to Delhi. This cross country trekking on paper almost perfected our ‘f’ for us. As I went through the familiar motions of making him write, I wondered why cursive is so important. More…
Saturday, December 2nd, 2006
A Group of Ministers (GoM) has cleared a proposed legislation that will allow foreign universities to set up campuses in India. Once cleared this would become a vehicle for foreign direct investment to flow into the education sector in India.
It would mean more centres of higher education and perhaps better quality of education all around. The competition these centres will provide might egg the country’s existing centres of learning to improve themselves.
More importantly, this move could contain the US$ 4-billion annual drain of resources from the country for higher education abroad. Students in India will not need to go out for better quality education.
It will certainly fill a large gap in the education sector in the country. But what about the even larger gap in primary education? What about the issue of schools who do not have teachers, labs and even toilets? Don’t they need investments too?