An open Letter to CBSE Chairman

Dear Sir,

I am sure that you are aware of the instructions issued by your Regional office at Ajmer to teachers with a bag containing 200 copies of class XII evaluation work. I have some legitimate questions to ask, though from past experiences, I know your office will not bother to reply.Still, I am writing this because the fundamental question for me is , will any school administration have the courage to ask these to you on behalf of their faithful employees that they euphemistically call teachers.If they do not , then they should hang their heads in shame and tell their own selves that if they can't speak the truth they have no right to preach morals and talk of imparting the values in children.

1. A total of seven days are given including the days copies are given and will be collected , so that leaves five effective days and on the average around 35 copies a day.If each copy has 48 pages it should take minimum 20 minutes to read, evaluate ,mark, total and recheck that makes it around 11.6 hours of continuous work . In these times when domestic helps are not coming and most of the family is confined to home how is it possible specially for a lady teacher to do this task ?

2. In normal times a copy goes through three hands and on the average 20 copies are checked per day but in these difficult times 35 to 40 copies are ordered to be checked alone . How is the rationale justified? The problem is authorities passing such irrational orders are neither aware of outside temperature sitting in their ac offices nor have really checked a copy to know the time and effort it takes to honestly evaluate a students work.

3.The board is conducting remaining exams in July and the result is expected in August. What then is the emergency to so disgustingly press teachers to this level ? This is an obligation that teachers do and they are by no means bonded labor of CBSE or their school .

4.Irony is the authority talks about imposing a penalty of 50000 rupees when they pay around 5000 Rs for 200 copies. A teacher in such a stressed environment is bound to make mistake and then when subjected to penalty I know the spineless managements of school will deduct it from teachers salary to please the bosses.

5. The whole language of letter of instructions has sentences that are far from practical implementation like , wear mask while checking copies .I am sure person signing the letter must be wearing mask in his house for all the time he is awake.

6. In response to the verbal jugulary of last para of instructions where Mr. Sanyam Bhardawaj reminds teachers to be of tough times the world is passing through, all I can say that while teachers are aware, ask yourself, are you ?

I sincerely hope board will have mercy and give more times to teachers.

Regards

Your sincerely

An odd teacher who refuses to be part of your system.

Attached: Copy of instruction that has insensitivity on gross display.

Being confined to home with family is mostly the best thing that can happen.It generally helps one to come out with better version of self. Evidently, most revolutionary scientific ideas have  came from isolation.Sharing with you few of these.

1.Issac Newton in 1665 was confined to his family estate in Lincolnshire with his mother when Cambridge closed down due to plague epidemic .Newton would sit with prisms in dark room allowing the light to enter through a tiny hole made in shutter , his studies lead to some of the remarkable explanation of optical phenomena at that time . In isolation observing a falling apple in his garden made him understand that it is the same gravitation force that pulls the apple  is also responsible for lunar orbit .The mathematical model to solve the problem of distribution of mass led to development of whole calculas.

2.Werner Heisenberg in June of 1925  had a sever attack of hay fever because of allergies to pollen.  For change of climate he decided to go to the Baltic coast.  While he was musing on rocks overlooking the Baltic Sea, it led to a revelation that  many of the quantities he was struggling to describe within the Bohr-Sommerfeld model were not things any physicist could ever hope to measure directly which led to his famous  'uncertainty principle'.

3.In  December 1925 another great  Erwin Schrödinger struggling to find answers to quantum problems within domain of relativity  put aside his work, and went off to a remote mountain cabin on a ski holiday with one of his many mistresses , spending the days skiing, and staying up late nights working on physics   and by the time he returned to Vienna he had a non-relativistic wave equation, now known as the Schrödinger equation, that allowed him to correctly describe the states  of electrons.

It seems,Our imagination functions much better when we don't have to speak to people.
So let's use the opputunity .

Is Indiscriminate Lockdown Solving India's problem?

Hope authorities and people who think indiscriminate lockdown is the solution to problem are reading and analysing the international scene of countries not under lockdown and are not tied to unilateral thinking.

I am no medical expert but whatever little I have understood is the basis of  my twopence worth.
1.Aged and kids should be in a perfect isolation rather than the whole population indiscriminately put in curfew like scene.When asymptomatic people are being diagnosed as corona positive ,sooner than later we need to identify who truly is susceptible to risk.
2.All social gatherings, school, colleges and coaching should be restricted to operate online, instead of blind approach of arbiatry closure of all shops of every kind. Like fire safety regulations there could be strict  hygiene regulations like mandatory provisioning of sanitisers and entry of limited people at a time with proper distance and home delivery of goods so that there are less people moving . Moreover, how do you define what is essential and who should be allowed to sell it ?  For example , is mobile repair essential ?A device that one desperately needs for his online teaching essential ?How do you decide ?If online supplies are allowed offline retailers have a problem .The psychology can be understood from this Javed Akhtar urdu couplet
ye tasallī hai ki haiñ nāshād sab
maiñ akelā hī nahīñ barbād sab
Which translated in english means
My satisfaction lies in fact that all are unhappy like me
I am not just one who is getting destroyed
3.To die with corona is not same as to die from corona so proper biopsy should be done to a acertain the facts of cause of death to reach meaningful conclusions.
4.All the major hospitals have stopped OPD from last one month, does that mean apart from corona there isn't any ailment left in world? A lot of people with chronic and transient illness are suffering due to fear of hospital owners who don't want closure for number of days if a posetive case is found to have visited their hospitals.
5.Studies have been done that show that after a week of proper food and vitamin supplements patients became alright. The way drugs like Azithromycin and chloroquine are being used  may be adding to the problem as these definitely have adverse effect associated with them specially in alterations of heart rhythm .
6. The logic that is given in favour of extended lock down is based on assumption that had there been no lockdown there would have been expontially more number of cases ,this is just probabilistic and not factual.
All in all, social distance should be maintained and sanitation and hygiene should be a priority at all times virus or no virus, throwing the baby with bath water is certainly not the solution.

Rigidity on the rampage

Idea is like a free bird in space and ideology is often like a cage in which this beautiful and powerful bird may flutter it's wings but will ultimately die for the lack of freedom to fly . The dose of ideology is like a tonic that was originally given to promote the growth of thought process but in most people often ends up in immunity to rational thought and individual decision making. Such prisoners to ideologies will never be able to see the difference between right and wrong . Armed goons in the colleges will not disturb them if the colleges is supposed to be portrayed anti their ideology ,Even in killings they will see and propagate religion and caste , gushing blood of innocent will not haunt them as long as it is of their ideological opponents .

A blind woman once asked Mother Teresa "mother, can their be anything more unfortunate than loosing once sight.

She replied "yes, loosing your vision".

All of us ought to know the difference .