“It was a clean death,” my aunt recounts, her eyes lost to the horizon. “He didn’t have to suffer for long, and that’s what counts. Isn’t it?” Her cheeks move back, show the yellowing teeth as she too battles old age, and now a cold bed, but it isn’t a smile, it’s a grimace.
I can only nod in the affirmative.
My cousins squat on each corner of the foyer, staring at the wall, lost in their own thoughts. The room feels claustrophobic, the air oppressive.
Continue readingIn search of the elusive A+, are our students forgetting something important?
Our family dinner in the evenings are an elaborate affair with all of us recounting our notable moments of the day. During the course of one such recount, my brother spoke about his volunteering event at his school (which will remain unnamed for this article).
His school, a popular one, had recently introduced a computerized system to evaluate admission application forms to manage the influx of hundreds and thousands of forms they received during the annual admissions rush after the SEE exams. But, as the computer would only accept forms that were filled exactly to instructions, the school employed volunteers from the senior batches to help go over the forms before the computer scanned it.
My brother vented about how SEE-passed students, almost all of them in the upper percentile rank (after all, it’s a reputed school), simply failed to comply with the instructions given in the admission forms.
“The instructions are just there, in bold, for everyone to follow. Can’t they even read?” asks my incredulous brother.
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