247 items in this section. Displaying page 23 of 25
Every Ball You Bowl, Every Shot You Play
July 31: A spy will be hired to keep a watch on the activities of cricket players in Pakistan. This decision has been made by the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB). The idea is to prevent the players from fixing any more matches. The spy will shadow the team, stay in the hotel and keep an eye on the cricketers. Like who they meet, where they go, and when they return to the hotel. So anxious is the PCB that the job is well done, that it has decided to keep the identity of the spy a complete secret....
A Penalty Kick into Disaster
Where: Kandahar, Afghanistan July 22, 2000: It was the strangest football match that the Pakistani team had ever played. There they were in the city of Kandahar, in Afghanistan, for a match with a local team. Every sportsperson knows that home teams always get a lot more support than the visiting team, and is even prepared for it. But none of the Pakistani players were quite prepared for what happened to them on the football ground....
The Brightest of Them All
November 4: Children of Indian origin in Britain, are outperforming white children in important secondary school examinations. The British office for standards in education, Ofsted, shows that the number of Indian children passing five exams at the special Grade C level, a level corresponding to the Indian class 12, has risen from 23 per cent to 49 per cent between 1988 and 1997. What this means is that many more Indian-born children are eligible to attend university in Britain now, than in the past....
Woman who Terrifies Burma's Military
Woman who Terrifies Burma’s Military [] September 23: Two days ago, commuters at the railway station in Myanmar or Burma’s capital city Yangon (earlier spelt Rangoon), were confronted with a scary sight. A posse of policemen in riot gear, was swarming all over the station. No, it wasn’t a dreaded terrorist attack that they were guarding against. They were preventing a frail 55 year-old woman from boarding the five pm train to Mandalay, according to reports in ‘The Hindu’ and ‘The Indian Express’....
How to Write the Right Way
September 9 : These are days of the high-tech child. A child whose grasp of the computer is phenomenal and who knows how to handle the mouse better than he can handle toys. But in this rush to be computer whizzes at age fifteen and below, kids are forgetting how to hold pens and pencils. Or, to put it simply, today’s kids are forgetting how to write. It looks as if the days of the neat homework book, with pages and pages of beautiful, tidy writing – the school-going child’s special pride – will soon be a thing of the past....
The Teenage Teacher of Pune
September 30: If you educate a man, you educate one individual. But if you educate a woman, you educate a family, so goes a popular saying. But Ganga Waghmare of Pune has done more than educate a family. She has educated all the women of her neighbourhood. That would make it many families! Ganga is 16 years old. She’s been teaching for three years now. Because of her efforts, 30 women have become confident about being able to read and write....
The Minister who Couldn't Add
July 22: I want to say it simple and clear: I am bad at arithmetic. In school I could not even add up my marks in the annual report card. I could never figure out figures at all. So I have a sneaking sympathy for Miroslaw Handke for what happened to him recently. He lost his job because he couldn’t calculate. Handke is the Education Minister of Poland. Probably, his math skills are as bad as mine but he still went on to calculate the money that his Ministry would mark for the running of schools in the annual budget....
Toilet Matters
Where: New Delhi, India August 3, 2000 : As a kid, I had a big problem going out. I hated the thought of travel. It’s not that I was a stay-at-home type. I liked visiting people, places. But travel I hated. For, in the midst of a particularly long journey, I would desperately want to go to the toilet. My parents would ask me to hold on, as there were no suitable public toilets for girls....
A Syllabus for Harmony
November 24: A syllabus where a chapter on Habba Khatoon, a famous Kashmiri poet, jostles for space along with chapters on papier-mâché, hanguls (deer), apples and Kashmiri rugs? Well, these subjects are what primary school students in Kashmir, are going to be reading in their textbooks – and it is not without reason. The violence in Kashmir seems to be never-ending. Alarmed at the violence and bloodshed that children in the state are exposed to, the Jammu and Kashmir Government now wants them to absorb themes of love, harmony and ecology, says a report in the ‘Indian Express’....
Aruna Roy – Voice of the People
July 31: She was once an officer of the Indian Administrative Service or the IAS as it is popularly known. What is equally well known is that most IAS officers are as remote from the people as possible. Today, she has won the Magsaysay Award for public service for daring to question this attitude. She looks like a village woman in a simple sari, chatting away in a local dialect or language of Rajasthan. She is Aruna Roy, the winner of the Magsaysay Award for public service of 2000....