Jai Kamal's Blog : Work in Progress

There is no doubt that we have limited time. We need to allocate this time to numerous activities according to our own life goals and preferences. What are those activities? I have categorised them into four major heads: Work, Health, Social Life and Happiness. Work This consists of the tasks that is expected while fulfilling professional duties. For professors, it can be activities such teaching, doing research, admin duties and many others. Health  The activities to keep yourself healthy such as enough sleep , good food and  daily exercising. Here, I am  concerned with physical health only. Mental health is assumed to be in shape if one is keeping track of  fourth head "Happiness" and also I am ignoring exceptional cases for simplicity. Social Life Giving required time to family , friends and society, in that order. It is crucial to give time not only to family but also to friends and society in general. Happiness One may extract happiness from va...

India could have won the match easily with the kind of form they were in. But they failed in this crucial match. I am not here to do a post-match analysis like a pseudo-expert on cricket (Most Indian Spectators are. I was like them too, not long ago.), rather I am here with a different viewpoint on this loss. It is very easy to criticise cricketers but can we learn from this event? What did India lack ? 1. Luck: Yes, it is true that luck didn't favour. The playing conditions in first 45 minutes of overcast conditions in England is harsh for batsmen. Had Virat Kohli been given not out, New-zealand might have reviewed it and their review could have turned down as it was umpire's call. Who could have imagined a direct hit from Martin Guptill to run out Dhoni. And you can find few more instances like these. Can we blame luck for loss? No. It can never be an excuse as no team has control over it. 2. Preparedness for worst cases:  They were not prepared to face such a s...

Time is precious, it flies very fast. We realize it only when we are about to fail or we have just failed to achieve something really important. On other occasions, we remain ignorant of value of time. Remember, we have enough time for major tasks and we need prioritization for that.Once you learn that, no one can stop you to become the person you want to be.

Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the Cloud Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity?

There are two types of people Who work only when there is a lot of pressure on them. They need to be pushed through deadline, appraisal, assessment, training etc. Who are self motivated. They work better if they have freedom. We can belong to any of the above categories. Actually, we belong to both depending upon the task. Let us take the example of Virat Kohli, He might need a push in bowling. Does he need any push in batting? obviously not. In my opinion, if he is pushed for batting, his performance might decrease. In other words, he needs freedom in batting. In General, the freedom could be in setting your deadline, choosing the style of working , identifying the set of tasks to reach the goal  etc. Do you need full freedom? No! If given full freedom you might not perform at all.Let me take my own example, In semester vacations, my productivity is lower than normal semester days.I generally start my vacation with full enthusiasm with some ambitious goals.For first fe...

I think there is need of MOOCs for all the levels of education (Primary,Secondary, Senior Secondary, Higher Education) in different educational medium(Hindi, English, Tamil , Telugu, Gujarati etc). The main advantage of MOOCs is its accessibility, thus it can help us in addressing the problems related to Quantity. Refer my old blog-post for categorization of problems in education. It can also cater to the Quality of education provided that MOOCs are created by top schools. one such example is NPTEL, where professors from IITs, IISc and other premier institute contribute for quality MOOCs. NPTEL is focused only to Engineering courses.There is need of developing such MOOCs in social sciences and humanities also. In my opinion, we can develop MOOCs for K-12 education as well. Schools across India differ in terms of quality, pedagogies and curriculum. We can ask top schools of India such as DPS,Chinmaya vidyalaya, Kendriya vidyalaya etc to come up with MOOCs. In this way, we will be able ...

Let me describe one common scenario "The race". Two persons A and B are running on parallel and straight tracks in a 5 day race. A person is considered as successful at any stage if he is ahead of other. A started with a point 200 km ahead of the point from which B had started. In other words, A had head start of 200 Km. A travelled with 20km/h and B travelled with 15 km/h for first day. Next day, A travelled with 20km/h and B increased its speed to 20km/h. On the third day, B further increased its speed to 25km/h while A travelled at same speed 20km/hr. Who is ahead at the end of 3rd day? Obviously A is ahead by 2000km as he was already having a head-start of 2000km. even though B has outperformed A on day 3, he hasn't won the game. Wait! Game is not yet over. However, B can take two decisions at this stage: a) Even though he is trying harder than A, he is still behind A and hence he should give up. b) He should give tougher fight to win as he has travelled more ...