meethapani

  Visualising Elections 64 countries go the polls this year representing 49% of the world population. The big boys – USA, Canada UK, Germany and Russia are gearing up. It is also election year for Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, for Iran, Turkey, Jordan Syria, for South Africa, Taiwan and both North and South Korea.    Analysts call it not just an election year but the election year. Democracy, developed to break the power of noble families, is one of the most tenacious concepts to come out of Ancient Greece.   The earliest elections around 500 BC were not to vote in people but to decide who should be exiled for ten years. Voters wrote their choice on broken pieces of pots, ostraka, from which the word ostracize comes. While it evolved into a system of selection rather than rejection, voting has had a chequered history. Roman elections could be violent with gangs intimidating voters, and even buying votes. Ballot papers made their appearance in Rome in 139 BC.

  The Watchdogs of Society The internet has become a busy hub of revelations, fact challenges fact, locked chapters of history are re-opened, or scandals are unearthed. With 5.3 billion internet users in a world population of 8 billion, several hours are spent sharing and forwarding, (and challenging what is shared), creating an unprecedented ‘people power’. An important part of this people power is its watchdog role. A watchdog is an individual or a group that monitors the activities of individuals, organisations or governments on behalf of the public to ensure their actions do not harm common people. They may become whistleblowers or try to prevent wrong doing by lobbying or going to the courts. From fact checking websites, and small local groups to larger international organisations such as Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Avaaz and Change.org, people have stood up to protect forests, animals, children, women, the poor, small businesses and the consumer. On the 11 th of Jan

  Reimagining Education The moment a child takes its first steps, the entire family is taken by joyous surprise. No one taught the child how to walk. Did it learn from observation? Is it an innate instinct similar to a foal who stands up unsteadily as soon as it is born? What has however been agreed is that the baby needs a safe environment, lots of play time, and the opportunity to be independent and experiment. Those are the conditions that remain essential for learning all through our lives. Yet those are the very things we deny during the learning process. Many children learn under the gloom of fear of a demanding parent or an impatient teacher, play time is considered a distraction from ‘studies’, and there is an expectation to conform and obey instead of experiment. Clearly there is a need for structure and boundaries, even if these change over time. Defining these structures and boundaries determine the best environment for learning, teaching methodologies and curricula.

  Another New Year   ‘The Old Year has struck, /And, scarce animate, /The New makes moan,’ wrote Thomas Hardy as a war-torn Europe slipped from 1915 to 1916. Today the moans of victims of a new war have made some nations cancel new year celebrations, while others drown them out in noisy celebrations, and spectacular fireworks replace the flash of rockets and bombs in the night sky.   New year celebrations were once, and in many countries still are, a celebration of the seasons, of great importance to agrarian communities. For the Egyptians it marked the flooding of the Nile which brought the promise of fertile soil. Spring, the time of new growth and planting of new crops, has been the most common time to celebrate a new year. In medieval Europe this tradition was given a religious significance and the new year began on March 25 th as the time the Angel Gabriel announced to Mary the impending birth of Jesus. The Roman Catholic Church adopted the Gregorian Calendar in 1582 and

  A Time to Forget “Lest we forget”, a term originally from a Rudyard Kipling poem used to remember the sacrifices of soldiers of WWI, has now become a phrase equally associated with remembering the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust, along with the term “Never Again” from a 1927 poem, Masada, by Yitzhak Lamdan. “Lest we Forget” was the title of a 1921 exhibition in UNESCO Paris, of photographic portraits of Holocaust survivors. Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne, French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs, said the exhibition “illustrates the very tangible dimension of Nazi barbarity, which was not executed abstractly but targeted men, women and children, each with their own story and singularity.” Ironically the fear associated with that trauma which every Jew is encouraged to remember, is used to justify the actions we see in Gaza today which also target “men, women and children, each with their own story and singularity.” It raises the question of how should we remember the past and what