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 Previous Week Topic |
| January 09 |
 Engineering students hard hit More... |
05-01-2009 |
The number of campus interviews has come down and many IT majors have put on hold recruitment drive, says D.V.L. PADMA PRIYA |
Insecure future: With recession clouds hovering and many companies going slow on recruitments, students are at a loss about what the future holds in store for them.
With ‘recession’ looming large, the impact is being felt the most by aspiring engineers. With industry sources revealing that the current scenario is set to continue for the next year and half or more, placements have been worst hit. The recruitments schedule usually begins from December and goes on till February. If earlier students of top 20 colleges could easily get placed, now there is no guarantee even for those in the top five colleges. Cost cutting “In 2005 and 2006, most major IT companies visited at least 10-15 campuses apart from conducting off-campus recruitment. But in 2007 and 2008, it has been confined to one or two campuses,” says a senior executive of a reputed assessment company. Massive cost cutting operations carried out by many companies is another factor. “Earlier, firms could afford to have 40 per cent staff on the ‘bench’ for four months. These days, once a project is finished, either the employee is shifted to a new one or is given the pink slip. Fresh recruitments are the last thing on their minds,” he adds. “We managed to place many students in July 2008 but the second phase has been relatively slower,” admits N.L.N. Reddy, Placement Officer, Chaitanya Bharati Institute of Technology (CBIT). Recruitments in subjects such as civil engineering too have seen a steady drop. “Infrastructure and real estate was affected after the IT sector slowdown which has led civil engineering companies to keep on hold their recruitment plans,” says M.V.R. Durga Prasad, placement officer, VNR Vignana Jyothi Institute of Engineering and Technology.The future is uncertain even for those who had placement offers as 80 per cent of 2008 pass outs have offer letters in hand yet not being informed about the joining date. “I received an offer letter in third year and passed out in May this year but am yet to get any appointment letter,” says an engineer. “IT was a comfortable sector which made me forgo a chemical engineering seat in IIT. I regret my decision now,” rues another final year student.Most colleges have already been informed about the change in plans from IT firms leaving the students anxious and worried about their prospects. Some are making alternate plans. “I am looking at doing Masters abroad with the hope that the market would bounce back in two years,” says V. Sandhya, a student. There are many students who think on the lines of Sandhya now. Either doing a Masters in India or abroad is on the top of agenda of many. Students are hopeful that securing US visas would be relatively easy this time since the US universities expect a drop in foreign students given the recession world over. “Universities in US will pressurise their Government to make the issue of visas a relatively easy affair since they depend hugely on foreign students for generating resources,” says a consultant. Moreover, they think it is the right time to tap the best talent in countries like China and India where the companies had been retaining the good students with good job offers. |
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| Success mantra for children More... |
12-01-2009 |
| | | | | It is easy, it is fun and it shows great results. No wonder, more and more school students are taking to SIP Academy offerings, says Aruna Chandaraju | |
 Sociable Intellectual and Progressive (SIP) Academy’s simple but highly effective training programmes help children, giving visible improvement to dramatic results in their studies, especially mathematics. Also, on the rise are SIP centres with increasing enrolment of instructors.
Nearly all instructors and franchisees are women –– many of them homemakers. They see this as a wonderful way to earn money and job-satisfaction while still managing their homes since this is a weekend programme (school-going children can attend only on weekends). Thus, SIP has becomes a means of empowering children and also women by turning them into entrepreneurs.
The SIP Academy India Pvt Ltd is the Indian wing of the mother organisation SIP Academy SDN BHD, Malaysia. The mother company started off in a small way with the idea of imparting skill-development programmes using the best principles from the West and East –– thus the twin tools called Abacus and Brain Gym. Today, it has a standing in nine countries with over two lakh students. In India, it functions in 20 states with a total of 450 centres of which 75 are in Karnataka alone. Only those between the ages of seven and 12 can enroll.
The Abacus works on the principle that learning any skill happens in three ways –– kinesthetic, visual and auditory, explains Hemamalini Ganesan, Product Head, SIP Academy India Pvt Ltd. It uses numbers as tools. Thus the child learns mental arithmetic. We get a demo of this when instructor-cum-franchisee Saraswati Nagesh, holding a timer, asks her students Aishwarya and Sathwik to do a long series of additions and subtractions. Computing mentally, the children arrive at the result in 18 seconds, compared to nearly two minutes if one used a calculator.
Though this mental arithmetic is the most visible result, there are other benefits too, points out Hemamalini. Like enhanced comprehension, logical thinking, observation and memory power. Concentration powers also increase. The Brain Gym, based on the principles of Educational Kinesiology, employs a series of simple movements or exercises to energise the brain i.e. learning to use both left and right sides of the brain. The SIP module has eight levels followed by three grandmaster ones. Parents are told not to expect results until at least three modules are completed.
What is a teaching programme without competition and prizes? SIP holds three annual contests –– regional, national and international. H N Narayana, Area Partner, proudly tells you that Karnataka is the national leader with 183 out of the 600 prizes in 2008 having gone to the state’s students.
Much of the spread of the nominally-priced programme can be attributed to word-of-mouth. School-teachers and parents who see improvement in their children’s performances tend to tell others. Parents have tested their children using calculators and found that the child using mental arithmetic arrived at the result faster. Such experiences coupled with improved grades at school and general increase in powers of concentration that children begin to demonstrate in any task, academic or otherwise, impresses the parents who then spread the word.
Teachers M Vijaylakshmi, R Jayashri and R Geetha report that parents of a child who was learning mridangam, told them that the child was now handling the complex rhythmic patterns that this percussion instrument involves, with greater ease after his SIP classes.
In some cases, a parent is so impressed with her SIP-trained child’s performance that she turns instructor herself and later a franchisee, as with Veena Joshi.
Also, SIP is, hearteningly, not a city-centric programme. At Ranebennur, for instance, teacher-franchisee Geetha Reddy has nearly 300 students with many of them being prize-winners at national and international levels, she says with pride.
For the differently-abled
A few special children are also enrolled at various centres across the country. They are taught in separate classes and even have a special abacus designed for them. The feedback from teachers and parents has been that this programme improves their attention-span and motor-coordination. Madhuram Narayan Centre for Exceptional Children in Chennai trained 140 students in Brain Gym. The teachers reported improved concentration and even better neck movements in children with cerebral palsy.
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| Better safe than sorry? More... |
19-01-2009 |
| There are all kinds of predators on the internet. Violence shown on TV and in video games has been known to influence behavioural changes among children. Yet, not all parents hasten to ban TV and gaming from their homes. But is it alright to allow unsupervised watching of TV and surfing of the internet? | |
 Many present day parents, teachers and elders seem to feel that TV, Computers, films and media have become part of the norm. It is felt that children and teenagers are mesmerised into passive consumers. Is this true? Should parents react to the degradation of ‘values’ by blaming all of them - school, peers, TV, movies, computers - and never look into themselves for what is happening to their children?
Those were the days when we as youngsters were not taught values. We just imbibed it from our elders. Fortunately or unfortunately we neither had TV sets, computers nor mobile phones. We only had the radio to listen to and films to watch in theatres. Entertainment was only seen and enjoyed as a temporary fantasy. Just an escape from reality; but in the present scene all the above have become the accepted mainstay. Though they do have some influence on the younger generation it is not always true that they are the prime factors of distraction as many want to believe. Much depends on parents who can be powerful role-models thwarting temptations without saying it to them in so many words. The more you preach the more adamant they become.
Though I belong to the pre-television and pre-computer age, my parents never imposed any restrictions on us as regards to what we should listen (radio) or read. We saw a number of English movies with our parents and had access to many foreign journals and magazines. I do not remember my parents chastising us for reading them nor did they lecture to us about the ‘good’ and ‘evil’ of them.
We were always told that ‘western culture’ was different from ours and that’s the way they were. It had never bothered us and we never identified ourselves with what we read or saw. To us they were different and they were entertaining. Period!
Bad Words
First, what are ‘bad words’? Children take delight in learning new words and they are on a roll linguistically. If they listen to ‘filthy’ and ‘bad’ words spoken at home, often by their own family, they cannot resist using them. It is not always right to blame the school and peers, fly off the handle and turn all shades of red and blue each time they hear their child using foul language. First, they should check their own vocabulary while speaking to others. Authoritarian parenting seldom works. It may sound like blasphemy to some, but that is the truth.
Dr Kevin Leman, a well known psychologist has said “God’s plan is for mutual respect and consideration: children honouring parents in their turn honouring their children in return is the best way to parenting.”
Just like how babies vary in their ability to wean themselves from the breast to the bottle and later to the cup, they vary in weaning themselves from many childhood attachments.
They also vary in the way they behave. Much depends on the availability of substitutes. It is at this crucial time that parents should introduce them to right substitutes. Books, bat and ball, games, puzzles, cross-words and scrabble, which are suitable to their ages, are perhaps the best substitutes. Parents’ involvement with these things with the children makes it a wholesome entertainment and they will never crave for other addictable variants through TV, Computer and movies.
Playing outside with friends should be an enjoyable experience for children. It is not correct to say: “Don’t bother me. Go out and play.” The child may walk away but deep inside her psyche something tells her that the mother is wanting her to go out and play so that she is not ‘bothered by me’. They are very quick to take cues from such statements and parents better watch out!
Story telling is perhaps one of the best ways to keep any child engaged. It should not just be a school programme. Personally, I feel that ‘myths’ are symbolic and that is one of the reasons why children love them. Though the symbolism is not explicit, its subtlety is what appeals to young minds. The significance need not be explained in so many words, it generally gets across without any explanation. Explanation of morals and values spoils it. Psychologists agree that the child’s listening to such tales is therapeutically helpful to them in learning to adjust to adult realities and eggs them on to what the psychologists call ‘Imagineering’!
Creativity is not something that is mystical, magical or beyond the comprehension of children. Reading stories, listening to them and as they grow a little older, even writing them will nurture and exercise the creative abilities in them. George Bernard Shah believed that “imagination was the beginning of creation”.
The Present Day Problem
The present day problem is that parents are unable to spend a lot of time with their children due to various reasons. It is either due to both parents working long hours outside home and also staying in nuclear families. This, to a large extent is the reason for children getting addicted to TV, Computers, movies and peer influences. It is necessary to achieve some kind of balance between work and staying home with children at least during their vacation and just being with them, instead of packing them away for various classes during their vacation.
Srijaya Char
My friend’s daughter, Shruti, is a bright, talented and inquisitive thirteen-year-old. Like all other youngsters, she enjoys watching TV and likes to spend time browsing on the internet. This, her mother Kanchan tells me, has led to at least two disturbing developments. Entranced by the lively dances shown on TV, Shruti dropped out of Bharatanatyam classes and is now training in ‘Salsa’. Also the time devoted to the internet has meant that she spends less time reading books. Shruti dismisses these accusations with typical teenage annoyance and disregard. She asserts that her mother nags her too much. She claims that Bharatanatyam is both demanding and outdated, while Salsa is fun and popular. And had not TV helped her improve her Hindi in record time? The internet, she argued, helped her get news, views and information at the click of a mouse. It was in fact a global, up-to-the-minute newspaper. Could anything be wrong with that?
The situation that Kanchan and Shruti find themselves in is typical of many homes not merely in our country but the world as well. We, parents and teachers, must face it; TV and Internet are here to stay. Having these facilities in the home and asking our children not to use them is like leaving the doors to our house open and not expecting outsiders to enter!
The question that faces us then is not one of allowing access to TV and internet; it is one of deciding what and how much should be permitted. The chief concern of course is the influence of so much violence, crime and sex. Let us tackle violence first.
One argument is that violence on screen may breed violence in the mind. From playing with bows and arrows and causing severe injury as a result of watching Ramayan, to committing murder after viewing ‘Scream’, TV has been blamed for inciting violence in the young. People worry that children will not only become desensitised to suffering but start believing that violence is acceptable. Some could even identify themselves with violent characters on the screen. They may try to solve their own problems in a similar violent way. There is the addiction angle too. The excitement experienced may have them asking for more. On the other hand, it must be admitted that children have always enjoyed sword-fights and gun-fights with ‘pretend’ weapons. The violence we see on TV today, we read in books in the past. Many fairy tales are every bit as cruel and full of violence, but it did not make many of us take to violent ways.
What then is the sensible attitude to take? While children should not be allowed to watch ultra-violent scenes for too long, a little bit now and then will not turn them into killers. It is for parents to keep track of what children watch, spell out ideals and, most importantly, set an example. If children know the standards they are expected to have, they will live up to them.
Apart from violence, there is the question of sex. It is a topic that arouses great curiosity and interest in children and is dealt with in movies and the internet with freedom and sometimes a lack of discretion.
Facts of life
All children seek knowledge about the facts of life. Children of today know more than those of even a generation ago. Their ideas are picked up from siblings, friends and of course the media. They search privately for revealing matter and draw conclusions from this. At this stage pornography can exert a fatal attraction and hook them. The wise and loving parent will be aware of this and take care to explain the facts of life, all the time adjusting the information to the child’s readiness to receive it. By now, he will have heard the biological truth from his teacher as well. This will counter any temptations that corrupting influences in the media may have.
There are some steps that parents can adopt to shield their children from harmful viewing. Make rules and set a limit to the time spent on TV and internet. Make sure that the child spends time doing other things like reading and playing with friends. Make it a point to spend time with him and take an interest in his activities. Inspect his school books and keep in touch with his teachers. If you find your child secretive and inclined to be alone, find out why. Above all, if you find anything that is objectionable on TV or the internet, form a group and complain. It could well bring about the change you want
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| REPUBLIC DAY OF INDIA More... |
26-01-2009 |
The Republic Day of India is a national holiday of India to mark the adoption of the Constitution of India and the transition of India from a British Dominion to a republic on January 26, 1950. It is one of the three national holidays in India. History Although India obtained its independence on August 15, 1947, the Constitution of India came into effect only on January 26, 1950. During the transition period from 1947 to 1950, King George VI was the head of country. C. Rajagopalachari served as the Governor-General of India during this period. Following January 26, 1950, Rajendra Prasad was elected as the president of India.. [edit] CelebrationsTo mark the importance of this occasion, every year a grand parade is held in the capital, New Delhi, from the Raisina Hill near the Rashtrapati Bhavan (President's Palace), along the Rajpath, past India Gate and on to the historic Red Fort. The different regiments of the Army, the Navy and the Air Force march past in all their finery and official decorations. The President of India who is the Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Armed Forces, takes the salute. Parades demonstrating the cultures of the various states and regions of India are also held and broadcast nationwide on television. The parade also includes vibrant displays and floats and traditionally ends with a flypast by Indian Air Force jets. Celebrations are also held in state capitals, where the governor of the state unfurls the national flag. If the Governor of the state is unwell, or is unavailable for some reason, the Chief Minister of the state assumes the honor of unfurling the National Flag of India. |
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| For a complete MBA... More... |
02-02-2009 |
| Kirloskar Institute of Advanced Management Studies, with its annual rural fair, gives students an opportunity to explore the many facets of an MBA degree, says Rajeswari Nandyal | |
 The need of the hour is nurturing managerial and organisational excellence in the context of the liberalisation of
the Indian economy. To this end, Kirloskar Institute Of Advanced Management Studies (KIAMS) started a two-year full-time residential Post Graduate Diploma in Management Programme (PGDM), in a state–of–art learning environment, in 1998. The placement record has been 100% so far.
Established on the banks of the river Tungabhadra in Harihar, a 270 kms drive from Bangalore, the campus is a picturesque entity in itself, which powers creative thinking and learning. Admission to the two year PGDM is through CAT or Xavier Admission Test (XAT).
KIAMS is an independent autonomous body. Students here get familiar with a wide range of managerial skills and operating techniques and the ability to think critically and rationally. Alliance with Kirloskar group of companies enables them to have hands–on experience and link theory to practice.
The institute offers 76 courses in the PGDM programme. During the second year, students are given the opportunity to adapt the programme according to their personal requirements. Hands on experience – a vital part of PGDM is assisted in the first year by taking students on industry visits, summer internship at the end of first year for 6-8 weeks.
In the second year students go through Capstone exercise where a live problem in the industry is taken and a solution is provided. They also take live industry projects as part of their course requirements.
There is more here than just classroom teaching. Manage-ment discussions provides a competitive forum to the students to show case their insight and is conducted twice a year.
The annual all India competitions saw an incredible response from more than 60 B-schools last year. It provides an opportunity to students to participate in management events of other B-schools.
Chanakya – the institute’s newsletter with five publications every year – reflects the students’ understanding and perception of the current economic and corporate scenario. Articles include features on emerging trends in management and interviews of prominent corporate leaders.
Pragati is an annual rural marketing fair designed entirely by these students, providing a unique prospect for corporate houses to introduce and sell their products, brands and services. It is the only rural commercial event of its kind held in this part of Karnataka.
Pragati 2006 and 2007 received a huge response with participation of over 40 firms and nearly a lakh attending the fair from all parts of Karnataka.
Through this a rural database is provided for companies with information regarding consumer awareness and the trends in rural Karnataka. Kalasanchay is the cultural wing of KIAMS, where programmes are held regularly for students to exhibit their talents. Local invitees also attend these events. All major festivals are celebrated so as to bring students closer to one another and in the process teach them to appreciate different cultures.
The PGDM programme is made easy for the students by bringing about a balance between work and leisure. Sports events are arranged annually with morning and evening exercises a must. Harihar being near many tourist locations and amidst nature, trips are undertaken during breaks. This brings a lasting network of contacts and friendships and ensures good bonding amongst students, faculty and staff.
The students are given executive style, twin sharing rooms with telephone facility and a modern kitchen where healthy, nutritious food is provided every day. Classrooms are air-conditioned with built in audio-visual aids. Contemporary collection of books, periodicals and newspapers, company annual reports, case studies from Harvard and management compact discs comprise the library.
A well stocked computer lab with internet and video conferencing facility to enhance the reach of the campus globally is also available to students.
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