Precious Pearls

Mathematics was a subject I never liked in my schooldays. Thanks to my phobia for calculations, I could never get its basics right. Instead of understanding things, I chose to bank on my memorising skills. Parroting textbook was never my calling but I made it an exception for maths. After Class XII, when I somehow managed to cope with limits, derivatives and integration, I decided to bid adieu to the subject.   A refrain I often hear from people makes me look at the subject from a different perspective. It’s the theory negatives they apply to life and relationships. They believe that two negatives make a positive. It’s half-truth. Mathematical equations seem to offer innovative ways to explain intricacies of human relationships. I happened to attend a corporate training session where a trainer was explaining how two negatives add to a negative. I have a different angle and guess what, I go parallel to the subject, dislike for which, I’ve already displayed. I believe human relation...

Photograph of this 11-year-old boy stealing a wine bottle from a broken shop in recent London riots hugely upset me. He was reportedly the youngest looter among a few thousands charge-sheeted. We all know United Kingdom recently faced one of its worst crises. The rioting and looting is indeed disturbing but what is more worrying is the kid stealing alcohol. It cannot be looked at as a case in isolation but has deeper undercurrents. The boy appears too young and immature to understand implications of his action. However, we, as mature and sensible people, need to dwell on repercussions of this and try to find answers to questions the London riots have thrown up. Gunning down of a 29-year-old jobless black man, reportedly innocent, by the police triggered the chain of occurrences. Protests began and resentment spread like wild fire through social networking. Involvement of young people in the riots stunned the world. Experts have attributed the trouble to unemployment, racial discrim...

All of us love to capture nice moments in camera and no wonder, photo and video shoots are integral parts of our family functions and excursions. Now imagine this. While you are out on a picnic or hosting a party, you know you are under ‘watch’ and it would all go into police records for security reasons. That’s not funny, you would say. Consider another case. You are texting a message to someone and the person next to you glances at your cell phone. It does irritate, doesn’t it? Well, the content would often be perfectly okay for anyone to see it but why an uncalled for curiosity, you would wonder. There may be nothing private, fine. It doesn’t mean it should be public! Each of has one’s privacy intruded sometime or the other. Personal space, privacy and freedom are the watchwords in today’s world and interestingly, all of us seem using these terms as per our convenience. More importantly, people across age groups and cross-sections — kids to old and policy-makers to preachers — look...