G Plus Volume 1 Issue 45

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20 G-Talk G PLUS AUG 09 - AUG 15, 2014 SEX EDUCATION SHOULD BE INTRODUCED IN SCHOOLS N Manoj Kumar Singh Doctor Chirojyoti Bhattacharjee Artist POINT COUNTERPOINT Sexuality is an important aspect of the life of a human being and almost all people, including children, want to know about it. Hence, if the information on the physiological and sociological aspects of sexual response and reproduction is not provided to a child in its formative stages, he/she will look for other sources to learn from. Today, it is a well known fact that students are exposed to a lot of information from various sources like internet and television. In such a scenario students need to have this information made available to them through a classroom environment. I feel many parents are unwilling or unable to do so because of the insecurity they face in exposing their kids to this fundamental aspect of life. But parents should remember that it is not just okay to teach our children about maths, science and history only. If they are not informed by means such as a classroom environment, they will try to learn it from other sources, such as television and pornography, which will somehow put some kind of negativity into the process of learning. The problem of using these sources is that they provide a distorted image of sex and also do not provide information on the serious, consequences that come from using it improperly. Various statistics show the impact of not having sex educations in schools. The highest STDs and teen pregnancy is observed in schools with no sex education. Parents say that abstinence is definitely the safest of all safer-sex measures and hence children should follow only abstinence but there also comes a point at which we have to accept reality. Children today engage regularly in sexual Providing a healthy sex education program, that responds when children begin to ask about bodies and babies and develops as they do, is our responsibility practices without having any knowledge of the consequences. Hence sex needs to be dealt with in a smart, productive and educational setting by professionals. On the other hand, some parents feel their children are given details that are too explicit of sexual nature. It should be borne in mind that a good sex education program, delivered by confident adults only increases children’s knowledge about their health, equips them with communication and relationship skills. It supports them to develop positive attitudes to themselves and others. Failing to provide good sex education leaves children and young people vulnerable to exploitation, abuse, fear, misinformation and ill health. Children have the right to education, protection and healthcare. Hence providing, a healthy sex education program, that responds when children begin to ask about bodies and babies and develops as they do, is our responsibility. Sex is too sensitive a subject to be taught to school going children. Sex education cannot be taken as normal education as it involves a peculiar aspect in which children try to explore more and more .Even if schools teach the children about sex they will still watch pornography if the same is made available to them. Sex education will only make The Indian government has rejected westernstyle sex education programs, saying they do nothing to solve the problem of teenage pregnancy but only exacerbate the problem by promoting sexual promiscuity them more conscious and curious to experiment. Many surveys, which have questioned thousands of parents, found that majority do not agree with the fact that sex education should be taught to children in schools, even from a young age. Sex is a sensitive subject and parents have their own way to approach it and want to control what their children know, even more so at a young age. Sex education might encourage girls to carry condoms and boys to use them, rather than pointing out to them to stay away from sex till marriage or attaining legal age. Under age sex is illegal, so why should schools increase the desire. Giving sex education to underage children is like teaching drug addicts the safe way of having drugs. If a thing is illegal it has to be abstained from totally and the safe way of having it should not be preached at all. The Indian government has rejected western-style sex education programs, saying they do nothing to solve the problem of teenage pregnancy but only exacerbate the problem by promoting sexual promiscuity. It should be noted that sex education should be in line with the societal ethos. In India we do not preach sex before legal age and marriage which is in sharp contrast to western culture. Hence the Indian school course curriculum cannot have a sex education course in line with western culture. As found in a government report sex education in schools would strike at the root of the cultural fabric of our society that had been nourished over the millennia. If implemented it would corrupt Indian youth and lead to collapse of the education system. LETTER TO THE EDITOR Dear Editor: Through your newspaper, I would like to draw the attention of the concerned authorities towards frequent power failures in our area. There are repeated power cuts in my area. The load shedding is happens at night around 1:00 AM which lasts for an hour to hour and a half. It has become a regular feature. As a result we have to face a lot of trouble. At night the whole area plunges into total darkness and our communication system goes for a toss. We don’t get any news, information and entertainment. Students and patients really suffer due to the lack of electricity. Electrical appliances are badly damaged. I had to suffer a lot during my shortly finished semester and all the students of my area are facing the same problem. My power supply company is APDCL and Division is Garbhanga. I made a call to the complaint number to lodge complaints but nothing has been done. We have been facing this problem since the last two months. The concerned authorities are requested to please restore regular electric supply to our locality as soon as possible. H. Kalita, Student, Bhetapara Dear Editor, Being a resident of Beltola Tinali, I do not feel any communication problem basically as the distance between my home and the bus stoppage is just a one minute walk. But the whole situation gets worse when the city goes through the assembly sessions. The Bashistha-Paltanbazar city buses changes their routes from the regular ones. The buses take the Six Mile road as the Survey-Supermarket route completely gets shut during every assembly session. I am not against the session but the concerned authorities should think about the commuters too. The Six Mile route takes too much time compared to the Survey- Supermarket and therefore the passengers especially, the students and office goers has to deal with a great trouble. And this has been happening since a long time, so I request to the authorities to find a permanent solution to this problem. Moushmi Dey, Beltola Tinali
itu gupta gritu21@yahoo.com There is a difference between living a life and loving to live this life. The choice is yours. To love this life, we as individuals have to create happiness. Happiness comes from within so stop looking for it here and there. Happiness is the only ingredient needed to make you love your life. If you really want to be happy then manifest more in your world to be happy. Keep giving instructions to your sub conscious mind that you are a happy person. The moment your subconscious mind accepts your instruction, it programs your mind to stay happy. Rather than focussing on all the unhappiness, put your entire focus on things, which make you feel happy. Your intentions play a very important role. If you intend to stay happy and compassionate then nothing can affect your happiness. Change negative vision about yourself and it will help you I wish for my little boy Tirus to grow up to love his girl, companion, wife, lover and treat her like a princess. I know he will ‘cause I see the care he takes of me when I am ill and distraught. He sits next to me and strokes my hair, pulls the blanket over me and barely whispers while entering the bedroom. So, when I tell him that I want him to grow up to be a wonderful man, who has to protect all the women he knows and even those who would be strangers, the only thing Tirus does is to listen intently. I know for sure he is recording everything I am saying to him, which is really good ‘cause the World will need a lot of good people, especially men to protect the women. So, what I felt when I completed reading Gaddafi’s Harem was that we would probably need more good parents, especially mothers to love their sons. Gaddafi grew up in a Bedouin family and never got much love and attention while he was growing up. So, at 27, when he took over Libya, it was not so much as to liberate it but to set up his own kingdom; a kingdom which bled inside a veil of innocence. Gaddafi gave this impression to the rest of the world that he believed in equality of women and to make it more authentic, he even had an army of women as his guards. He traveled with them to diplomatic tours abroad, making him the cynosure of most leaders. However, Libya was crying under the cover of Gaddafi’s pseudo prophetism to ‘enhance the position of women’; and all beautiful women from the age of 12 onwards, who probably had dreams of becoming a doctor, a nurse, a beautician some day and serve their country well had their dreams snuffed out at the verge of their flight. Gaddafi’s Harem is a chronicle of Soraya, a girl born of a Libyan father and Tunisian mother, kidnapped by Gaddafi’s clique when she was barely 14 years old and repeatedly raped by him for more than a decade. Even after Gaddafi was overthrown by the rebels after 42 years of his excruciatingly torturous regime and murdered in public, Soraya was never accepted by society and is now living a life of utter remorse, repeatedly asking the question, “Why me?” It is not only Soraya but 1000s of others just like her, who were either kidnapped or trapped into prostitution. So many women have perpetually gone into hiding, some fleeing the country after Libya was temporarily taken over by the rebels, more so from the fear of being shammed by society. A riveting novel, which has more goose bump effects when Soraya narrates her story in the raw, making it somewhat unreal in parts of the nightmare she faces in the hands of the dictator. LIVE, LOVE AND KEEP GOING achieve whatever you want in life. Positive things happen with positive people. Always stay positive. It’s hard to feel happy if you feel powerless and hopeless and some people have good reason to feel this way and perhaps happiness eludes them. You’re not one of them. Empower yourself. Most people have no control over their emotional well-being. They feel ecstatic when good stuff happens and depressed when things go wrong. Their lives are roller coaster rides: sometimes up, sometimes way down. But what if you could be happy no matter what happens? Some people run after the vague meaning of happiness which makes them fall apart. More money. more power, more friends more importance... Will this make me feel happy? Is this happiness? Do reconsider... If you are just running after these things then you really need to work more. Wanting more in life is okay, but don’t forget to relax and enjoy life for what it is – in the present. Instead of blaming others for what’s wrong in your life, focus on what you can do to make things better. Never sulk and try not to feel sorry for yourself too often. It’s your responsibility to make yourself happy: nobody else’s. Gaddafis’ Harem Annick Cojean, the French writer however, did get death threats for trying to reach out to most of the people involved in Gaddafi’s Harem, Bab-Al-Azizia and get the pieces of the story together. Closer home, there isn’t a single day when we don’t hear of rape of women, starting from as young as 2 years. 2,3,6, right upto 60! These are no longer numbers but ages of women who have been raped gruesomely and then most often killed. When we ask this most literal question, “What made that man rape a woman?”, we have thoughts of nothing but the most monstrous punishment for the rapist! But have we ever thought of talking to this criminal; about why he had come to such a psychological impasse that led him to tear apart ‘the delicate woman’? Probably not! But on a personal level, I thinking talking about a problem, which we as individuals don’t give much importance, should be done more often. Today, we have less time to talk or listen to a problem when it comes to our child. Listening to our child, getting him/her to talk about the inherent fears, insecurities, disturbing thoughts should be done on a daily basis. Rest I think Love will do the magic to create some fantastic people for the future! So just spread the love and feel the thrill! tinat ATIFA MASOOD In India, there is a famous story of Eklavya (a character from the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata). Eklavya is considered the epitome of a disciple. As the story goes, Eklavya wanted to learn archery to save the deer in the forest that were being hunted by the leopards. He was the son of a poor hunter. So he went to Dronacharya(a master of advanced military arts) and requested him to teach him archery, butDronacharya rejected him because he was the teacher of the Royal family, he was a Raj Guru. He was teaching the royal princes of Bharat (India). Wisdom is a quality of consciousness. It can be developed through sadhana, or grace, not through information. Wisdom can directly be instilled in two ways: 1. Through spiritual practices (sadhana). 2. By putting your attention on it. In those days, if you are a teacher of the royal princes then you cannot take someone else and teach them archery and make them equal to the prince. It was not considered ethical. You are teaching archery to the prince so that you make him a great archer, to protect the nation. So you cannot teach someone from the street the same knowledge. It was forbidden to make anyone as powerful as the prince. His duty is to make the prince very powerful, so he cannot create a competitor. Otherwise the nation would not be safe and secure. So, Eklavya wanted to take Dronacharya as his Guru, but Dronacharya could not accept him. This was the law of the land, that you have to exclusively train the princes. Nevertheless Eklavya accepted Dronacharya as his Guru, and he went home and made a statue of his Guru. He learnt archery and became even better than the prince. He became an expert. He would just hear the sound of the animal and shoot an arrow at it. One day, Arjuna, the prince found out about this. He saw that Eklavya was far better than him. So he went to Eklavya and asked him, ‘Who is your Guru?’ Eklavya said, ‘Dronacharya is my Guru’. Arjuna then goes to Dronacharya and shouts at him. ‘What is this? This is cheating. You are supposed to teach only me, but you taught this man and made him more skilful than me’, he questions Dronacharya. Dronacharya was baffled as to who was this student of his, whom he had not taught, and who has become a competitor of the prince. Then they both go and meet this boy. Eklavyaleads them to the statue that he made of Dronacharya which he considered as his Guru. Dronacharya then says, ‘You have to give me some Dakshina (a gift as fees for learning)’. He asks Eklavya to give him the thumb of his right hand as a gift (without the thumb there is no archery). Eklavya without a second thought gives the thumb of his right hand to the Guru. This story is viewed as the Guru to have a very cruel attitude. The boy has learnt on his own, while Dronacharya goes and asks for his thumb taking away his skill. How bad this Guru was! This is one way to see: the Guru robbed the student of his skill. But from the other side, if you see, if it were not for this incident, nobody would have ever known Eklavya. Though on the outer level it seemed as if Dronacharya had done injustice to Eklavya, but actually Dronacharya uplifted Eklavya because this one act made him immortal. So when people think of devotion, they think of Eklavya, and not Arjuna. When you wake up in the morning, think of the Guru, or any wise person, or any saint, so that your consciousness becomes like that. Then the whole day passes by like that because you have incorporated wisdom (by remembering the Guru), and the quality of consciousness has changed to that level. This is called Pratah Smaraniya. See the greatness of Dronacharya, he took the blame on him and uplifted his student.That is why, even if the Guru is wrong, if your devotion is there you can never go wrong. But the Guru is not wrong, it appears he was partial but he uplifted Eklavya and preserved his Dharma (duty) also. His duty was to maintain the law of the land: You cannot have anyone much better than the prince. This is a beautiful story. There is a full dialogue on this which people say is very good. Yoga Vashishtha is another very nice story of how Vashishtha gives knowledge to Sri Rama. You should read Yoga Vashishtha, it is a very beautiful way in which Vashishtha gives knowledge to Sri Rama and uplifts him from depression; makes him realize that he is an incarnate of the Divine and the light of the world. So again, wisdom is a quality of consciousness. It can be developed through sadhana, or grace, not through information. Wisdom can directly be instilled in two ways: 1. Through spiritual practises (sadhana). Through G PLUS AUG 09 - AUG 15, 2014 21 Life Wisdom Catches Wisdom sadhana that quality of consciousness develops in you, or 2. By putting your attention on it. See, whatever you put your attention on, that quality comes into your consciousness. You become that. If you keep thinking about monkeys all your life, then... (laugher). Or if you keep thinking of someone who is angry all the time, you will also get into that state of anger. Haven’t you experienced this? (Many raise their hands) So wherever the mind goes it absorbs those qualities. So when you put your attention on wisdom, then your consciousness becomes like that. That is someone who is enlightened or very wise is called Pratah Smaraniya. It’s a very common word used in India. It means, that which is worth remembering first thing in the morning. As soon as you wake up whom do you think of? Whomever or whatever you think of, your mind assumes that quality. That is why it is said, when you wake up in the morning, think of the Guru, or any wise person, or any saint, so that your consciousness becomes like that. Then the whole day passes by like that because you have incorporated wisdom (by remembering the Guru), and the quality of consciousness has changed to that level. This is called Pratah Smaraniya. Wisdom catches wisdom. In the company of wise people, your quality of consciousness also shifts. A man of great achievement and a saintly person is called Pratah Smaraniya. Pratahmeans Morning, and Smaraniya meansWorth Remembering. That which is worth remembering first thing in the morning. Usually people say a prayer before going to bed, and as soon as they wake up, they say a prayer. Like that, in the morning it is worth remembering those with wisdom so that you become wise. That is a practice, and it makes a lot of sense. We are in a world where emotion catches emotion. If some people have an emotion, others catch that emotion. Similarly, wisdom catches wisdom. In the company of wise people, your quality of consciousness also shifts. If it doesn’t, then you have to think why not? Maybe Time could be a factor, because it is impossible not to change when there is wisdom in somebody around you. Remember this: Wisdom is not information. It is a quality of consciousness. When you walk around today, or any day from today, think that you have a diamond inside of you, a gem inside. You have acquired some gems, some wisdom. Walk in life with the feeling that you’ve been given something very precious. A lady saint called Meera, a devotee of Lord Krishna, could not make progress without a Guru. So she went to a cobbler (a person who makes shoes), and he became her Guru, and then she sang the song, ‘Payoji Maine Ram Ratan Dhan Payo’ (meaning: today I got the most precious wealth). Though she was a devotee of Krishna, the Guru gave her the mantra ‘Ram’ (laughter), and Ram and Krishna are completely opposite. Whatever Ram did, Krishna undid it all. Have you heard the comparison between Ram and Krishna? (Audience says, ‘No’) Ram was born at 12 noon and Krishna was born at midnight. When Ram was born there was a big celebration, but when Krishna was born there was fear all around. Ram was born in a palace, Krishna was born in prison. Ram will not cross the line and would obey what his father said, and Krishna never listened to his father. Many such things, completely opposite. That’s why people say, you should follow Ram and not Krishna. You should listen to what Krishna said but you should act like Ram. It is easier for the parents and the spouse. Remember this: Wisdom is not information. It is a quality of consciousness. So she used to sing the name of Krishna all the time, and her Guru gave her the mantra ‘Ram’, and so she sings, ‘Payoji Maine Ram Ratan Dhan Payo’. What I am saying is that, even though her Guru gave her the mantra ‘Ram’, it did not cause any conflict in her. If someone is Christian, a Sikh, a Budhist or a Hindu, it doesn’t matter. Whatever religion you are born into, or whatever religion you practise, it doesn’t matter. The spiritual wisdom carries you forward, so honour the knowledge. That is why Meera sings, ‘Payoji Maine Ram Ratan Dhan Payo’. It is a very famous song in India; most Indians have heard this. So Meera says that this is a wealth I received, a blessing I received. It is a great wealth. His Holiness Sri Sri Ravi Shankar Ji
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