SAST Wingees

Comments (0)

FTOTW4 – best links of the week ending 4-September-2011

Prolog

Here are the best links shared on my tweet stream this week.

Best Links

1. rsukumar: RT @ArunSN fostering innovation is harder than it seems “Xerox PARC,Apple & the Mouse” by @Gladwell FTOTW Link 14 ~ vv interesting

2. rsukumar: RT @thisissrividya: The economics of beauty. Extremely insightful. FTOTW Link 15 via @speaktosriram ~ vv interesting

3. rsukumar: Behold, the $15 LED bulb FTOTW Link 16 ~ vv cool. product of indo-us collaboration /via @srini_venkat

4. rsukumar: FTOTW Link 17 just finished reading Mojo by Marshall Goldsmith ~ brilliant /thnx @KumarSachi

5. rsukumar: RT @gvaidees: Human Brains Are Primally Wired to Notice Animals FTOTW Link 18. Evolution dictated dedicated processing area ~ vv cool

Epilog

Hope enjoyed the links? Did you come across any good links you want to share? Please share in the comments below.

References

I use a certain ratings scale for my annotations which are explained here.

Comments (0)

FTOTW3 – best links of the week ending 28-August-2011

Prolog

Here are the best links shared on my tweet stream this week.

Best Links

1. rsukumar: RT @work_matters: 5 Warning Signs Apple is Starting to Slip FTOTW Link 8 ~ vv insightful. Excellent forecast.

2. rsukumar: RT @4KM: MT @graingered: Can Schools Teach #Empathy? FTOTW Link 9 via @AddToAny #ecosys #ed ~ vv insightful

3. rsukumar: RT @michelsagen: Good article, lots of sound advice: If you wouldn’t do your job for free, then quit. FTOTW Link 10 ~ vv interesting

4. rsukumar: RT @ericries: Learning to Be a Lean Startup: Interview with Elizabeth Yin of Recently Pivoted LaunchBit FTOTW Link 11 ~ insightful

5. rsukumar: RT @AMAnet: Why Your IT Project May Be Riskier Than You Think. (RT @derbrad) #project #it #pmot | FTOTW Link 12 ~ vv insightful

6. rsukumar: RT “@DanielPeterson: 7 Things McDonald’s Knows About Your Brain | Psychology Today FTOTW Link 13 ~ vv insightful

Epilog

Hope enjoyed the links? Did you come across any good links you want to share? Please share in the comments below.

References

I use a certain ratings scale for my annotations which are explained here.

Comments (2)

FTOTW2 – best links of the week ending 21-August-2011

Prolog

Here are the best links shared on my tweet stream this week.

Best Links

1. rsukumar: /via @sandygautam Retrain your stressed-out brain by Daniel Goleman | Psychology Today FTOTW Link 3 ~ vv insightful

2. rsukumar: RT @galipeau: #Psychopaths and Big Money – It All Adds Up – FTOTW Link 4 #psychology ~ vv interesting

3. rsukumar: RT @ananthavsagar: 13-year-old makes a Solar Breakthrough with Fibonacci Seq ~ FTOTW Link 5 & FTOTW Link 6 ~ #*;!ing brilliant

4. rsukumar: Retail’s BIG Blog | The secret sauce in the Pizza Hut iPhone app FTOTW Link 7 ~ insightful /via smartbrief

Epilog

Hope enjoyed the links? Did you come across any good links you want to share? Please share in the comments below.

References

I use a certain ratings scale for my annotations which are explained here.

Comments (0)

FTOTW1 – best links of the week ending 14-August-2011

Prolog

Here are the best links shared on my tweet stream this week.

Best Links

1. rsukumar: Designing for delight by @gilescolborne) FTOTW Link 1 ~ brilliant /via @GrahamHill
2. rsukumar: RT @4KM: When Knowledge Isn’t Written, Does It Still Count? [NYT] FTOTW Link 2 #epistemology #KM #wiki ~ vv insightful
3. @rsukumar: RT @BelladonnaIT. @Sarcasan on how to eat South Indian Thali Meals: http://j.mp/qzxlw0 Highly recommended. ~ brilliant. hilarious. ROTFL.
4. @rsukumar: RT @GarethIdeas: Ideology of No — how liberals & conservatives respond differently to negatives.  ~ vv interesting
5. @rsukumar: RT @thej: How to Level Up as a Developer http://j.mp/nTVOum must read for all developers. ~ vv insightful
6. @rsukumar: RT @dorait: The Three Waves of Enterprise 2.0  #trends ~ insightful
7. @rsukumar: RT @pascalvenier: Sustainable Perfection: A Michigan Couple’s Model Green Home~ vv cool
8. @rsukumar: RT @kingofchola Storytelling: digital technology allows us to tell tales in innovative new ways~ vv interesting

Epilog

Hope enjoyed the links? Did you come across any good links you want to share? Please share in the comments below.

References

I use a certain ratings scale for my annotations which are explained here.

Comments (13)

“Where The Mind is Without Fear: Celebrating the life and works of Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)

Recently on May 7th, 2011, as a proud nation (and even comity of nations) we celebrated the 150th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore. Our newspapers and magazines were full of coverage on Gurudev’s life, contributions and implications for the coming generations.

For me the immediate challenge was how does one pay tribute to a great man whose corpus of work is like that of an ocean? One can probably only catch up on a small fraction of that corpus in our entire lifetime.

The phenomenal character of works authored by Tagore and subsequently those written on him in Bengali, English and other Indian and world languages would constitute today miles of shelf length in any major library. He enjoys the distinction of having composed the national anthems adopted both by India (Jana Gana Mana) and Bangladesh (Amar Sonar Bangla).

In an interesting way, early on during my under-graduation itself, as a result of too much time spent indoors in school and college classrooms, it is the Santiniketan / Visva Bharati legacy that got me excited about Tagore’s contributions. The idea of a learning institution pursuing the fine arts and humanities in idyllic, sylvan settings in an informal environment reminiscent of the age-old Gurukul system to me sounded like a Eureka-moment, a unique achievement in modern education.

Tagore was critical of rote schooling. The move away from typical classroom structure and his abandoning conventional approaches to education has led later-day observers to rightly call him the ‘Father of Informal Learning in India.’ I had the pleasure of staying at Visva Bharati for a while where I could sense the spirit in which Tagore had gone about his lifetime’s work. It was a poignant experience indeed for me being in Tagore land.

Apart from his contributions to literature, arts, painting, music, education and much else, here are a few unique achievements that we are beholden to Tagore for in modern India:

Bridging the East and the West: In another blow to the Rudyard Kipling’s philosophy of the East and West not meeting each other, Tagore travelled far and wide from the America’s to Europe and East Asia. Between 1878 and 1932, Tagore visited more than 30 countries on five continents. Not only was his literary work recognized leading to the Nobel Prize in literature, but several of the acquaintances he made not only shared his interest in literature, arts and painting but also travelled to visit Santiniketan. A China Studies Bhavan was formally opened as a research department at Visva Bharati by Rabindranath Tagore on April 14, 1937 with lofty ideals of strengthening the age old cultural ties between India and China. The sheer geo-cultural breadth of Tagore’s travels has no parallel among the icons of his time.

Cosmopolitanism : Tagore had a cosmopolitan vision for India and the world respecting the plural and diverse cultures. Through all his writings, artistic works and even the statement of objectives in the founding of Visva Bharati, Tagore always worked for an amalgam of civilizations, castes, religions and gender. In a sense, he was probably the earliest in the 20th century to treat the world as a ‘global village’ and himself as a ‘global citizen’ much before technology changed the way media, communication and transport impacted how people across the globe related to one another.

Patriotism and Anti-colonialism: Tagore wrote extensively on the perils of imperialism and narrow-minded nationalism. For Gurudev, to combat such evils India required ‘moral warfare’, a great ideal that Mahatma Gandhi represented. Among the founding fathers, both Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru considered him as a guide if not their sage in their leadership of the freedom struggle. It was Gandhi who was known to have given him the title of ‘Gurudev.’

A famous instance of his rejection of colonial repression was a firm “thanks, but no thanks” statement to the British empire through the return of the knighthood given to him as a mark of protest against the 1919 Jalianwala Bagh Massacre. Tagore’s compositions such as ‘Where the mind is without fear’ and ‘If they answer not to thy call, walk alone’(the famous Ekla Chalo Re) won mass appeal. Yet as the great mind that Tagore was, it was not as if he was uncritical of some of the politics of his compatriots including aspects of the national movement that came under his scrutiny.

It would be most fitting to conclude with an excerpt from one of Tagore’s most inspiring poems:
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
……………………………………
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake

Global citizens need the above verse NOW more than ever before. Few leave behind their mark on eternity and Tagore is one among them.

References:
[Thanks to my colleague Ms. Chandra G, for terming Tagore, the‘Father of Informal Learning in India’ ]
R. Tagore, ‘The Centre of Indian Culture’ (Kolkata : ViswaBharati, 1919)
R. Tagore, ‘A vision of India’s history’ (Kolkata : ViswaBharati, 1951)
R. Tagore, ‘On Gandhi’ (New Delhi : Rupa, 2008)
Mala Bridges, ‘Santiniketan’ (Santiniketan : Subarnarekha, 1997)
http://www.visva-bharati.ac.in/Heritage/Contents/HeritageContents.htm?f=../Contents/SantiniketanAims.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabindranath_Tagore