Remembrance of things past: high school ends :(

This March, it is 30 years since the final class XII, CBSE, exams ended.

I recall "Alaigal Oivathillai" as the defining Tamil movie of the year, with a whole bunch of songs that seemed to be at the loudest volumes at every street corner.  Wikipedia says that the movie was released in 1980, but ... perhaps my memory is faded.  Or, maybe like we instruct students, hey, don't trust Wikipedia :) ...



Anyway, as I think back now, I realize now that I had intense pangs about leaving the town and school, which had been my world throughout my entire life until then. I was barely a month past turning 17 when the exams were all over and I had no idea how to express in words my anxiety that I might never see most of my classmates again.  It was much later in life, when I watched American Graffiti for the first time that I was even able to package all those high school leaving emotions into something understandable as one of the important milestones in one's life.



Thirty years!

I recall watching a movie in Bangalore, where a bunch of us went to take some stupid exam.  I couldn't care about the exam, and was a lot more excited by the fact that it was my first ever trip to that city.  All I remember from that trip was an important intersection in town called the Kempe Gowda Circle.  And the cinema hall where we watched Love Story was near this intersection.  Here is a song from that movie:


Did you catch something that sounds almost like an Abba tune in the beginning of the song, and throughout?  Oh well, the composer, R.D. Burman was notorious for mixing popular music from the West into his compositions.

Educating College Graduates So They Can be Unemployed

That is the title of this post at the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. 

if young people with college degrees can’t survive in the post-recession era, nobody can. And this explodes the idea that education alone, instead of monetary and fiscal policy, is the way out of our current high unemployment rate.
I’ve been on a kick of watching the employment rates of 20-24 year olds with college degrees as a barometer for our economy’s health for some time. Some people on the right get that this is going to kill a generation – David Frum in particular has done great work. But in general everyone on the right is screaming about the Europeanization of the U.S. economy. Ironically, they have been screaming about the part where we could get universal health care and some decent trains and not the part where the young generation that is supposed to start building their careers, innovating and creating the future of the economy, is sitting idle. The part where a generation becomes permanently detached from the formal labor markets. An economy of insiders and outsiders.

I simply cannot understand why we fail to even acknowledge this growing and urgent problem of the idling of the youth.  For their own personal and professional growth, and for society as a whole, the youth need to be actively involved in the economy.  Yet, that is not happening.  And, we are hell bent on making it worse for them by forcing higher education down their throats and then idling them.

Colleges and universities are having a great time as a result--record enrollments.  Don't listen to the faculty or administration talk about not having enough money.  Of course that is what ponzi schemers will try to convince you.  After all, if they don't have money, how come they build multimillion dollar buildings with rock-climbing-walls, right?

I wish we would stop telling students in high school that a college degree is their passport to successful middle class lives.  Allow them to pursue their own interests, and don't put down their vocational curiosities.  If they want to learn about Socrates, awesome. But let us also make sure they understand that understanding Socrates will not necessarily lead to dollars; perhaps cents, yes.  And if they still want to learn, terrific!

Obama, Libya, and his Nobel Peace Prize ... and more

Pictures easily convey what a gazillion words might not:

Oh the irony of being the only Nobel Peace Prize recipient to have launched missiles!  But then maybe he is Bush; on Obama and his advisers being the center-left version of Bush and his neo-conservative advisers:

So, maybe Obama deserves not the Nobel but the Oscar for ...

Do we have any alternatives?  Nope; all we have is crazies like this:

Or this one:

Meanwhile, the deficit and debt keeps growing; the mushroom cloud we need to worry about:

But, in a democracy (however weak it might be) the state of the nation depends on we the people:

So, what is the bottom line?