As the dawn breaks over the vibrant tapestry of India, the first rays of sunlight illuminate the dreams and aspirations etched on the faces of millions of young Indians. As we approach International Youth Day on 12 August and our 78th Independence Day on 15 August, it’s time to reflect on these dreams — dreams that pulse with hope but are often threatened by the harsh realities of our society.

Breaking Societal Shackles

Our youth are ensnared in a web of stereotypes and societal expectations that equate success solely with white-collar jobs. This narrow definition stifles creativity and smothers innovation, forcing countless young minds into paths that do not align with their passions. Picture Priya, a vibrant soul with an artist’s heart, coerced into the rigid confines of engineering because it’s deemed more ‘respectable’. Her palette of dreams is muted, her aspirations silenced. It’s time to shatter these shackles and celebrate diverse careers that honour individual talents and passions.

Cultivating Policies: From Blueprint to Reality

Imagine a garden, lush with potential, yet marred by the choking weeds of inadequate policies. Government initiatives, despite their noble intentions, often wither in the face of poor implementation. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 promises a revolution in education, but without proper execution, it remains a blueprint gathering dust.

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World Day Against Child Labour is an annual event observed on 12 June every year. It is dedicated to raising awareness and taking action against the exploitation of children in the workforce. The theme for the 2024 campaign, “Let’s Act on Our Commitments: End Child Labour!”, underscores the urgent need to fulfill our promises and obligations to eradicate child labour globally.

This significant day commemorates the 25th anniversary of the adoption of the ILO (International Labour Organization) Convention No. 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labour in 1999, a landmark treaty that became the first ILO Convention to be universally ratified in 2020. This convention represents a crucial step towards eliminating the most egregious forms of child labour and ensuring the protection of children’s rights.

Child labour is defined as the exploitation of children through any form of work that deprives them of their childhood, interrupts their education, or harms their physical, mental, or social development. It remains a pressing issue worldwide.

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Mental health problems exist in our lives, families, workplaces and communities, impacting everyone. We need to do as much as possible to prevent mental ill-health as individuals and as a society. We need to talk about mental health, in general, how we need to look after it, and how important it is to talk about things and get help if one is struggling.

Another important aspect of concern in our country is the rising rate of suicides. About 800,000 people die by suicide worldwide every year. Suicides in India rose 10 per cent from 2019 to an all-time high of 1,53,052 in the pandemic year of 2020, with student suicides seeing the highest percentage increase at 21.20 per cent, according to the latest data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). In 2019, Maharashtra recorded the highest number of deaths by suicide followed by Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka. These five states together accounted for almost half the total suicides recorded in India in that year. The male-to-female suicide ratio is around 70.2:29.8, which means that the number of men committing suicide is three times higher than that of women.

Factors contributing to suicide in India in 2020

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We often blame God for sicknesses, not realizing that we bring them on ourselves. I am thankful to my daughter, Minal, who brought to my attention the hidden cost of cosmetics and beauty aids. Minal and I have switched to soaps and shampoos made by cottage industries. It is back to nature for us.

According to azchemistry.com, the highly toxic chemical mercury is found in some skin-whitening creams and mascara. It causes allergies and damages the nervous system. Beauty isn’t skin deep, especially when cosmetics contain laboratory-made chemicals slowly and steadily go through the pores of the skin and attack our vital organs. Imagine a stone placed beneath a tap that keeps on dripping one drop at a time. The water is slowly but surely wearing away the stone until there is a dent in the stone.

Talc used in eye shadows, blush, deodorants and soaps is carcinogenic. It is a mineral often found along with the deadly carcinogenic chemical asbestos. Hence, talcum powder is sometimes contaminated with asbestos. Talcum powder and foundation also block the pores of the skin, thereby accelerating aging. Aluminium found in some cosmetics could cause breast cancer and Alzheimer’s.

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The United Nations General Assembly declared 11 February as the International Day of Women and Girls in Science to help achieve equal access and participation in science for women and girls, and further achieve gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls. A significant gender gap has persisted throughout the years at all levels of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines all over the world. Even though women have made tremendous progress towards increasing their participation in higher education, they are still under-represented in these fields.

The number of women working, studying and researching in science fields needs to increase significantly over the next few years, as they have a huge role in pushing science forward. We need more girls and women in science and we can support this by encouraging young girls to choose careers in science and showing them female role models who made significant contributions to the world of science.

Let’s take a look at some women role models in science.

Marie Curie: Together with her husband, she was awarded half of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903 for their study into spontaneous radiation.

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My student, Anargh, was a promising table tennis player, and we hoped that he would definitely secure a gold medal at the university level for the college. But unfortunately, one day, just 200 metres away from the college gate, he had a severe scooter accident and was critically injured on his head. He had to fight for his life for many months and miraculously survived. Five years on, Anargh is able to walk but with severe constraints, and is not yet able to speak coherently, nor is he able to pursue his sports.

Why did he have such a severe accident?

1. He did not wear a helmet.

2. He was over speeding and lost his balance.

I, too, was a victim of a scooter accident on my return from a long trip to Trivandrum. But I did not sustain any serious head injury as I was wearing my helmet and I had worn it fittingly well. 

In the last one decade of guiding an educational institution, I had the bitter experience of witnessing the death of eleven of my students. Six out of them were victims of road accidents, almost all of them avoidable had the victims taken adequate precautions. 

Global statistics reveal that every 23 seconds someone loses their life on the road! As per the W.H.O. website, Death on the Roads, of the 1.36 million who lost their lives on the road this year, 4 lakh were car users, 3.12 lakh were pedestrians, 3.8 lakh were motorcyclists and 40,000 were cyclists. Initiated by Brigette Chaudhry, the founder of Road Peace, in 1993, the U.N. dedicates the third Sunday of November to remember road traffic victims worldwide.

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The United Nations observes the ‘International Day for the Abolition of Slavery’ on 2nd December. This is both a day of remembrance and recognition and an urgent call to action to all Member States, civil society and the private sector to strengthen collective action to end the heinous practice of slavery.

What is slavery and how did it start?

Slavery has been around since primeval times and in most ancient cultures. In many cultures, slaves formed a very large part of the economy. Some of the empires like ancient Egypt, the Roman Empire and some of the Greek Poleis built a large part of their wealth using slaves acquired through conquest or as prisoners of war.
Although slavery is illegal in all countries today, the practice is still subtly prevalent around the world, primarily in African, Asian, and Eastern European countries. Modern slavery includes forced and bonded labour, services for debt repayment, child labour, forced marriage, sexual trafficking and exploitation of women and children with children even being recruited in areas of armed conflict.

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Of late, there has been a lot of discussion around women empowerment and rights of girl children thanks to the growing awareness around these issues and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao campaign. Some of the positive developments include women reaching space, becoming commandos in the defence forces, flying the longest flights as pilots, acing sports at international levels, the Supreme Court upholding the reproductive choice of women as a fundamental right, declaring excluding a married daughter as unconstitutional, and stating sexual harassment at workplace as a violation of a woman’s fundamental rights.

However, while we rejoice how far we have come and celebrate the International Day of the Girl Child, we also need to reflect and ask ourselves how far we still have to go. Statistics such as 45.8 million (4.58 crore) girls have gone missing in the last 50 years due to the practice of female foeticide according to a UN Report and out of 33 million children out of school in India 40% being girls, give us a reminder. NCRB recorded 4.3 lakh cases of crimes against women in the form of assault, kidnapping, rape, etc., and reported that one woman is raped every 20 minutes in India. Not only this, millions of girls in India still don’t receive enough nutrition, clothing, food, etc., which are the basic human needs as per Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, let alone receiving fair wage, pursuing ambitions, etc. These statistics are not mere numbers but many lives living in this situation having to fight those battles every day.

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A nation is built by its citizens and citizens are moulded by their teachers. Chanakya rightly said, “Teacher is the maker of a nation”. The kind of nation India should be is envisioned in the Preamble of the Indian Constitution. When teachers are convinced by the vision of India as envisaged in the Preamble, they can then help their students to imbibe the core values of the Indian Constitution, thus making a significant contribution to the process of nation-building.

The core values of the Indian Constitution as delineated in the Preamble are 1) Sovereign socialist secular democratic republic, 2) Justice: social, economic and political, 3) Liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship, 4) Equality of status and of opportunity, 5) Fraternity, 6) Dignity of the individual, and 7) Unity and integrity of the nation.

Along with helping students in their intellectual and emotional growth and skill development, teachers have a great responsibility to instil in students the core constitutional values mentioned above. Only then can they claim to be nation-builders.

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How would you like the news you read or listen to? You want the truth. Yet there’s news that’s reported independently and news that is not — it may be true, coloured by propaganda or just plain fake news. A free press may deliver all these.

Even so, when the press in a nation is free, chances are we as readers will get much more truth than anything else. We who think and make choices will gradually move towards reading newspapers or watching TV channels that are free and unbiased and disliking those that are not.

Freedom of the press is essential to a democracy, where the Press is often referred to as The Fourth Estate, meaning a fourth power and deriving from the historic three greatest powers in a realm: the king, the clergy and commoners. In fact, the great man who may have first used this phrase in the year 1787 pointed to the press gallery in the British parliament and said: “… there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.”

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