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Periodically we hold a 1 day or 2 day residential camp at our serene and peaceful retreat called Manthan, located opposite Delhi Public School (North) in Yelahanka, off Highway to International Airport. We bring together like-minded people who wish to get away from the urban congestion once in a while, do some serious self-introspection and some child-like activities, let their hair down, make friends with people very different from themselves, and learn a few lessons of life while relaxing and enjoying home-made food.

 

Every baby and small child has an innate desire and curiosity to explore, learn and acquire skills. 

Adults find it so difficult to hold back toddlers who wish to move around all over the place and investigate everything within their reach. They use all their senses to see, listen, touch, taste & smell whatever they come across.

As the child grows older, he is sent to school to get ‘educated’, but all his motivation and desire to learn reduces.  He then has to be forced to listen to the teacher, take notes, do calculations, complete his homework, and ‘mug up’ for exams. Is it the fault of the student, or is it the fault of all of us adults who kill the curiosity and the joy of learning?

Instead of blaming the system or authorities, each one of us can, and should, do our bit to rekindle the spark of learning in any child we interact with, and send him off on a path of growth to become a capable adult.

It’s not difficult.

We can be rightfully proud of ourselves

Patients treated in American hospitals have lower death rates if they are treated by doctors who were trained in foreign countries than at American universities – and these foreign doctors include many from India.  This was the result of a survey done by Harvard University, covering as many as 1.2 million elderly patients.

In the US, international medical graduates are mostly from India, the Philippines, and Pakistan.

The study questions the perception that some people may have that the quality of care provided by international graduates may not be on par with US- trained doctors. “America has a history of attracting the best and brightest from around the world and that appears to be true in medicine as well. We hope that we are able to maintain that openness because the biggest beneficiaries of these doctors coming to the US have been the American people” said senior author Ashish Jha, and I do hope Mr. Donald Trump is listening.

 

Bilingual Advantage

Those of you who feel burdened because you need to study two or more languages, let us see some advantages of being bilingual:

Overall, the bilingual outperformed the monolingual speakers on memory tests. Bilingual people were also on an average five years older than the monolingual participants.

Bilingual people tend to have better functional connectivity in frontal brain regions which helps them maintain better thinking skills and withstand the damages to the brain. Constantly switching between different languages causes structural brain changes creating a “neural reserve” that helps bilingual people resist mental deterioration.

Bilingual people also have better ‘neural compensation’—the brain looks for alternative pathways to help maintain thinking skills and compensate for the loss of brain structure that comes with aging.

Speaking 2 or more languages may slow down mental decline and eventually help you keep away from dementia, one of the worst things that can happen to you in old age, for which there is no cure.

 

Gratitude is a wonderful habit that can enrich your life significantly.

It is not the same as Thankfulness. We can be thankful for something that we wanted and received, and hence we desire to have more.

When we develop Gratitude, we are thankful for something we received without wanting, expecting or anticipating – and we feel a sense of fulfilment without desiring more.

It makes you feel happy, positive, and helps you overcome failures or disappointed.  You can even have gratitude towards those who treated you badly, because you became strengthened by their behaviour.  You can learn from failures. You feel connected to everyone around you – and you will never experience loneliness. Learn to look at only the good side of people around you.

Just start off with making a journal of all that you received as blessings or gestures or gifts every day…. And read the journal periodically.