Comments on: Take a Time Out

By: BiGYaN

BiGYaN — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 17:55:37 +0000

Could not agree with you more. Being a part of this system I also feel that we really need to have a certain amount of time just for doing whatever we like.

Most of the students are so bogged down by the academic load that they hardly get the time to be creative. My brother, aged 15 devotes around 12+ hours per day for his academic load.

Thankfully the situation betters as we move up the ladder. I personally had to study less in UG college than what I did in Std XII.

But looking at all the competition around us, I am not confident about any alternative solution. Like I just cannot ask my brother to stop devoting so much time on his academic load.

So what do you think should be done to get around this problem?

By: Brian Hayes

Brian Hayes — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 21:02:13 +0000

I wrote a silly narrative poem about the formation of communities.

There might be a bunch of memes and tiny stimulating things if you read it really quickly.

http://brianhayes.com/community.htm

…the modelling of mind to mechanism

By: Prasanth

Prasanth — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 08:40:17 +0000

Completely agree that we need kids to take time out and have “unstructured time”. As you pointed out, kids today are burdened with so many “structured activities” that they hardly get time to do whatever they feel like. I take care to ensure that my kids are not over burdened and get enough unstructured time. The other day i noticed my 5 year old son sitting quietly on a chair with a far away look on his face. When i asked him what he was doing, he said he was “thinking”. When i asked him about what, he said “about everything”. It is extremely crucial that we let kids be kids else we will end up killing their curiosity and creativity

By: Blue

Blue — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 05:42:38 +0000

And Draupadi in the Mahabharata advised to divide the day up into law, profit, and pleasure… and yet, despite our instinctual reaction towards this division, we’ve still created a society which divides itself up into profit, profit, and profit.

We never pay attention to good advice, do we.

By: Akhondofswat

Akhondofswat — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 05:01:46 +0000

“Colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middleclass non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets is each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization”—-JACK KEROUAC, “THE DHARMA BUMS”

Back to the sixties????

Here’s some more:”See the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn’t really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ‘em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.”