Category: Opinion

Independence Day celebrations at IIMB turned a tad more special with the performance of the play, ‘The Prophet & The Poet’, at the IIMB auditorium on Tuesday evening.  Designed and directed by Prof. Vijay Padaki, the play, offers rare glimpses of the exchange of correspondence, spanning 25 years, between Gandhiji and Rabindranath Tagore, and takes the audience through the heart and mind of the stalwarts, their triumphs and tribulations, their glory and grief, their dreams and dilemmas, and their delight and despair. Poetry meets philosophy meets practical wisdom, in powerful…

Learning Matters is an ed-tech organization headquartered in Bangalore. The firm was founded by Ramamoorthy G (Moorthy), Gowri Mahesh and Saraswathy Ramamoorthy. Gowri, Saras and Moorthy are from the education and technology domains in which they have worked for about 20 years each. The Founders share that they focus on one of the largest problems faced by the Indian education sector – falling quality of learning outcomes in the majority of students. “We use tech tools and AI to solve this systemic problem and to scale the solution effectively, for…

Last week a leading financial daily reported that several unicorns had suffered write downs in their valuation.   You can read it here. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/technology/blackrock-cuts-byjus-valuation-by-over-60-to-8-2-billion/articleshow/100627551.cms For those who have been observing the startup space even from the periphery, like me, this was not completely surprising.  News about write downs had been trickling in for a while from 2022.  What the news story did was to pull into one place the names of prominent venture capital (VC) funded companies and the extent of write downs they had suffered lately.  The story suggested…

I remember visiting India in July 2014 after a five-year hiatus and paying Rs. 250 for a haircut in a Mumbai suburb. In January 2023, I visited the locality again and a haircut cost me the same Rs. 250. I am reasonably certain that the barber didn’t charge pro-rata to account for my much-receded hairline over the last decade. This observation could be termed anecdotal. The below snip shot from the app Urban Clap has haircuts prices at about Rs 250 as well. Why have haircut prices not increased in…

‘This year’s World Health Day will shine on nurses and midwives, the on-the-call, relentless workforce that revolutionized the healthcare industry as we know it today,’ says the World Health Organization (WHO). The International Confederation of Midwives, an association with 108 member associations in 98 countries, projects a global shortage of 900,000 midwives and those in the sector continue to face discrimination, poor working environments and unequal pay. They are left out of health leadership. “Midwives need an enabling environment. Strategic litigation for better salaries is the need of hour,” says…

STEMonsters is a learning ecosystem for school children, aiming to build, in them, a strong foundation in STEM concepts through interdisciplinary, application-focused programs. According to the founder, Dr. Sonali Dasgupta, the programs help develop a problem-solving mindset while instilling confidence in children to explore the unknown and keeping them engaged and curious. Dr. Sonali Dasgupta adds, “We offer weekly, after-school science and technology learning programs for children (pan-Asia), in the age group of eight to 14 years, wherein they learn by experimenting and building on their own, right from their…