Make Sense of the world
Unique insight from 2,000+ contributors in 80+ Countries
In a matter of months, the novel coronavirus has swept across the globe and entirely up-ended our understanding of normality. Now, as the virus continues to rage and signs of a second surge are emerging even before the first has ended, we’re rethinking everything we’d assumed and hoped for at...
Fair Observer’s Atul Singh told me of his own friend, Pankaj, a father of three daughters. Pankaj was concerned that his daughters have been subjected to around three to seven hours a day of online classes, and he felt it was deeply wrong. I was invited by Fair Observer to write an article...
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, schools closed their doors this spring, impacting the lives of 1.5 billion students around the world and sending teachers and school administrators scrambling to keep students connected to learning opportunities. To do this they deployed a range of old and new...
Every year, on Indian Science Day in February, India commemorates the discovery of the Raman Effect by Sir C.V. Raman. In 1930, Raman won the Nobel Prize in Physics and has been revered by Indians ever since. Fast forward to 2019, and the US National Science Foundation placed India third when...
The late Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1921-1997) was a prominent figure in the 20th-century critical pedagogy movement and the celebrated author of the ground-breaking 1968 text, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” Freire’s seminal work proposes a dialogical method of teaching literacy that...
Like most other human activities, education has been brutally affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The traditional classroom, a place of safety in which the teacher reigned over students and represented a form of political order, suddenly came to be seen as a petri dish of disease threatening not...
India has an abysmally low percentage of people with access to decent health care. About 300 million Indian citizens live below the poverty line and, for them, medicine is prohibitively expensive. For decades, serious medical conditions have pushed families into poverty and destitution. From 2000...
Who isn’t interested in any random pronouncement that Elon Musk makes? After all, he’s smart and he’s rich and getting richer every day. He also acts like a media celebrity, saying provocative things in public, which most smart or rich people — who don’t seek to be known as brands —...
To the extent that people know anything about the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), they reasonably assume that they have something to do with the economy (development), and with the environment (sustainability). They’re only partly right. The bigger challenge, especially for countries in...
Indian journalist Manu Joseph recently wrote a column in which he questions major intellectual advances in history, claiming they were nothing but delusional ideas of schizophrenics. He asks, rhetorically: “What if many things that we call philosophies today had emerged from a mental disorder?...
Student loan debt has deservedly become a major political issue in the US, with the total debt burden approaching the impressive figure of $1.6 trillion. The phenomenon has revealed many of the structural problems American society is now attempting to address, with little hope of a viable...
