Unexpected behaviour:

A boy was born to a couple after eleven years of marriage. They were a loving couple and the boy was the apple of their eyes.

One morning, when the boy was around two years old, the husband saw a medicine bottle open. He was late for work so he asked his wife to cap the bottle and put it in the cupboard. The mother, preoccupied in the kitchen, totally forgot the matter. The boy saw the bottle and playfully went to it and, fascinated with its colour, drank it all. It happened to be a poisonous medicine meant for adults in small dosages.

When the child collapsed, the mother hurried him to the hospital, where he died. The mother was stunned; she was terrified. How would she face her husband?

When the distraught father came to the hospital and saw the dead child, he looked at his wife and uttered just four words.

“I Love You Darling”.

The husband’s totally unexpected reaction is proactive behaviour. The child is dead. He can never be brought back to life. There is no point in finding fault with the mother.

Gemini Ganesan and his College Days

[Excerpts from THE MCC Magazine]

By Ms. Narayani Ganesh

The Madras Christian College used to be located at Parry’s Corner, close to where the High Court stands today. First established in 1837 by British missionaries as a school, the institution was upgraded to a college in 1865, and renamed ‘Madras Christian College’. A hundred years later, the College acquired four hundred acres of what was known as the Selaiyur forest estate in Tambaram. The institution shifted here in 1937, in a move that is still referred to as the ‘great migration’. Here, Appa studied Chemistry and after graduation, worked as a lecturer-demonstrator for some time before changing tracks.

Other reputed colleges in Madras then were Presidency College, Loyola College and Pachaiyappa’s College, all exclusively for boys. M.C.C was co-educational. Appa was a good student and sportsman and enjoyed the good things of life. The diary he maintained in 1942 has a few gems that reveal the kind of life he led as a college student. M.C.C encouraged extracurricular

Poverty, Evil and Crime - Amartya Sen - Critical Summary

Introduction:

Amartya Sen, who is fondly known as the Mother Teresa of Indian Economics, was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1998, for his contributions to welfare economics and interest in the problems of the poorest people in society. This speech titled, “Poverty, Evil and Crime” was delivered to the United Nations Programme for Development, New York, on October 5, 2007.

According the George Bernard Shaw, “the greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty”. Based on this premise, Amartya Sen divides his speech into two parts.  The first part of his speech deals with the relationship between poverty and evil, and the second part deals with the relationship between poverty and crime.

Relationship between Poverty and Evil:

Sen argues that poverty is the cause of all social evils. The world today is filled with millions of people who are unable to afford even the barest minimum necessities of life. It is this poverty that leads people to indulge in criminal activities like robbery, looting, arson, etc.

If poverty is an evil, then there must be some wickedness behind poverty that allows such wrong-doings to occur. This raises the immediate question: Who are the wrong-doers? But, identifying the wrong-doers is not our task. Our focus has to be on removing wrong-doing rather than going on the wild-goose chase of catching the wrong-doer.