Kusum Choppra

It was instantly obvious that her thirty years in education had not taught the lady how to guide young minds. She was the unworthy principal of the leading girls' school at mt. Abu in Rajasthan India, run by a Catholic order. Born into an Indian family which lived in Indonesia, I had done my early educaton in a Catholic school and higher education in a Methodist institution, both of which built up a healthy respect for the Christian religion and the nuns who ran schools with so much love, dignity and erudition. All those healthy feelings were shattered in a single instant when Sister X, virtually jumped up and down in her chair to convince my husband and me that she could not admit my adopted daughter, into her school, because children are cruel !! My child is blessed with the sunniest of dispositions. but at that stage, approaching age 12 and Std. 7, she was tall for her age and fat and dark wheatish in complexion... a combination which was only lit up by her bright smiles an...

A WOMAN NAMED SITARAM ? Have you ever heard of a woman called SITARAM ? or RADHAKRISHNA or RADHESHYAM ? WHY ? The names sound feminine enough. Then why does one only hear of men carrying those double-barreled names ? Legend has it that these double barreled names are the outcome of a " vardaan" from the Gods to two women, Sita and Radha: that their names would always precede the man's. this was because their steadfast loyalty and pure love had raised them head and shoulders above their communities, even their men, Ram and Krishna, respectively. For Krishna had dallied with dozens and married two, but Radha, a married woman defied home, family and society, to abide by her steadfast love for her Lord. Sita too proved her mettle, in banwas, in imprisonment , in the agnipariksha and ever after, to place herself a cut above the Maryada Purushottam, against whose later days and apparent lust for power, question marks still stand. So it is Men who are called Radha...

Is there actually a water shortage ? How Ancient India Coped Kusum Choppra The wisdom of our hoary traditions indicates that as a monsoon dependent country, India needs to conserve its sheet flows of rain water in any and every way possible. In fact, by the end of the sixteenth century, we had cultivated such expertise in water conservation, that in some parts of the country, as much as 60 % of the precipitation was being harnessed. Major R H Sankey, a chief engineer in Mysore in 1866, (quoted in Water Management Systems in India) records : " Of the 27,269 sq.miles covered by Mysore, nearly 60% has, by the patient industry of its inhabitants been brought under the tank system. Unless under exceptional circumstances, none of the draining of these 16,287 sq.miles is allowed to escape. To such an extent has the principle of storage been followed that it would now require some ingenuity to discover a site within this great area su...