When you have nothing to say, link it

Ogilvy rules, ok?

Apologies David Ogilvy – (in advertising) when you have nothing to say, sing it. More Ogilvy rules here…

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Today’s Times of India carries another article about that terrible “sport” so popular in the middle east camel racing – with children as jockeys –
Over 5,000 Pakistani children still racing camels, says Pakistan’s Daily Times. The ToI report says sometimes a child who falls off the camel gets crushed to death under the feet of other racing camels… but the race is not stopped…

And here, ConcentricCircle writes about something that is horrifying and disturbing – child trafficking in tsunami-hit SriLanka. Imagine a little girl, who has a mother and father and a nice home to play in. She is given food whenever she is hungry, probably even before she asks for it. She has a nice warm bed to sleep in and a comfortable cushy pillow to lay her head on. And the only worry in her little head as she rests on that pillow, is whether she can skip school the next day and play with her favorite doll. And the next day, there is this Tsunami and she sees water everywhere. She cries and cries and there is no mother or father to answer her, leave alone console her. Instead, there is this man who comes to her and speaks kind words, and she naively follows him. And the next thing she knows, she is shoved into a van with 20 other girls like her! She probably doesn’t even realise what her fate is! . As I commented on her blog, just the thought of these innocent trusting faces makes me want to do serious violence to these men preying upon their vulnerability…

What kind of human beings are these…?

If that is too depressing (it was for me), Gangadhar has an interesting post on Socratic Electronics – A time-tested way of centering instruction around students is to teach by asking questions. This is generally called the “Socratic method”, made famous by the Greek philosopher Socrates. Another way to center instruction around students is to have them share their new-found knowledge with others. As any teacher knows, “when you teach, you learn twice”….. Pedagogically similar to the constructivist approach to learning that I keep writing about – where the learner constructs knowledge according to his or her own understanding of the concept – construction moves the focus of learning from the teacher to the taught.

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Here I am, back from a wet, refreshing weekend break – a look at my technorati shows lots of new blogs who have linked to me or blogrolled me – thanks all of you… I have been making return visits to these blogs. And I find that I am unable to keep track of the list of new Indian blogs that I want to follow.

My blogroll here needs serious updating.

Also a while ago, I had a bright idea and went and signed up for a new rss aggregator to read only newly discovered Indian blogs – in addition to bloglines where I subscribe to too many blogs already including some on advertising and marketing. Now, I cannot remember where I went and registered… been googling for rss aggregator and newsreader and such – without any success so far… *sheepish and feeling-stupid look*