The Future Nobel Laureates of Timarni

As I spend these last days of summer holidays in the beautiful lake city of Bhopal with my niece, nephew and son frolicking around, I wonder whether their Intelligence is in-born or the environment, education and learning opportunities will have a huge impact on it. A quick internet research on this topic indicates that genes do have an impact on intelligence but both nature (what you are born with) and nurture (environment, education, learning opportunities) are highly intertwined in creation of an intelligent human being. Our intellectual reality is not even close to our intellectual potential, so there is a lot to gain with right nurturing.

On this trip, I had the opportunity to visit Timarni, a small bustling town four hours to the south of Bhopal, where Dayalbagh Educational Institute is doing excellent work in the field of education and nurturing young energetic kids towards a bright intelligent future.

Our post this week is on these 

“Future Nobel Laureates” of Timarni.

This is an invited blog post by Vandana Prakash, who runs the Junior Children’s Recreation Center (jCRC) at the Dayalbagh Educational Institute’s Radhasoami High School, Timarni giving these underprivileged kids an excellent start.

Regards,
Anurag
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Vandana wites...

jCRC was started in June of 2015. The center is meant for three to six year-old kids. The center is based on the philosophy articulated by Revered Prof. Prem Saran Satsangi of “Tod-Mod-Jod” or "तोड़-मोड़-जोड़", i.e. learning through designing, joining, adding, assembling, dismantling, shaping, redesigning, reshaping... This method of learning is in contrast to a conventional nursery or kindergarten. Here students walk in without bags, no pencils, no writing and no rote learning.

Humankind's biggest gift is the power of imagination, which typically gets subjugated by the hundreds of no’s that we hear each day, hampering our creativity and our desire to explore. At jCRC, the curriculum is designed to help kids retain their curiosity and become explorers and creators and to boost their ability to think.

The curriculum focuses on the following aspects of development:

1. Physical development- gross and fine motor movements
2. Sensory development-auditory, tactile, olfactory and visual
3. Mental development- cognitive and language development
4. Emotional and social development
5. Inculcation of values

The initial activities get the kids to play with soft toys of their choice, sand play, a walk in the garden with gardening tools...as they love to water the plants, sowing seeds and they are given the responsibility to water these plants daily. They learn to make tree-bark impressions and understand the importance of nature, about preserving nature using the center's story bank. The kids play around trees and hug them, they learn the names of the trees, various associated words like the trunk is wide, narrow etc. These activities focus their sense of touch, smell, help in understanding various textures, look at the various colors, helping in language development and conception.

As the kids get settled, they move onto working with simple 2D and 3D block puzzles, do sorting, seriation, tangram, joining pipes, clay models...here there is no right or wrong. As the material is scientific and self-correcting they find out the way on their own.

The kids thread beads and make various patterns, with various shapes and colors being discussed. Once they are ready they are given dressing frames and are taught to button, unbutton, use Velcro, ribbons and laces, this boosts their confidence making them independent!

After a month, the kids move away from soft toys with the day starting with exercise, rhymes and action songs, once a week they play with ball or Frisbee. While exercising they learn about parts of the body, function of each body part, and hear stories on good habits, and get encouragement to eat clean and healthy food and drink clean water. Puppets are used to make these stories and learning fun for the kids.

Over time, the kids move on to tougher and more complex puzzles. Counting using abacus and dominoes is introduced and spindle boxes are used to introduce the concept of zero.

One of the topics of the month is where names of various fruits and vegetables are covered, taught through a game where the mentor becomes the vegetable/ fruit seller and the students become buyers. Here their favorite fruits and veggies and various preparations are discussed, e.g. what all can we make with tomatoes? On the fruit and vegetable day, the fruits and veggies are washed, peeled, cut and eaten together. Later they color, print or paste fruits and veggie images on worksheets.

The kids learn about transportation using toys like trucks, milk vans, cycles, dump vans etc. They are encouraged to ride cycles, and told about how our dear earth is getting warmer, also understanding some of these environmental concepts through cartoons.

Festivals and important events are celebrated with the kids, and the story behind these festivals is told through stories and cartoons.

A short story with a learning/ value and a short prayer ends their day at the center.

This was about Level 1 jCRC, there is a Level 2 jCRC for Class 1 students.

In Level 2 jCRC the activities are similar with the puzzles, blocks and topics becoming more complex. Topics covered are about earth, plant life, and animal kingdom and in much more detail.

This is how these kids are becoming little explorers, nature lovers and creative humans.

Made-in-Heaven Marriages

Marriage is the legal or formal recognition of union of two people as partners in a personal relationship. In Asia, over time, the associated ceremony has overtaken the marriage and become a vulgar display of wealth and power, a display “worthy” of the so-called social standing of the two families, where typically the bride’s family gets harassed with demands of dowry and for putting up an ostentatious multi-day display worth the groom’s family social standing.

Further, in India, the institution of marriage perpetuates and feeds the caste system. As I edit this blog post, my thoughts go out to my own family coming from the hinterlands of India where the caste system is deeply rooted. From an Indian society perspective, my own marriage and that of my siblings and that of my parents (in 1961) are inter-caste marriages. You may ask how did that happen?

To answer this question, our post this week is on the 

“Made-in-Heaven” Marriages in Dayalbagh.

The word “marriage” brings to mind a coming together of two persons and their families mixed with festivities, rituals, lots of fun, meeting cousins! Sadly, marriages are more of a social “tamasha” (grand show), one-upmanship and a vulgar display of wealth highlighting class and social distinctions and differences thereby strengthening divisions of society based on economic status.

In Dayalbagh, the stress is on promoting social equality and brotherhood of man. Caste system is a strict “no”, rather it is expected that each person following the Dayalbagh Way of Life will develop the stated qualities and abilities of all the four varnas (castes) in themselves. So, depending on the need, I am a Sudra or a Kshatriya or a Vaisya or a Brahman or a combination thereof.

Marriages in Dayalbagh are simple and austere fostering social equality. They are conducted under the auspices of the Marriage Panchayat, Dayalbagh. The Marriage Panchayat arranges for three pre-marriage counselling sessions (over a six-month period) for the parents and the couple to enable a better understanding of each other’s expectations and backgrounds.

The rules are crystal clear. Total expenses permitted for the wedding are Rs. 18,000 (USD 280) each for the bride and for the groom. This amount is inclusive of the Rs. 1,200 (USD 19) for the post marriage lunch hosted by the Marriage Panchayat for 100 guests, 65 from the bride’s side and 35 from the groom’s. All expenses are auditable by the Marriage Panchayat and violations are unacceptable.

There is no dowry – no cash and nothing in kind. Even a whiff of this happening can lead to big trouble.

The girl, the boy and their parents are required to report in Dayalbagh seven days prior to the marriage date and immerse themselves in self-less service in the fields.

Typically, there are four to five marriages on a particular day (typically Sunday). All marriage groups get together for a joint prayer function with all guests two days prior to marriage.

The day of the marriage is simple and straight-forward. The ceremony starts with a Sagai-Samaroh (engagement ceremony) early in the morning during community service in the farms. This is solemnized by an exchange of garlands and prayers for well-being of the couple and all others. This is followed by the marriage rites performed in the presence of a designated marriage officer either by registration (preferred – but requires either the girl or the boy to have residency in Dayalbagh) or vedic rites. The bride and groom take a vow to uphold mutual respect and their duty towards their parents and for each other.

Everyone can bless and congratulate the couple, only blood relatives can give a token gift of Rs. 11 as Shagun (auspicious gift).

We have not touched on the fun and festivities in this post, because without the need to spend one’s full life’s savings, without the need for social one-upmanship, without the need for caste matches, without the need for angst on whether some other relative gave a bigger gift, without the need to arrange for marriage lunch or without the need to arrange for the marriage venue the fun and festivities increase dramatically.

And when two individuals come together there could be ups and downs. The marriage panchayat provides a counselling session six months after marriage to re-emphasize the importance of adjustment and empathy. Violence in marriage is totally unacceptable.

Is it “marriages made in heaven” or “marriages in heaven”? or maybe both…

The above post is by Ms. Juhi Singh and Anurag Singh.

Renewable Energy Initiatives at Dayalbagh Educational Institute

Renewable Energy initiatives at Dayalbagh Educational Institute

The first of our invited posts is by Prof. Bhagwan Das, Professor of Renewable Energy in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Dayalbagh Educational Institute (DEI). In this post, we will delve into the renewable energy initiatives at DEI.

Through the vision, initiative and encouragement of Revered Prof. Prem Saran Satsangi, Chairman, Advisory Committee on Education, Dayalbagh, the renewable energy deployment in the institute commenced in 2010 to facilitate sustainable developmental activities in agreement with the concept of an Eco-Village.

The university campus is powered by 11 Distributed Roof-Top SPV (Solar Photovoltaic - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photovoltaic_system) power plants aggregating to a total of 668.2 kW(peak). Apart from the Dayalbagh campus of the institute, distributed Roof-Top Solar PV Power Plants of aggregate 45 kWp capacity have been installed at DEI extension centers (ICT centers) in various cities and a CSR sponsored project of 200 kWp distributed off-grid SPV system is under commissioning in the Dayalbagh Rajaborari Estate of Madhya Pradesh tribal area.

Fig 1 : Satellite view of Dayalbagh Educational Institute showing six of the eleven plants and their coverage (image - Google Earth)

The effectiveness of renewable energy micro-grid was evident during the major grid collapse on two consecutive days on 30th and 31st July 2012 in India when over 600 million people (nearly half of India's population), in 22 out of 28 states in India, were without power. Dayalbagh Educational Institute, having its own SPV micro-grid, was not affected and the teaching – learning- co-curricular activities continued normally. On normal sun-shine days, the institute is self- sufficient in power and not affected by the frequent power outages. Under cloudy conditions, a careful battery management ensures uninterrupted power supply to the whole campus.

Having commissioned the distributed SPV based micro-grid of the institute, the challenge now is to make the system efficient, reliable and economically viable in the face of dynamic loading conditions, weather conditions affecting generation and unreliable power grid. Multi-dimensional R&D activities are in progress to indigenously develop integrated remote monitoring, communication, control and fault diagnosis of all the power plants from a central control station, resulting in a Smart Micro Grid.

  Solar thermal cooking systems in Hostels  

Three solar thermal cooking systems have been installed in the three hostels in DEI. Each system comprises of 5 dishes, each having a 16 Sq m in diameter. The total average kcals generated by the concentrators in one system is 200,000 kcals / day, which is equivalent to 19 kgs of LPG. The system installed in the Girls’ Hostel is also equipped with water heating facility. For institutions having much larger hostels, the savings would be sizable.

The cooking systems are used for boiling Amla and decoction of herbs for preparation of Chyavan Prash in the Ayurvedic Pharmacy of Dayalbagh during their lull phase. With conventional boiling process, there was a requirement of 80 Kg of Hard Coke and the process time was 12 hours. In steam cooking the process time has reduced to 3 hours with no expenditure on fossil fuels.

A pioneer in the field of vocational education, the institute has launched vocational programmes in renewable energy at various levels viz. Certificate, Diploma, B.Voc., M.Voc. and Ph.D.

The Dayalbagh Educational Institute initiative has demonstrated that Universities, building intellectual resources through teaching-learning and research, offer a perfect platform for establishing renewable energy micro-grids. In addition to sustainable development through clean energy technologies and self-sufficiency in energy, a university micro-grid is an ideal test bed for conducting indigenous research and development. This ensures quality research with relevance as well as development of skilled man power and intellectual property in the area.

Look forward to your comments and feedback.

Thank You!

It has been two months since we started the Sigma Six Q blog on Blogger and subsequently added our Facebook page and Twitter handle. Last week we completed introducing the Sigma Six Q Sustainability model and we now move onto the next phase.

We want to most humbly thank Revered Prof. Prem Saran Satsangi for the Sigma Six Q Sustainability model and for providing us an opportunity to blog details of Dayalbagh, a Sustainable Way of Life, which the Sigma Six Q model tries to simulate.

We would like to thank all of you for your response to our Sigma Six Q blog, the Facebook posts and Twitter tweets. Thanks for your feedback, comments, stories, photographs, re-posts and re-tweets.

We do a once a week blog post on sigmasixq.blogpost.com.

Every day we try to do one or more tweets and replicate these as Facebook posts. The 140-character tweet limit constrains us sometimes to squeeze some information out, in contrast the Facebook posts are complete. So, I will urge you to follow us both on Facebook (www.facebook.com/sigmasixq) and on Twitter (https://twitter.com/SigmaSixQ).

Your retweeting/ forwarding of our posts is very helpful. It helps us take our message to a broader audience and we together under Guidance will be able to make this world a much better and a more sustainable place, while promoting social harmony, peace and brotherhood of man. One of our posts reached 40,000 people on Facebook and 14,000 people on Twitter.

We would like to thank Dr. Anoop Srivastava for providing us directions, expertise and being our reviewer and critic.

I would like to thank our Sigma Six Q Social Media team consisting of my co-bloggers Rima Mehta and Juhi Singh, our designer Aruna Sharma, and our Dayalbagh Literature expert Dr. Dayal Pyari Singh.

Our process includes a quality check by a second person for the weekly blogs. The Facebook posts and the tweets are as of now done solely by me; we hope to add a second person to this team soon to verify quotes and ensure data quality. Our aim is to ensure absolutely correct information is posted and there are no photo-shopped photographs. Irrespective, some mistakes may creep in. And if you spot any mistake, please do drop us a mail and we will be more than happy to correct.

All non-abusive criticism, queries and feedback is welcome.

From this week, some of our weekly blog posts will be from experts outside of the core team. If you have a Sigma Six Q expertise area, deep understanding of its implementation in Dayalbagh (or Dayalbagh institutions) and want to contribute to our blogging, drop us a mail at sigmasixq@gmail.com. For example, Dr. Satya Prakash, a water quality expert at Dayalbagh helped us with the Water Quality post.

To sum up our current needs:

1. We are looking for a volunteer who can help us on/ do the Facebook and Twitter posts. The person should have strong communication skills and a deep understanding of the Dayalbagh Way of Life.
2. We are looking for volunteers who can help us translate our blogs/ tweets/ posts into Hindi, Telugu and Tamil.
3. We are looking for experts in the Sigma Six Q areas who can blog on Sigma Six Q topics. Even if you can provide information for a post, we can help create the post.
4. We require very good quality photographs and small write-up of events that would fall under a Sigma Six Q Quality.

This is a blog by and for people who want this world to be a better place, who want Planet Earth to sustain happy human life for times to come. Let us make it successful.

Best Wishes,

Anurag Singh
Sigma Six Q Blogger

Sigma Six Q: Does Planet Earth have a Future?

Your response to our Sigma Six Q blog, the Facebook and the Twitter posts has been overwhelming. Though it has only been a few weeks, many of our Facebook posts now reach an audience of thirty-forty thousand people and our twitter posts leave fifteen thousand impressions. This is a great start. This is our Way of Life that we are modeling and documenting. 
As our social media community multiplies and expands, we expect these posts to reach a million plus people in the short term and have a large positive effect in this world gasping for breath.

Recently, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking asserted that humans need to colonize a new planet within the next 100 years for the survival of our species. If we assume for a second that given the direction in which our world is hurtling (and without divine intervention) this is true, then there are two possible options that we have today:

1. We can behave like many a selfish individuals or communities or for that matter nations and remain content in our current non-sustainable all consuming ways as we would anyways be dead in the next hundred years!
2. Or we can align our thinking and energies towards a Sustainable and happier Sigma Six Q Dayalbagh Way of Life to make this world a better place for generations to come.

The choice is ours to make individually and together as a community, as a nation and as inhabitants of this planet.

In the previous posts, we have introduced the Sigma Six Q model and covered the Six Qualities for a Sustainable Way of Life.

The Six Qualities are:

1. Innovation: Changing, altering, evolving, progressing and adopting near state of the art processes and technologies for better outputs and outcomes.
2. Air Quality: Maintaining high Quality of Air, keeping it crisp and clean with minimal pollutants, greener surroundings, limiting increase of green-house gases and tending to a zero-carbon footprint.
3. Water Quality: Providing high quality drinkable water for human and animal consumption, quality water for agriculture, ensuring water conservation, harvesting and recycling.
4. Education and Healthcare: Making Education affordable, accessible and comprehensive leading to the evolution of a complete man with integration of intellectual abilities, physical strength, emotional stability and ethical values. Making Healthcare affordable, accessible and preventive.
5. Agriculture and Dairying: Continuing with the Green and White revolution and further innovating to make it sustainable.
6. Values: Application and practice of abstract values in our way of life; values of Duty, Beauty, Humility, Courage, Temperance, Wisdom, Loyalty and Justice imprinted early. Values of democracy, secularism and humanism leading to a lifestyle of Better Worldliness.

As stated by Revered Prof. Prem Saran Satsangi, “Sigma means that all these aspects or components have interaction amongst themselves and the cumulative effect of all these is many times more than their individual effect.”

The four Qualities of Air Quality, Water Quality, Education and Healthcare, Agriculture and Dairying need to necessarily sit on a bedrock of Innovation and then the five Qualities get bound together by Values.

This completes our introduction of the Sigma Six Q model. We will now delve into various facets of these Qualities and their implementation in subsequent blogs.

We want to most humbly thank Revered Prof. Prem Saran Satsangi for the Sigma Six Q Sustainability model and for providing us with an opportunity to blog this model to you all.

Look forward to your stories, your views, your implementations and experience with these Six Qualities. Drop us a mail at sigmasixq@gmail.com.

You can follow us on Facebook (www.facebook.com/sigmasixq) and/ or on twitter (https://twitter.com/SigmaSixQ). You can also subscribe to our posts via email (link on the right). You can like our posts on Facebook and Twitter and share them further with your friends/ followers.

The above post is by Anurag Singh, Editor of the Sigma Six Q Blogs.

References:

1. “The Dayalbagh Herald” dated Tuesday, June 21^st, 2016

Sigma Six Q: Values - The Sixth Quality necessary to bind it all together

Your response to the Sigma Six Q blog, the Facebook and Twitter posts has been awesome.

In the previous posts, we have introduced the Sigma Six Q model and covered the first five Qualities for a Sustainable Way of Life:  Innovation, Air Quality, Water Quality, Education and Healthcare, and Agriculture and Dairying.

The sixth and final Quality for a Sustainable Future is Values; a Quality that binds everything together.

As stated by Revered Prof. Prem Saran Satsangi, “Now what is the sixth excellence, i.e., Quality. That is a very great necessity for our country. You see how many scams are here in the country. How atrocities are committed against women. In order to stop all these, our value system should be refurnished. Our life style has this special emphasis on giving value based education. Thus, we give due place for application and practice of abstract values in our way of life. Only then is it possible to stop the different types of scams and atrocities. In the opinion of some people, we should have more money to spend to live good life. But in our life style of Better Worldliness, we require to awaken our inner spiritual consciousness where there is the kingdom of our Inner True Self, rather than the rule of and authority of mind, intelligence and matter alone.”¹

The underlying threads that ensure Dayalbagh’s success in its efforts is a common base of Values.   As summarized by Revered Prof. Prem Saran Satsangi, “Here again we try to pursue abstract human values that I learnt right since my primary schooling days such as Duty, Beauty, Humility, Courage, Temperance, Wisdom, Loyalty, Justice.”²

These values becoming part of every individual’s DNA is all the more important in a world moving towards automation and digitization, a world moving towards super-intelligent machines.

Dayalbagh’s education system inculcates these values in all students from pre-school onwards. Dayalbagh Education Institute’s Education Policy, as formulated by the Founder Director, Revered Dr. M. B. Lal Sahab aims “to bring about physical, intellectual, emotional and ethical integration of an individual with a view to evolving a complete man who possesses the basic values of humanism, secularism and democracy and who is capable of giving a fuller response to social and emotional challenges.”³

Further as explained by Revered Prof. Prem Saran Satsangi, “Such a man is called Superman. He will not come into existence in a day; he will evolve gradually as the human body evolved gradually according to Darwinian principle. As is the case of the body, mind and spirit will also evolve gradually, and the spirit and the mind will become so pure that a Superman will come into existence. This is a gradual development, a gradual evolution.”⁴

Revered Prof. Satsangi further explains, “Our object here (Dayalbagh) in creating the so-called superman who imbibes all the qualities of physical faculty, mental faculty and spiritual faculty would then be the true achievement of the goal of education, as enshrined, in Sanskrit, in the proverb, that is education which leads to complete emancipation.” ⁵

Dayalbagh aims to get these values of Duty, Beauty, Humility, Courage, Temperance, Wisdom, Loyalty and Justice imprinted into the subconscious from early childhood. The Sant-Su(perman) Evolutionary Scheme that is open to all children aims to create this race of Supermen, humans with ingrained values, values that all free, democratic, secular and humanist nations cherish. We will further explain the Sant-Su scheme and its implementation in future posts.

That completes the six Qualities required for a Sustainable Way of Life. In the next post, we plan to summarize the Sigma Six Q model.

We would love to hear your stories, your views, your implementations/ experience with these six Qualities and their implementation. You can drop us a mail at sigmasixq@gmail.com.

You can follow us on Facebook (www.facebook.com/sigmasixq) and/ or on twitter (@SigmaSixQ). You can also subscribe to our posts via email (link on the right). You can like our posts on Facebook and Twitter and share them further with your friends/ followers.

The above post is by Ms. Rima Mehta and Anurag Singh.

References:

1. “The Dayalbagh Herald” dated Tuesday, June 21^st, 2016
2. “The Dayalbagh Herald” dated Tuesday, May 17^st, 2016
3. “The Dayalbagh Herald” dated Tuesday, January 26^th, 2010
4. “The Dayalbagh Herald” dated Tuesday, January 08^th, 2008
5. “The Dayalbagh Herald” dated Tuesday, January 26^th, 2010