Funny Side (Hopefully) Up

We've had a lot of talk lately about something called "Net Neutrality" in India. The basic idea of net neutrality is not that fishing nets don't have a gender - that's already been established, thank you. It's about our ability to visit whatever websites we may choose to without paying extra. You see, all these telecom chaps - the guys who give us our internet connections - hit on a brilliant idea. They could have all the large conglomerates pay them extra money and then allow their users to visit only those sites for cheap, charging extra if they want to use another website. That may not sound too bad, but the implications are huge. Say, for instance, that you wanted to visit my blog (and if you don't, why not?), you would have to pay some company that's already making way too much money even more. Sites like Google.com, YouTube.com and so on would be available to us at sensible rates, but everything else would be insanely expensive. Call me picky, ...

Hey guys! This is really just a, like, micro-post-type thing (is that what they're called?) to say that this blog is getting UPDATED! WOOHOO! At long last, I'm going to change the name, and make the blog stop looking so... boring.This theme is really only temporary, but temporary means until I get off my lazy behind, and who knows when that might be? Anyway, I really need a new name for my blog, and I really can't seem to think one up myself, so tell me what you think the blog ought to be called in the comments below or on Facebook or Google+ or wherever you're reading this. Thanks guys!

I know what you're thinking. "Great, another post about education. Didn't we just do one last week? Jeez, Ritvik, come up with something new!". But I won't, because it's my blog and I get to decide what I write about, so there. This post isn't so much about education (rejoice!) as about how we - or rather I, because I'm not the entire human race - learn. Recently there's been this whole thing that video and audio are the best ways to learn anything under the sun. Personally, I don't entirely agree. However, I also don't exactly disagree. A few weeks ago, I was working at an orphanage (for free, because I'm such a good person, aren't I?) and was helping the kids learn to read English. The trouble was, the kids weren't exactly what you'd call fast readers, and the lady who ran the orphanage - a wonderful person by the name of Roopa Mahajan - wanted them to be. Not that there's anything wrong with being a fast reader, o...

Oh, the choices the modern teenager is faced with in terms of education. It's quite beyond a joke, I must say. Not too long ago, people went to whatever college was nearby and that they could get into. Now, it's nothing like that. Now that I'm in the 10th grade, it seems like a good idea for me to make a decision about what exactly I want  to do with my life. The problem: I really can't seem to figure out! And this is despite the fact that I know exactly what college I'm aiming for! For starters, there are all the acronyms. This doesn't really have to do with what I want to become, but I still think it's a problem. Just the numerous exams that different colleges have - CET, SAT, several other ones ending in T - make me want to go AIEEE! I keep reading all these articles on academics and exams and whatnot and find myself doing a Google search on some new obscure acronym roughly every five seconds. That's about as long as it takes me to read a couple of ...