Scribes Wanted for CAT Aspirants

 What: Scribes to work with CAT Aspirants and to help them in the final exam

Where: Hyderabad

When: From now to the date of CAT

Time Commitment: 2 hours a day, about 2-3 times a week. Completely flexible.

How this works: You will be tagged with one aspirant. The idea is to get comfortable with each other so that you can effectively help them scribe on the final day.

How many: SIX volunteers wanted.

Details:

We are Vignesh and Sanjana, who are IIM Lucknow Alumni and founders of Mockat. We coach students for the CAT exam, which is the entrance test for most of the top Business Schools in India, include the 20 IIMs.

As a part of our social initiative, we recently started training 5 Visually Impaired students - Kottakapu Shivani, Rahul Munnur, Baddam Akash, Daya Praveen, Sharath Kumar Budida, who have performed very well academically (close to 90% in 10th , 12th and college). We are based out of Chennai but train the students online with about 5 to 6 classes per week. And, we are being mentored by Nidhi Arora, (IIM Calcutta ’01 batch, and Founder of Esha – People for the Blind). The students are highly talented and are now trained to mentally solve Easy to Moderate Questions.

CAT allows them to have a scribe who can read out the questions, write the steps and mark the answers. Given the nature of the exam and their disability, working closely with the scribe is extremely important to do well in this exam as it is a very fast-paced exam.

We are looking for 6 volunteers who can be the scribes for these 5 students from now to the CAT exam which will be held on 26th November 2023. All of the students are at HYDERABAD and can travel to the volunteer’s places, if required, as well. It would be helpful if the volunteers could spend about 2 hours of practice, 3 times a week. Timings are completely flexible as the students are preparing full-time. A few sessions can be held vide zoom as well.

These students are bright and motivated and want to succeed. Helping them on this front would really propel their career and their future. Please feel free to reach us at +91 9769744855 or +91 9930478173 if you could volunteer. Many Thanks.

The importance of the Indian Oral Heritage Project

In 2021, the Summer Project was very unique. We asked volunteers to record oral traditions from their own families, in an Indian language. 

It could be a recipe, an oft-quoted proverb, a family tradition, a simple business or trade practice, or a simple wellness or food practice. (In my family, it was, no water after guava and watermelon). 

We might take these small things for granted (and we do), until someone writes about it on LinkedIn / Facebook and we hear a hundred people comment - What a lovely idea! 

Yes, they are lovely ideas and just because they come to us free, we do not have to undervalue them. 

 

Why Now? 

Indian traditions have remained largely unchanged - not for decades, or even centuries, but millenia. The shapes of our cooking vessels, the saree, dhoti, jewellery designs, the festivals and their dates.. the everyday life, has remained, more or less the same. Some knowledge has been lost, of course, but a vast majority has been retained. 

But since the 1970, the rate of this loss is staggering. There are many factors that have contributed to this: 

A. For the first time, young people moved away from homes to work. Until then, even the educated Indians picked jobs near their houses. The idea of moving away from home for education or work was rather alien. 

B. Within three generations, flying the nest is normalised.But more importantly, with this, comes the non-inheritance of culture and shared stories. As family units become smaller, the pool of cultural content available to us shrinks even more. 

C. The third factor contributing to this is the loss of Indic languages. Very  few children in metros speak an Indian language fluently, much less read it. Most people in my generation are at least-trilingual, if not more. While the transferring jobs cut people away from their own homes, they did make them polyglots, bcs being quick learners, we Indians quickly learnt the language of wherever we lived. 

Till even a decade ago, a short drive from the city would take me to a place of continued cultural inheritance - the fields, the houses whose structures remain the same, the simple everyday cures for simple everyday problems, an adhesive, high-context culture. 

But over the last decade, even this rural fabric has eroded a fair bit (due to internet, perhaps?), and my understanding is that things we take for granted, we will have to start preserving. The belief was only cemented further by the Linked In wisdom posts and the proliferation of self-help and wellness programs in metros. 

 How do we do this? 

Very simple. Think of anything - A-N-Y-T-H-I-N-G that is endemic to your house. These are some tips, but they are indicative, not exhaustive: 

A. A proverb 

B. Recipe 

C. Story told often at home (folk tale) 

D. Stories you might have heard from your parents/ grandparents/ relatives 

E. A business practice or life advice that is usually followed 

F. A wellness practice that is always followed 

G. Food practices or rules 

H. Anything related to crafts, special skills that you have seen in your family. 

There is always something. 

Here's a trivia: Ram Charan is a global Advisor to the top CEOs of the world. One of his bestselling books is - What the CEO wants you to know. The book starts with customer service lessons he learnt from his family's shoe store in Gujarat during his growing years. 

There must be lakhs of children whose parents run mom and pop stores in India. How many of them have understood the value of what they saw in their growing years? 

Be one of those who did. Recognise what is of value around you. And cherish it. Amplify it. Bring it to the world. 

Image: An old Chandamama image of a young man in a village.

Help Wanted M.tech Students

A blind M Tech student is looking for a reader for his subjects (a fellow M. Tech student who can read his content and probably help explain them). The subjects in which he needs help are:

Browser Security

Firewall security 

protocols Design

Cross site scripting 

If you can find any student who can get on video/audio calls with this student, maybe once a fortnight, to work together on the concepts, that will be very helpful. 

Please write to hello@braillecards.org or comment on the post.

Update: This requirement has been met. Thank you.