P.S.: This post is an attempt to record my feeling of relief... the first day off.

For me, this day stands as a memory...how relieved one feels to walk free...live the life on one's own terms...before slipping into the routine again...We have choices and we have chances..but unfortunately we cannot exercise both of them at the same time...period!

Women normally offer an interesting challenge for men's intellect. Most of the time, everyone of us are stuck at appreciating the beauty rather than transcending beyond it to understand the person...I urge the reader to kindly try answering this question.. how often did you stand at an entrance of a passage-way and were lost in the beauty of it rather than seeking what lies beyond it? It is important to understand the value of both beauty and the brain to better appreciate what is the driving force for attraction. Beauty offers the elegance of a foyer while brains offer the ambiance... This is probably one of the reasons why the following statement makes much sense...

"...The average woman would rather have beauty than brains, because the average man can see better than he can think... "

For most of the men, women are beautiful indeed. But they grow beyond being mere beauties like the sympathetic characters in a play, to present themselves as an appealing and a memorable personality when they pose a challenge to the men's intellect... The feeling of understanding someone can only be achieved when one transcends the boundary of 'physical appeal' into 'appeal to the senses' i.e. when we see her as an innate challenge offering the intoxicating mix of appeal and intellect... I expect most of the readers might have a different view which might be either complementary or supplementary to that of mine.. comments are highly solicited...

(This is an article written by Prof. M. Balakrishnan, Professor of Computer Science amp; Engineering at IIT Delhi. He has been with IIT Delhi since 1977 except for a three year stint outside India. Currently he is on Sabbatical and working with a startup)

It is estimated that 158 million children aged 5-14 are engaged in child labour worldwide. Millions of children are engaged in hazardous work environments like mines, working with petro-chemicals and pesticides. From Sub-Saharan Africa where around one in three children are engaged in child labour, representing 69 million children to South Asia, where 44 million are engaged in child labour because of poverty.

A study demonstrated the parallels between the historical pattern of the decline in child labor in the United States and situations today in developing countries. It is understood that the greater the extent of poverty in a country, the greater the amount of child labor, the relationship holding within a country over time as well as across countries at a given point in time. Though poverty may be a determinant of child labor, it cannot be examined in the absence of cultural and social factors, such as education, culture, and urbanization. Another Study points that child labor is deeply rooted in poverty and social customs. Thus, one reason for such high labor force participation is that working children are from impoverished families. There are several social and cultural explanations for widespread child labor in developing countries.

The effect of being sold into slave labor has the obvious physical scars from the constant beatings the children receive, their inhumane living conditions, and the practical starvation that the employers impose on them. However, the effects of slavery do not merely affect the physical well-being of the children. They also suffer from emotional scars. In addition to the risks that they face, there are also many negative side effects of exposing children to the excessive demands of adult labor. These side effects not only manifest themselves in the children’s health and growth, but also in their access to education. In fact, it is rare to find children who, over a prolonged period of time, manage to balance their studies with their daily chores. More than half of children laborers have never attended school, and those who have rarely finish the first cycle of elementary school. As researchers have noted, boycotting exports of goods produced by children may actually worsen the welfare and well-being of those children and their families, first by lowering their living standards and second by pushing children into dangerous work endeavors, such as begging and prostitution. This speaks of the need for a sustainable development plan to include the marginalized sections of the society to best tackle the growing numbers of child abuse.

If we can understand the dynamics of poverty, education, and child labor, we may be in a position to create more effective ways of eliminating child labor through education and economic development efforts. The problem of child labour, being inextricably linked with poverty and illiteracy, cannot be solved by legislation alone and a concerted effort to tackle this problem will bring in the desired sustainable growth.

Don't give up, though the pace seems slow,
you may succeed with another blow.

Success is failure turned inside out,
the silver tint of a cloud of doubt.

And you never can tell how close you are,
it may be near when it seems so far.

So stick to the fight when you're hardest hit,
its when things seem worst - you must not quit.

(This work is not mine but is close to my heart amp; that I relate to)

to paint every invigorated rose,
scent and feel reaching every nose.
But painted an orange sunset rotten,
only to be lost and forgotten.

Heretofore I sought:
to live under the inviolable sanctity of the sky,
reaching beyond the words, to the cry of joy.
But lived in the vacuum of the metal,
to watch the flower fare forth, petal by petal.

Henceforth I seek:
to paint beyond the sun behind the hills,
exceeding the potential of any known mills.
For life is filled with moments far too many,
only few of us truly living any.

Henceforth I seek:
agility of a freshet to grow
from being a colour amongst the plural,
to be the first that paints every mural.
I... the violet shade!

This is an attempt to devise a plot to understand the growth of one's maturity levels as a person. To begin with, I wish to identify the paradigmatic and syntagmatic parameters (These terms are borrowed from the study of linguistics where the former speaks of a relationship 'across' a set of elements of the same type; while latter speaks of a relationship 'up' or 'down' a sequence. I shall take their help to prove the analogy between the plot under discussion and a perfect sentence) for the same and then proceed to understand the other influencing factors for the plot.

The basic blocks used to map the points on the plot being events or episodes in our life, it is easier for us to consider a single event and categorize the influencing factors for our action into ones with a paradigmatic existence or with a syntagmatic existence. There might be factors which might show traits of both, in which case we will plot their influence on both the axes while ones with absence of any such influence by either of them can be safely ignored.

For any action, it is necessary that we have the instigator, one who initiates the course of action and the sufferer, one who is influenced by the action. We will restrict our analysis to consider only the sufferer's point of view. Instigator can be regarded as a paradigmatic parameter from the sufferer's point of view since the action is important not the one who intiates it while it is the other way round from the instigator's point of view. The other important factor that influences and supports the action is the setting which is both a paradigmatic as well as a syntagmatic parameter since replacing the setting will influence the action and the impact of moving the setting during the action also influences the action.

There is a direct analogy between an action and a perfect sentence. A sentence can be framed using the subject and the predicate, here it is easy to understand that the sufferer of the action becomes the subject while the action becomes the predicate. A perfect sentence is furnished with sufficient detail to understand and appreciate the meaning of the action that it talks about, while a perfect action needs sufficient detail in regard to setting so that we fully appreciate the action from the sufferer's point of view.

Apart from the above mentioned three important factors, there are numerous factors which influence the action, degree of suffering and impact on the sufferer. In this chapter, these factors are debated and categorized into the two set of parameters that I talked about so that we can plot the level of understanding ( maturity). I hope you will enjoy it...