Diwali or Deepawali is not just a "festival of lights". It cannot and should not be reduced to facetious symbolism. It has Dharmic and spiritual context and underpinning, which must be remembered and emphasized.
Current American establishment's quest for control and "teaching countries lessons" is pushing the geostrategic chessboard in a certain direction. The resultant Indo-China rapprochement may be a watershed moment in this century. A detailed analysis.
Canadian Intelligence and political establishment have played Jekyll and Hyde games while using Khalistanis against India. The stories of omission and strategic misses are so spectacular that only collaboration can explain them.
In Uttar Pradesh’s Faridpur town in Bareilly district, there is a madrasa which is now known as Oxford School. This is a new trend that is coming up in UP where madrasas are teach – English, science, math, social studies, computer science and extra-curricular activities instead of the normal Quran, Persian, Arabic and Urdu. While these are going to filter out. Teachers still advise to show their children videos on the above curricular activities. There are various Arabic kid son videos online that can help with learning Arabic which will help your child read the Quran. English, science, math etc. are going to being in schools across the Bareilly district in the coming weeks.
The kids are taught from books of local private publishers and of NCERT. The schools follow the CBSE curriculum, although they are affiliated with the UP Board of Madrassa Education.
These schools are being created under the Scheme to Provide Quality Education in Madrassas (SPQEM) started by the UP Government to modernize the madrasa education. Under this scheme, the kids are provided free books and three teachers of the school are paid an honorarium.
Some madrasas are bringing such modernization on their own, even without the help of the Government resources. For example, M Children Academy in Bareilly’s Nakatia area provides a library, a computer lab, CCTV cameras in all the classes and they have teachers with B. Ed qualifications.
These are poor kids – of artisans, workers and laborers – who get a chance at higher education because of quality education.
Yours truly had once done a study in UP on Muslims – with specific emphasis on kids’ education. We had found out how the Muslim kids were losing out because their education was preparing them to be unemployed! This new change will go a long way to change the future integration of the Muslim kids into mainstream.
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