Ur Gesture Thoughts

  ‘A person aged 7 and above who can both, read and write with understanding in any language is considered literate’. This is the commonly used definition when we talk about literacy. When India became independent in 1947, the literacy rate was very low. The earliest figures from the year 1951 show that the literacy rate was only 16.67%. Fast forward to 1991 it was 52.10%, which is still quite low as only half of the population was literate. The last census was carried out in 2011, according to which India's literacy rate was 74.4%, with 82.14% male literacy rate and 65.46% female literacy rate. The latest survey carried out by the National Statistical Commission in 2017-2018 shows that literacy rate has increased to 77.7%.   Since Independence, India's literacy rate has increased six times.  But the increase over the years has been very sluggish. The Global Literacy Index for people aged above 15 years is 86.3% which is much higher than our national literacy rate. Th...

  In 1964, Kitty Genovese was killed outside her apartment building in densely populated Queens, New York. There were dozens of people that heard the pleas of the young woman screaming for help, but none of them took any action. This infamous murder launched the decades of studies investing the ‘Bystander Effect’ amoung humans.   Most of us must have heard the infamous News headline: Blinded by rage, man stabs wife repeatedly in Delhi's Rohini as bystanders record incident. What is even more shocking is that the brutal crime took place in the daylight with more than a hundred bystanders, some of whom were busy recording the incident. It is needless to mention that not even a single person tried to rescue the poor woman.   Such instances invite numerous questions behind such human psychology. If you witness an emergency situation right before your eyes, you would certainly take some sort of action to help the person in trouble? All of us might believe that this is ...