Don’t doubt your abilities. Don’t compare yourself with your friends. Don’t push yourself too hard. That will only add to
the anxiety. Tackle one subject at a time. Set achievable deadlines. Don’t get distracted. Take practical tips from a
relative who has recently appeared in the exams recently. You don’t have to be either extremely casual or overly anxious.
Take a middle path, be confident and give it your best shot.
Six Steps to Success
* Sleep well for at least seven hours before your exam.
* Don’t skip breakfast.
* If children leave early for an exam, give them a fruit (to eat an hour before.
* Drink water before you enter the exam hall to keep hydrated.
* After your exam, have a snack or lunch and rest for a while before get ing back to your books.
* Don’t eat fried stuff or junk food during exams; they make you sleepy. You can also catch an infection eating street food. Stick to healthy, home-cooked food.
The riot of colours that is Holi
One festival that truly depicts the composite essence of not only India but the whole sub-continent is Holi.
It is not just a festival of colours but a celebration of life itself.
Every festival carries a deeper message. Deepavali, for instance, dispels darkness and evil forces.
Holi fills our lives with colourful shades. It is a festival of bonhomie and reconciliation when
people embrace each other, forgetting any bitterness and ill-feeling.
When the French traveller Vernier came to India during the regime of Mughal emperor Shah Jehan,
he was wonder-struck to see so many people playing Holi. They belonged to all streams and strata of society.
This is the beauty of Holi. It dissolves social differences and brings people together. In fact, Holi ka dahan,
a day before Dhulandi, symbolises the bonfire of all ill-feeling. The message of egalitarianism marks this festival
and distinguishes it from others.
Abul Fazl, one of the nine gems in Akbar’s court, wrote in Ain-e-Akbari, a book that vividly describes
Akbar and his times, of how “Shanshah ust chee shudam aviyaar minhal mustambeer qabl-e-jashn-e-faam”
(the emperor began to collect pichkari of different sizes well before Holi).
Akbar was very fond of Holi and played it with not only his courtiers but also the masses, for which he
would come out of his palace. That was the day even a commoner could put colours on the emperor of India.
Even a zealot like Aurangzeb did not stop people from celebrating Holi on the streets.
The spirit of Holi is just unsurpassable. It can only be felt, not described. Those who have seen
Holi play in northern India, especially in Uttar Pradesh, will always remember it. Uttar Pradesh’s Latthmaar Holi,
during which women beat men with sticks in a light-hearted way, is a spectacle to behold.
The last places on Earth without the internet
Is there anywhere left on Earth where it’s impossible to access the internet? There are a few places, but you have to go out of your way to find them.
It can be easy to forget what life was like before the internet. For many, not a day goes by without checking email, browsing online or consulting Google. Some 1.3 billion people alive today are young enough never to have experienced anything else. Yet has the network of networks underpinning all this activity actually reached every part of the globe?
Various reasons still stop people accessing the internet where they live, of course. There’s censorship, for starters. “We don’t get much traffic from North Korea,” says John Graham-Cumming of Cloud Flare, a content delivery network – the equivalent of a regional parcel distribution centre, but for web traffic. “Likewise, early in the Syrian civil war they cut off internet access and we saw a drop in traffic coming from those Syrian connections.”
It’s also a well-established problem that many of the world’s poorest people do not have the means or technology to log on, with just 31% of people in the developing world using the internet, compared to 77% in the developed countries.
The people of North Korea have less access to modern technology than their neighbours, as this night-time satellite image hints. (Nasa)
However, these political and social barriers to access do not necessarily tell us about the physical extent of the internet itself. Assuming you had the right device and the political freedom, is there anywhere left on Earth where the labyrinth of cable and wireless signals does not reach?
Answering this question begins with an explanation of the various tiers of internet access. The primary mechanisms for getting online are wired connections, mobile networks and satellites. Fibre-optic cables make up the core of the internet, criss-crossing oceans and land. The first of those communications cables were put down in the 1850s for carrying telegraph signals. Today they connect all continents except Antarctica, and include many – but not all – small island nations.
Mobile connections, meanwhile, rely on cell phone towers. And these can have an impressive reach. “Two years ago I was in the Sahara, and for quite a large amount of time I had access,” Graham-Cumming says. “It was patchy and slow, but it was there.” Indeed, many developing countries, especially in Africa, rely predominantly on mobile connections for accessing the internet.
Finally, satellites are the slowest means of getting online, but the only choice for those living far from a cell phone tower or wire. The Iridium satellite constellation coverage extends over the entire world, and their satellite phones can wire you up in otherwise unconnected places, such as national parks in the US, Antarctica or isolated spots of land like the Cook Islands. “If you live out in the sticks somewhere, it makes no sense for your local telecom provider to run a fibre to your house or farm,” says David Belson, editor of the quarterly State of the Internet report at Akamai, one of the world’s largest content delivery networks. “So in many cases satellite is the optimal solution, although it may not be the fastest one.” Sheer distance explains that delay: from the equator, for instance, data needs to travel about 22,000 miles (35,000km) between satellite and user.