EMPOWER PEOPLE

Presenting to you a talk by:  Professor R. Raj Rao Writer, Poet, Academician and Queer Activist  Using translations of Bollywood songs as a point of departure for ruminations on the construction of male friendship and male love within both Indian cinema and its primarily male audience which represents Hindi culture at large, Prof. Rao will share his insights on how homosexuality thrives in covert yet recognized places in Indian culture, and how subtler forms of homosexuality are actually engendered in the normative patriarchal culture.  Professor R. Raj Rao's poems led to India’s first out and out gay film back in 1996 created with crowd sourced money as an independent film in the digital realm. Also, his book ‘the boyfriend’ is considered to be the most significant queer literature to date.  On the panel, he will be joined by:  Badal Thakker Architect and Activist

Dr. Sachin Labade Assistant Professor, Department of English, Mumbai University PhD Scholar in Queer Cinema  ..about Queer Cinema at regional level especially the Marathi/Bengali/Malayalam regional film industries;   With inputs from..  Satya Rai Nagpaul Cinematographer: Aligarh, Chauthi Koot, Zinda Bhaag, Ghoomketu, Newborns, Anhey Ghode Da Daan, Gattu  Founder & Working Group Member, Sampoorna [A Network of Trans* & Intersex Indians]  ..who will share insights on the process of creating cinema that has queer cinema, sensitive representation, challenges of the industry, what this representation means to the community, mainstream representation comparison, how he sees Queer Cinema changing in the future and more!  Moderated by: Hridaya Ajgaonkar  Join us LIVE and participate through comments and queries in comments section!  #Queer #Cinema #Trans

In this episode we are sharing webinars organized by EMPOWER PEOPLE with Health Professionals. it has three episode comprising overall health cautions and basic knowledge about Covid-19, child care and elder care. 

Please listen to the episodes and stay safe 

Manika Gupta discussing "critical thinking and mathematical problem solving" EP Webinar 1 

Attendees: 1. Adarsh Itrii (Ad) 2. Khyati Arora (K) 3. Amruta Khare (Am) 4. Manika Gupta (M) 5. Shafiq R Khan (S) 6. Dr. Savithri Subramanian (Sa) 7. Jyoti Goyal (J) 8. Wahid (W) 9. Chrysolite (C) 10. Reema (R) 

After initial pleasantries, the Webinar was begun by Manika. 

M: The topic I found to be important for this Webinar is Critical Thinking- it is very important in any sphere. In my experience, it is what is lacking in Science and Math School education. Science and Math in School usually just got reduced to 20 to 30 formulas and how to plug them in different places- never reflected on what more it can actually be and it didn't help people develop critical thinking. Later in my higher studies, I was asked where did this formula come from or what is my analysis of it etc and my whole worldview of how to approach things was shaken. For 12 years I was exposed to one thing and was suddenly expected to know another. So the situation is that today, Math and Science are not contributing to the country. In reality, it can be applied anywhere- any social model can be modelled by the mathematical model and we could achieve much more if people had critical thinking. Education has just been reduced to numericals. It doesn't get us anywhere. Lack of critical thinking is a concern everywhere. What is it really? Give people facts and let them make their judgement. Instead, we lose the scope of questioning, analysing and just become machines that produce rote answers. We need to give students different situations to analyse and make them think innovatively. We look down on students and don't trust them enough. Need to work to incorporate critical thinking in the curriculum so students can be trained to think critically. For example, Calculus is a study of change- how quantities change. What other quantities are there is not taught and the concept of limit was not taught until my 2nd year of higher learning. Which means that we never learnt what Calculus actually was for 2 to 3 years as we used it to solve the problems! Now that I know though, I see it very differently and can see the possibilities! So that's what I wanted to share. If there are questions, let me know.