Dear Dr. Abdul Kalam

I call to your attention a requirement that too many parents in india today consider to be small and mostly insignificant as they are too busy trying to give their children the best possible future. Sadly, this comes at a cost, a cost where children have to fend for themselves because they are not comfortable telling their parents or teachers their problems, thoughts or ideas.

Our education system is quite archaic, our syllabus is based on data that was published years if not decades ago; many new schools and colleges encourage students to memorise theories and definitions but offer little or no scope to understand the fundamentals of that definition or theory. We as a society seem bound by our desire to push our children in to the rat race by forcing them to get that 99% or 100% score in all their exams, but few parents and teachers have taken the time to understand and realise that every child has a different learning curve and that our education system should be geared towards helping them learn and understand as opposed to memorising a definition that in most cases would not help or further. Not to mention, that for some reason children having mobile phones in a class room can be grounds for confiscation and sometimes suspension.

Our children have stopped thinking, they move on to sites like google and wikipedia for the answer to some of the most simple and logical questions that would only require a small amount of their thought process. The ability to think things through to the end is quite limited and as time goes on seems to diminish among the same age group.

In a world where XBOX and Playstation are two more things that seem to have taken over the lives of the urban youth in addition to the television and Internet coupled with the fact that in many houses both parents are working, land that was once used by children as their playground is now being used as the site for the next high rise apartment or office.

For all our efforts in continuing development of infrastructure and education, we seem to have forgotten to listen to our children, encourage their creativity and analytical abilities. These are qualities that will ensure that tomorrow we are not in a country run by robots but by intellectuals and thought leaders, something that the world seems to lack these days.

Thanks for listening.