Social

There are times when life sets before us an opportunity for radical change. Such a moment led Narayanan Krishnan to dedicate his life to feeding the poor and the mentally disabled on the streets of India.

The saying Spare the rod and spoil the child is deeply rooted in some cultures as saving discipline. Where does this idea come from and is it true that using the rod is next to godliness?

Many years ago, while I was still in high school, our Romanian language and literature teacher assigned us the task of writing a framed story, complete with characters and a plot of our choosing.

“I knew her face better than my own. Still, I had to say goodbye. I had to walk away. That’s what you do when someone dies. Except this wasn’t just someone. It was Ana, my sweet girl.”

At 51, C.M. is a shadow of his former self. A shadow who has escaped lung cancer but it's mouth cancer that keeps him away from the cigarettes to which he was inextricably linked for 44 years. He swallows with difficulty, even saliva, and is always thirsty.

Women work an average of 68 hours per week, while men work 55 hours—a total that includes both professional commitments and household responsibilities. This was the conclusion of a 2007 study conducted by sociologists at the University of Cambridge across European Union countries.

"The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts." (C. S. Lewis)

Couples do not break up because they fight, but because they do not know how to argue, relationship therapists say, underlining the functional components of the differences between partners.

Did you wrestle with your decision to have children? Or did you know motherhood was for you from a long time back? More than six years ago, I found myself wondering about children. I couldn’t really find a “point” to having children. “Underpinning all of these [ideas] was the knowledge that the world is overpopulated and under-resourced,” I had written.

JS: What is NAIDOC Week? Why is it significant?  DG: NAIDOC Week celebrates Indigenous culture—Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, their achievements and their contribution to the nation.

“To them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that will endure forever” (Isaiah 56:5).

More than 19 years ago, the Netherlands experimented with legalising prostitution, an approach that many countries looked at with interest and curiosity. After all, after the failure of the "noble experiment" of American prohibition, people wanted to see the result of the opposite approach with regards to sex.

From the first positive pregnancy test, parents often build up expectations for their baby. And as the little one grows, so do the expectations—emotional, cognitive, moral and academic. While it's only natural that this should be the case, as children need to be set standards, parents' expectations can often turn out to be a double-edged sword.

In A History of Young People in the West, Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude Schmitt posit that, in the West, adolescence is first and foremost a social-cultural construction, and therefore a cultural product. They considered it at most subsidiarily as a stage in the physiological process of growing up.

How do we create fun and memorable experiences on road trips, where “Are we there yet?” isn’t whined out loud every few seconds?