Chat with Kavita Neelkantan

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What a lovely, lovely interaction! Thanks so much for this Kavita! 

How to write a feature / news for The Children's Post of India

If you want to write news or features for The Children's Post, this feature is for you. 

Step1: Read and Understand 

Read at least 8-10 different sources before you start to write. Note down the key figures. Make sure you cross check ALL the key figures that you are going to present and also save the source of each key figure. For instance, if you are reporting a figure on women and their welfare, the only authorised figures are the ministry of women and child development, govt of India. 

Understand all the key terms. Don't assume the meaning of ANYTHING. Read, read, read and understand. 

Step 2: Readiness check 

In your mind, explain the concept to an 8 year old child. If you have a neighbour or a sibling, nothing like it. Otherwise, practise in your own mind, or with friends or parents. Make sure you talk to someone who does NOT know the topic before hand. 

If you are able to explain the topic to them and answer their questions, you are now ready to write a feature on your own. 

Step 3: Write 

Different writers have different techniques. Some just sit down and start writing/typing and get it all together. Some first prefer to structure their content, figuring out how it will flow and the word limit for each section. Then, they write the main points under each section, and then they start writing. Most of u s are somewhere in between. In general, it helps to start with 100% planning and slowly internalise it so it becomes automatic in your head. Its just like driving. When we first start driving, we do Brake-Cluch-Neutral like a checklist. But after a few months, we just do all this the minute we sit in the car. 

Step 4: Illustrate 

Find CC0 images or your own original images. Even if you are using CC0 images, pls give credit where you know the name of the photographer. Sometimes, you can do Steps 3 and 4 together. Sometimes, you can even start with a vital illustration and write the story around or based on that. 

Step 5: Put it together. 

Visualise your story - both in the paper and on the website. How will it look? Where will the image come? What should the background colour be? Combine the text and images and create a full story. 

Step 6: Check 

First, read it as a third person. Does the story hold your interest, or do you lose interest after a few lines? Is there a coherent story, or does it jump from point to point? How does the story make you feel? Do you put it down with a smile or a sense of wonder? Well done, then! 

Sometimes, we pick up some phrases from the internet unintentionally, or because they just say it better. Even Helen Keller was accused of stealing a story once! To ensure that this does not happen to you, take some of the interesting figures of speech, clauses, phrases etc. that you have used and google them or use a plagiarism checker. If there is a match, change that part. 

DO NOT depend on Grammarly or any other grammar check software. The idea of writing for TCP is to help improve your vocabulary and grammar. Read books by S Upendran and GMAT guides. The idea is to help you write flawlessly. Further, these apps are not as accurate as they need to be for TCP. 

Step 7: Review 

Have someone else read your submission. Ask them to check for grammar, facts, correct usage of words, structure, and interest - everything! 

If all is well, send it to us. 

We LOVE hearing from you. 

Important Tips For You 

• DO NOT expect perfection from yourself. 

            Not the first time, and not the hundredth time. And not the thousandth time. We will all make                 mistakes, we will all learn. 

• Originality before excellence

            Please remember - we really don't want the wittiest thing, or the best thing. We want YOU.                     Write in your own original voice. No one else can do that. 

• We are strict about copying or not giving credit 

            Like, crazy strict. We will stop publishing anything by you after the third strike. And if there is a             strike, we will not publish anything by you for a month. Same thing for avoiding credit or taking             images from other publications or from people without taking their express written permission. 

All the Best! 

Fair Exchange of Value, and why Indians do it differently

 Have you ever noticed these: 

A. In a langar or bhandara, after serving, the person doing the serving thanks the person being served with folded hands. 

B. In the courts of kings, the person sitting next to the king is not the chief minister. It is the Rajguru. After that, the chief minister, and then the other ministers get their seats. 

C. When a teacher enters the court, the king gets up from the throne and touches the feet of the teacher. 

D. When the sage came to king Dashratha, he had to send his children with the sage, irrespective of his misgivings, or the fact that he was the parent of the boys. 

E. Sita was kidnapped because a beggar refused to take alms from her. Chandragupta raised his army through students who went door to door and sought support from householders. Buddhism got its first ashrams thru the bhikkus. 

Compare that to a modern office, or our current lives, and much of this will appear strange. 

So, why did this happen?? 

The first one, in my view, is the most telling of the underlying values that defined this society. When we give something to someone,we expect gratitude from the person. That is a fair exchange of value. But when we give something and then also offer our gratitude, that is one person receiving twice the value, and the giver receiving none. Why does that happen? 

Because, the giver has been given an opportunity to serve. This opportunity to serve is important to the giver. Not only because it gives him/her good karma. Why is good karma more important than money, or the instant gratification one gets from gratitude? 

Because, karma is a long term thing. One of the first spiritual concepts you will learn in India, irrespective of your religion, is that when you leave this world, only your soul and your karma goes with you. All material possessions are left here on Earth. Only your good karma tags along. 

Which means that the benefit one derives from good karma is far more than the sum total of material wealth and emotional strokes of momentary gratitude. The giver folds his hands and bows because he is getting something far more long-lasting and precious than what is being given. 

What is the impact on a society of a belief system like this? 

First, it implores people to do good for its own sake. The books of account are never closed - what you do in this birth, remains with you till it is paid off. Dying doesn't save you from the effect of your actions. 

Second, it creates a culture of learnt humility. The king vacates his seat for the guru, not because the king lacks in power, but because the teacher exceeds in spiritual power. 

Third, it acknowledges, on a day to day basis, that giving is as important to the human heart as receiving. 

Our need to love is as universal as our need to be loved. Our need to give as universal as our need to receive. 

When we acknowledge the universality of this need, we begin to understand that the person who gives us an opportunity to fulfill this need is, in fact, doing us a favour. Therefore, we thank them with folded hands. 

When we live and work in India, we come to accept this core value system and the underlying comprehension that it incorporates. 

To give is as much a luxury as to receive. 

How is this applicable? 

1. Many Western companies are very focused on reporting impact. They find it strange that the Indian arm is not as diligent about measuring impact and getting back on whether any difference has been made. THis is because the Indian believes - Neki kar dariya mein daal - let the good you do not be tom-tom-ed. 

2. Most Indian promoters do NOT report the CSR work that they do. I have been left gaping when promoters casually mention how they empowered thousands of women who did not have a choice, or how they adopted 80 schools and funded their redevelopment from their personal funds. The level of charity that I see in promoter led organisations, and the personal commitment of the promoters to doing that good is, quite simply, astounding. But this approach to charity leads to a situation that the Western mind does not understand - there is no report made on the CSR index of Indian organisations. If you see the reports made by private organisations, the list will mostly have non Indian MNCs. 

5 tips to ensure that you hear the truth, and nothing but the truth

One day, all the publications of India suddenly went berserk at about 7 p.m., screaming loudly - Trump to reduce H1B Visa curbs. 
Since we were about to start writing the stories for the next day's paper shortly, the editor naturally assumed that this would be a part of our newspaper the next day. 

But, when we sat down to write the story, we all were, at first, incredulous, and then, we burst out laughing. 

Trump had not made anything easier. He was not going to make anything easier. All that had happened was a Tweet of - wait for it - intent. One of those millions of intentions that politicians keep casting upon our collective consciousness like bread upon water. 

And the entire Indian media made it their headline! 

Another time, a short range service was inaugurated for the first time, joining two important places in India. Obviously, we were super excited and wanted to cover this. Until we did the fact check and realised that it was not so much inaugurate as restart. The service was actually inaugurated the previous year. Subsequently, no helicopter was available and the service was quietly closed, only to be "inaugurated" the following year "For the first time ever." 

Not surprisingly, we were possibly the only medium to use the words "Inaugurated again" in our headline that morning. 

For more than three years now, we have made fact checking our business. Sometimes, it leads to hilarious outcomes like the two incidents mentioned above. More often than that, however, it leads to changing the story at midnight. 

So, in this post, I am going to share another little secret of ours - especially if you are a young reader trying to make sense of the online news world. 

Why are we writing this for you? 

Many of you now have research as a part of your school work. I am sure that you face the same issue as we do - how to ensure that we get, analyse, and put accurate information/data in our reports? 

If you are an adult, am sure that you care for true news and are sick of the fact that the media is not reliable any more. Fact check is a super power that all of us need to have, because we are bombarded with half truths from absolutely everyone around us - our media, family, friends, and Whatsapp. 

So, here is our Secret Sauce for Fact Checks. 

1. Close to the Source 

Where is the water of a river purest? Closest to the source. The same is true of news too. The closer you get to the source, the more accurate your data is going to be. 

Last week, I was working on a research report on castor oil exports from India. Google took me to an industry website from which I took the numbers of castor oil exports from 2019 to 2020. 

But that is not how we normally do this. Google simply did not take me to any official site where any of these numbers were available. The data silence was deafening. 

Later in the night, I decided to use DuckDuckGo. The first search result was of the industry body that actually has the exporters. They had a report that was from DGFT - Director General of Foreign Trade - Govt. of India and industry official numbers. 

The numbers given here told a slightly different story for the years 2019-2020, but when I saw the trend from 2017 onwards, my eyes literally popped out.

If you are doing your research, go as close as possible to the source. 
Wherever there is an official resource, take that, unless you have strong reasons to doubt the veracity of that data. Raw data does not lie as much as reports, in my humble opinion. 

2. Kipling to the Rescue 

Rudyard Kipling wrote a beautiful poem that starts like this: 

I KEEP six honest serving-men
 (They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
 And How and Where and Who.

We use the same 6 honest serving men. 

When you get information over Whatsapp, or any other such reliable source, all you need to do is ask the 6 questions. If you get answers to all 6, you are likely dealing with the truth. If not, you are probably dealing with propaganda.  

This is really, really important. Because all propaganda comes cloaked in numbers and facts and figures and conspiratorial tones like "But What really happened was..." "Bet you didn't know about this. So-and-so (whatever their label for media) will not tell you this." 

Let's say you get a report that says - India has the most Parsis living in a single country, and therefore India has become like their first home now. 

Great! Let's ask a few questions: 

A. Where else do we have Parsis in the world, and how many are there in each country? 

B. What is the source of this data? (For India, the last official population data is ONLY 9 years old- the 2011 Census) 

C. Who has prepared this report? And for whom? (Who is the audience?) 

D. Why have they prepared this report? 

E. When was this report compiled? 

F. How was this report put together? Who all collaborated on this? 

And these are the questions only on the first part of the report - India has the most Parsis living in a single country. There is a second part to that statement - first home now. You get the drift. 

3. NOT from a single source 

One night, we were writing about a development metric from India. As a rule, we check from 2-3 sources, and one of the sources we used for the checking was an international respected orgn. Now, we always find some divergence between numbers from multiple sources (remember Tip 1 above?), but in this case,  they were so divergent that we had to either find a way to explain the numbers, or not carry the feature at all. That was the time we did a night out on the numbers. And understood that though both numbers are national, their data gathering methodology and sample sizes are vastly different. In a country as complex and huge as India, that can mean a world of difference. Once we knew that the core data sets were different, we were able to decide which number we wanted to go with. 

This will sound counter to the first tip - but its important. Even if you go very close to the source, ALWAYS double check with an external entity that does NOT report from the same source. You will ALWAYS get a difference in the numbers, even if it is one decimal point. But you will. 

Sometimes, you will get a HUGE difference. This is most likely when comparing a nation's data on something like GDP or development indicators. The national data will give one picture, an international body like WHO or World Bank Indicators will have another number. 

Same thing for research stories - one press story will present it another way, the University's own press release will show one thing. But if you go to some peer reviewed journals that hold some of the earlier work on that research, you will get some additional... facts. 

4. The Devil is STILL in the details 

One evening,  all the news websites ran news that a certain company was going to build a certain important building. The editor chose that story for the edition. When the edition came to me for review, I did a little fact check. Then, I called the writer back and asked, "Is this award of contract, or signing of contract?" 

"What's the difference?" she asked. (It was well past midnight) 

"The signing of a contract is a legal step. Both parties are bound by it. Award of contract is a step in the procurement process. It means that they have won the bidding war. After this, a long negotiation, verification, and due diligence will be done, after which the draft agreement will be created, then a draft contract, and finally the contract will be signed." 

I am sure that she did not like me as she got back on her laptop and checked. 15 minutes later, I heard back from her - "It is just award of contract. "

That day, she had to change her story well past midnight, and her reviewers (me included) had to wait up while she found and wrote another news story.  

Yes. True. 

Remember that report we put night out for? Not only were the data sets different, their definitions of the same term were different too! 

In fact checking, assume NOTHING. 

- Know the difference between MoU and Letter of Intent; Signing of Contract and Award of Contract, and other such devilish details.  

5. Oh, the Beauty of Social News and Crowd Sourcing  

One of the wisest people I have worked with taught an important lesson - the IQ of a mob is the IQ of the stupidest person in the mob divided by the number of people in the mob. 

Crowdsourcing is great for innovative ideas. For fundraising. It is NOT great for facts and news. Crowds don't have facts. Or News. 

Please, do not go to Social Media, Wikipedia, or Whatsapp for your news. Do not trust the stings that are sent to you from these sources. 

Some days, we get the right information ONLY from these unofficial media - but such days are few and far between (In fact, only once in 3.5 years). 

Also, you have to have the wisdom to sift all this content and stick to that which is important and real. Remember, half truth is half lies. Some articles present only facts, and give solid analysis, but they present the facts that are convenient for *their* case. Most of us do not have the sleuthing skills to ask - What were the facts that you left out? 

If someone is sharing news on a social platform, their intention is not to share unbiased view. Usually, their intention is to win the support of their friends and family to *their* point of view. 

Special Note on Wikipedia: 

Wikipedia can be edited by ANYONE. My son's school prohibits the use of Wikipedia. 

So, of all the crimes we commit against ourselves, going to Wikipedia as a source of information is right among the top 5. Because in this case, we also live with the delusion that we are well informed. 

But this sounds like a PAIN! 

Oh, it IS! 

Fact checking is very, very painful - literally! Neck pain (Not pain in the neck, though that too, but like, literally, neck pain), shoulder pain, and eye dryness. No sugar coating the idea that if you are going to write your research reports, the researching will take 1 hour and the fact checking will take 3 to 5 hours. 

In Conclusion... 

BUT, over a period of time, we have become far more adept at recognising propaganda when we see it. The editorial team has become a super competent and aware set of professionals, and our children have benefited from this, because these fact check conversations become part of our every day talk: 

"Mom, why have you not covered this important development?"

"My dear, there was no development. He just made a random Tweet." 

"How do you know? " 

"We checked. :) " 

Multi Currency Exchange

 We have created a world where we recognise only one currency - money.

But in the course of my work with Esha and now The Children's Post, I have become acutely aware that just as the Sun is not the only star in the world, money is not the only currency of human exchange.

Here are two others, but they are two among many.

Social Capital: "I owe you one." - Very familiar, and very pertinent. We have all experienced this. We do things for other people, and if we are in the right social construct and if they remember, we exchange in this social currency.

Strokes/Love: This is, according to my experience, the second most universal currency in the world. This is why people volunteer. This is why we make time to meet friends. This is why we smile at strangers. This is why children at home miss school and adults miss office.

If you observe your interactions more closely, you will find that beneath the surface, there are many currencies being exchanged in human interactions. Each of them is important.

But we have created a single currency narrative. The direct result of that is that we have started to measure our own progress in life on that single axis - the location of the house, the size of the car.

What are some currencies that you have observed in human interactions?

The power of words

As a child, I noticed that my grandfather always addressed my grandmother as "Bhaagwaane" (O Lucky one). My grandmother, when she was angry, would scold us with "Tera Beda Tare" (May your boat find its destination).

One day, I asked my aunt why grandma scolds like that. She said, "Even in anger, we must not wish ill for another person. So instead of saying Beda Gark (May your boat capsize), she says Beda Tare."

Many years later, on a particularly tough project, I found myself getting frustrated often. One day, out of the blue, I suddenly decided, "Next time there is a moment of frustration, I will say, 'God Bless You'."

That's it. Just a change in the words we use.

Within a week, the moments of frustration were fewer, and within a month, we also managed to bring the project back on track.

We never know when our childhood will come and inspire our future. Can you think of one such time in your life?

Brevity is the soul of wit, not of wisdom.

Context:

I am currently reading 2 books: One has just the Suktis (moral at the end of the story) from Panchatantra, and the other has the stories, followed by the Sukti.

Reading the Suktis book leaves one perplexed and wondering if Vishnu Gupta was very focused on the acquisition and management of wealth.

For instance:
The employer who remembers that his primary goal is to keep his employees provided for, and one who gives their salary on time, will find that they are largely tolerant of his whims. But the employer who forgets to pay his employees will find that they are very disagreeable indeed.

Read as a sukti, it left one puzzled. But in the book of stories, one read about a lion who befriends a bull and is convinced that vegetarianism is the way of the future. This leads to starvation of the jackals who depend on the lion for their food.

After this context, the lesson made perfect sense.

Has this ever happened to you, that brevity points, but context explains?